Religious Influence and Congressional Voting on Abortion

Abstract

The abortion question has been politicized since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortions during the first trimester of a pregnancy. In reaction, pro-life advocates have shifted their attention to Congress in efforts to restrict the availability of abortions. Recent studies have analyzed congressional voting on abortion legislation and have concluded that the political ideology of the congressperson is the most important reason for supporting or opposing abortions (see Eccles, 1978: 259; Vinovskis, 1979: 1790-1827; and Bardes & Tatalovich, 1982). These studies find liberals supporting the pro-choice position on abortion while conservatives more often selected the pro-life position. The research of Vinovskis and that of Bardes and Tatalovich, moreover, indicate that Congresspersons' religious affiliation is the second most important predictor of their votes on abortion legislation. This research note amplifies that aspect by delineating congressional voting in terms of specific religious denominations. This examination is based on thirty roll-call votes taken in four Congresses: four rollcalls from the 93rd Congress, two roll-calls from the 94th Congress, seventeen roll-calls from the 95th Congress and seven roll-calls from the 96th Congress. These thirty votes include all the roll-calls reported in the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report during the period from 1973 to 1980. Sixteen involved some version of the well-known Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal medicaid funds for abortions. Other bills included such issues as banning Legal Services Corporation attorneys from taking abortion cases, prohibiting the Commission on Civil Rights from collecting data on abortion policy, and forbidding the use of District of Columbia appropriations for abortions. As the index to voting on abortion, we used a form of Guttman scaling to construct a scale score to indicate each Representative's position. To achieve comparability across the four Congresses, each legislator's scale score was divided by the number of votes included, thus creating a range from 0.0 (pro-life) to 1.0 (pro-choice). The congresspersons' religious affiliation was coded according to the detailed classification used by the University of Michigan's Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research for election studies. From this array, we grouped the legislators in each Congress based on the average scale score (Table 1). Not all Representatives are included since ambiguous affiliations (e.g., other Protestants) were *Byron W. Daynes is Associate Professor of Political Science at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Raymond Tatalovich is Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois.