Moral Reasoning and Political Conflict: The Abortion Controversy

Abstract

We argue that the abortion controversy has one major source--religion--and two less important ones--attitudes towards sexual permissiveness and women's employment. Traditional Christianity promotes opposition to abortion using three distinct modes of moral reasoning: through deductive moral reasoning, by the Christian world view's implication that abortion violates the sanctity of life and is a rebellion against God's design; through authoritative moral reasoning by appeal to Catholic dogma; and through consequentialist moral reasoning, as a means of control over sexuality and as a means of confining women's activities to the home. Even aside from Christian belief, adherence to traditional morality promotes opposition to abortion on these consequentialist grounds. We posit a model in which religious belief, anti-feminism, sexual permissiveness, and attitudes towards abortion are distinct concepts (a four-factor model) rather than all simply aspects of a single conservatism factor. We develop reliable, multiple item attitude scales; show that our four-factor model fits the data much better than the one-factor alternative; and test our hypotheses on new data from a large, representative national sample of Australia (N = 4540). Using maximum likelihood structural equation methods, we find that deductive reasoning from Christian belief is the most important source of opposition to abortion, with strong effects both direct and indirect. Exposure to the authority of the Catholic hierarchy is a real but weaker source of opposition. Consequentialist reasoning from traditional moral views on sex--partly buttressed by religion, partly independent of it--is also influential. But views on women's employment matter only a little, contrary to received wisdom.