Abortion Politics by Munson Ziad;

Author:Munson, Ziad;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2017-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

American Exceptionalism

The United States is not the only place with an abortion controversy, of course. How do the attitudes of Americans compare with those of people in other countries? Such comparisons are complicated by a lack of reliable survey data on the topic in many places. Surveys asking about abortion beliefs are far less common outside the United States. Moreover, the questions asked in such surveys are frequently different than those asked of Americans, and we have already seen what a significant impact the wording of the question itself can have on survey results.

One source of possible comparisons is the World Values Survey, which asks the same question of thousands of people in many different countries around the world. In the case of abortion, people were asked to rate, on a scale of 1–10, whether they think abortion “can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between” (World Values Survey Association 2016). Figure 4.3 shows the results from a number of different Western, industrialized democratic countries. In the United States, more than 22 percent of survey respondents give the lowest score on the scale, saying abortion is never justifiable. This is more than in Spain (18%), Australia (16%), and the Netherlands (11%), and is more than five times more than in Sweden (4.7%). By contrast, less than 10 percent of Americans give the highest score on the scale, saying that abortion is always justifiable. Compare this number to 16 percent in Spain, 15 percent in Australia, 19 percent in the Netherlands, and 44 percent in Sweden. Overall, then, American abortion attitudes are exceptional compared to many European countries; the general population in the United States is considerably more pro-life than in these other places. Elsewhere around the world, however, particularly outside of industrialized democracies, public attitudes are more pro-life than even the United States. In Colombia, for example, 73 percent of those surveyed said abortion was never justifiable, as did 65 percent in Malaysia and 61 percent in Nigeria.

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