Race differences in abortion attitudes: some additional evidence.

Abstract

Although Combs and Welch reported a trend of decreasing racial differences in abortion attitudes, Hall and Ferree used data from the 1982 General Social Survey to argue that racial differences were not declining. This paper updates this debate through the 1988 General Social Survey and concludes that racial differences have indeed declined over time. Moreover, when new religious items introduced in the 1984 survey are included in the multivariate analysis, blacks are not significantly different from whites in their support of legal abortion. This finding obscures a more interesting pattern, however, of offsetting, statistically significant racial differences among respondents of the same gender-black men are significantly less supportive of abortion than white men, and black women are significantly more supportive than white women. Social scientists have consistently reported that blacks are less supportive of legal abortion than whites, even after controls for socioeconomic status and other demographic variables, gender-role attitudes, attitudes toward sexual behavior, and religion (Combs and Welch, 1982; Hall and Ferree, 1986; Secret, 1987). These differences are surprising in light of differences in abortion rates: black women are twice as likely to have abortions as whites, a ratio which has held relatively constant for more than a decade (Henshaw and Silverman, 1988).1 Combs and Welch (1982) used data from the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey (GSS) and found a lessening of CLYDE WILCOX is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. The author thanks Elizabeth Cook and Ted Jelen for helpful comments. The data were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. All interpretations are the author's. 1. The rate for nonwhite women in 1988 was 5.3 per 100; for whites it was 2.3. In 1977 the figures were 5.9 and 2.1. These figures would suggest that the rate of abortion for blacks may have fallen somewhat in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 54 248-255 ? 1990 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/90/0054-02/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.249 on Wed, 03 Aug 2016 06:09:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Race Differences in Abortion Attitudes 249 racial differences between 1972 and 1980. They reported that controls for demographic variables and religion substantially reduced racial differences, indicating they were largely due to differences in socioeconomic status and religious attachment. Using data from the 1982 GSS, which oversampled blacks, Hall and Ferree (1986), however, found no trend toward declining racial differences. The authors argued that in addition to demographic and religious variables, three sets of attitudes are important in understanding racial differences: attitudes toward gender roles, attitudes toward ideal family size, and attitudes toward premarital sex. The addition of these attitudinal measures to the demographic and religious variables did not reduce racial differences in abortion support, but it did result in a substantial increase in the proportion of variance explained. Since the Hall and Ferree analysis, the GSS has been conducted several times, including another oversample of blacks in 1987. New religious variables have been added to the GSS, including a measure of personal religiosity (frequency of prayer), a measure of doctrine (interpretation of the Bible), and a measure of denominational fundamentalism. This note updates the Combs and Welch and Hall and Ferree analyses through 1988 to determine trends in racial differences, assess the impact of the new religious items in explaining racial differences, and explore racial differences among respondents of the same gender.