Adolescent Males' Abortion Attitudes: Data from a National Survey.(Statistical Data Included)

Roughly 13% of a nationally representative sample of 1,880 15-19-year-old males approve of abortion in each of eight circumstances presented to them, while about 4% disapprove in every instance. The proportions agreeing that abortion is acceptable range as high as 85-90% if the pregnancy endangers the woman's health or results from rape. Any type of religious affiliation, especially religious fundamentalism, is related to weaker support for abortion; an even stronger correlate of abortion attitudes is the importance of religion to the respondent. Abortion attitudes vary little by race after other social background factors are controlled. Those with more liberal attitudes toward premarital sex and those who perceive that they would be upset if they became a father in the immediate future are particularly likely to express acceptance of abortion. Roughly 61% of adolescent males do not feel that it would be all right for a woman to have an abortion if her partner objects, indicating a possible "gender conflict o f interest" over the abortion issue.

(Family Planning Perspectives, 25:162-1 69, 1993)

The American debate over legal access to abortion that crystallized around the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision appears to have intensified in recent years, in response to the changing composition of the U.S. Supreme Court and to recent federal and state court decisions. Not surprisingly, a considerable amount of attitudinal research pertaining to this issue has been conducted. It has focused primarily on the extent to which individuals approve of legal access to abortion under specific conditions and, secondarily, on their personal moral concerns about abortion and their willingness to use abortion to resolve an unwanted pregnancy. Most of the research in this area has been based on household samples of adults and, to a lesser extent, on college students.

Because of the sampling frame used in large national studies and increasing political resistance to presenting controversial sex-related topics to adolescents in surveys, very little is known about teenagers' attitudes toward abortion, even though teenagers experience a considerable number of unintended pregnancies and are involved in many abortion decisions each year. In 1988, for instance, more than 406,000 abortions (roughly 26% of the total number in the United States that year) were performed on women younger than 20. (1)

Existing studies suggest that young persons' views may differ significantly from those of older adults. Recent surveys reveal that younger adults are less accepting of legal access to abortion than are older adults, after other factors, such as religiousness, are controlled. (2) In a Canadian study conducted in 1987 men aged 18-29 were significantly less likely than older men to approve of abortion under the following circumstances: a low family income, an unmarried mother's not wanting to marry the father of her child, and the possibility that the pregnancy would result in the mother's having a "nervous breakdown." Men aged 30-44 were most supportive of legal access to abortion across the various reasons. (3) For men older than 44, unintended pregnancy may be a less salient issue.

Using focus groups of 13-19-year-olds, Rebecca Stone and Cynthia Waszak found that teenagers tend to express "erroneous and anecdotal evidence about abortion more often than sound knowledge, portraying the procedure as medically dangerous, emotionally damaging and widely illegal." (4) The primary sources of their attitudes toward abortion seem to be "antiabortion views, conservative morality and religion." These authors contend that "recent campaigns to restrict abortion have targeted teenagers, who are particularly susceptible to persuasion, with an abundance of literature, while prochoice information has been less available and is unlikely to be geared toward adolescents." (5)

This article uses data from the 1988 National Survey of Adolescent Males (NSAM) to assess adolescent males' degree of approval of abortion in a number of pregnancy-related scenarios, as well as the likelihood that they will recommend abortion to resolve a pregnancy when an unmarried male "likes but does not love" his partner. Our focus on males' attitudes toward abortion is warranted for at least two reasons. First, the current U.S. occupational structure remains gender-segregated, as evidenced by male domination of all levels of government positions and the medical establishment; "men have the dominant political voice in setting policies and making laws governing abortion... and are the abortion providers." (6) Second, men are affected by unintended pregnancy and can influence decisions about pregnancy resolution.