Measuring public attitudes on abortion: Methodological and substantive considerations.

Data from a 1989 CBS News/New York Times survey are used to examine the effect that the framing of questions on abortion has on estimates of what proportions of the population support various legal positions. The nationwide data and results from six state polls show that general questions with only two or three options overestimate the proportions of respondents who either favor a ban on all abortion or who would allow abortion under all circumstances. Questions that pose specific circumstances result in movement of respondents out of extreme categories and into more moderate ones. Even respondents who indicate they would favor abortion in all specific circumstances and those who favor abortion in none are likely to moderate their views when asked if they support restrictions that have been proposed in a number of states.

In the 1989 ruling Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the U. S. Supreme Court indicated a willingness to consider greater state regulation of abortion than had previously been allowed. In later cases, including Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Pennsylvania v. Casey in 1992, the Court articulated a standard that states can impose regulations that make abortions more difficult to obtain, as long as these restrictions do not fundamentally interfere with a woman's access to abortion. State legislatures can now enact restrictions on abortion, although Congress is considering national abortion rights legislation. In either case, abortion policy has become the responsibility of elected officials, who are presumably more responsive to public opinion than are the courts. Since abortion is an issue on which most Americans appear to have well-formed, stable opinions, (1) it seems that public attitudes could be important sources of abortion policy.

Several observers have suggested that the future politics of abortion may be acrimonious and bitterly contested. (2) Kristin Luker and Donald Granberg have separately suggested that activists on both sides of the abortion issue have relatively coherent (and conflicting) sets of views on religion, gender roles and sexual morality, and that these competing worldviews make compromise and even dialogue difficult.

If the activist-level patterns described by Luker and Granberg also characterize the views of the general public, the abortion issue may come to distort the normal pattern of electoral and legislative politics by superimposing a nonnegotiable issue over other political matters. By contrast, if the general public holds more moderate or nuanced attitudes on abortion, the issue may be dealt with through compromise or accommodated through conventional political means.

Public attitudes toward abortion have received a good deal of scholarly attention, especially since the Webster decision. Abortion questions are routinely included in public opinion polls, but these questions vary widely in format. Little empirical work has been done to assess the impact of the use of different question wordings and formats on estimates of abortion attitudes. Such estimates have important implications for the future of the abortion debate.

The General Social Survey (GSS) includes a series of six specific items asking if abortion should be legal under various concrete circumstances, and a more general item asking if abortion should always be legal. The specific items are routinely combined to form a single scale of support for legal abortion, or to form two scales measuring support for abortion given physical or social problems. (3)

In contrast, most other surveys have employed a single, general item that offers three or four policy options with respect to abortion. Since 1972, for example, the National Election Study (NES) has included an item that posed four positions on abortion, although the wording of this question changed in 1984. (4) In voting-site exit polls sponsored by newspapers and TV networks, as well as in polls conducted by Gallup and other survey research firms, a three-category item on abortion is usually included. (5) These more general items take less survey time, but may not capture information on the nuances of respondent positions. Several studies use other types of items measuring abortion attitudes, such as asking approval for a Constitutional amendment banning abortion, or asking support for overturning Roe v. Wade, (6) but these two types of questions--the single general item, and the GSS-type specific items--form the basis for most research on public attitudes toward legal abortion.