The physicians' anti-abortion campaign and the social bases of moral reform participation.

Abstract

The and micromobilization approaches to participation in social movements lead to contrasting expectations about predictors of participation. The former position leads one to expect that attitudes, community memberships, and previous community memberships will predict participation. The latter leads one to expect effects of present community memberships, but calls into question role of values and previous community memberships. In this paper, I study physician participation in a local anti-abortion campaign to trace bases of such activity. While present community memberships appear to play a role, premedical college community plays no role. Further, while attitude variables appear to play some role, anti-abortion participants in survey actually reject Right-to-Life movement leadership's position on most of a series of movement-relevant issues. I interpret this finding in terms of Noelle-Neumann's concept of the spiral of silence, which holds that desire to avoid isolation leads to attitude incongruent activity, when such activity appears to have community sponsorship. Nothing would seem more self-evident than proposition that values play a key role in decision to participate in moral reform movements, yet issue is not at all settled. Positions on this point range from assertion that basis of moral reform is culture and socialization (Wood & Hughes 1984, p. 88), to assertions by resource mobilization theorists that values are secondary to structural/network conditions as causes of participation (Jenkins 1983), to position of once-popular discontents school that participation serves primarily status maintenance ends (see review in Lo 1982).