The Relationship Between Childbearing Motivations and Attitude Toward Abortion Among Married Men and Women.(Statistical Data Included)

Relationships between positive and negative childbearing motivations and an abortion attitude index are examined among men and women from 401 married couples--half of whom had one child and half of whom were childless. A multivariate model tests for differences in these relationships, as well as in the association of the attitude index with personality traits, personal value systems and age, across both gender and parity groups. The results indicate that three of the four measures of negative childbearing motivation and one of the five measures of positive childbearing motivation are associated with a more accepting attitude toward abortion. These relationships are independent of the effects of personality personal values and age, and are the same for both males and females and for respondents with no children and one child.

(Family Planning Perspectives, 26:165-168,1994)

Little is known about how attitudes toward abortion are related to childbearing motivations. Intuitively, we might expect those who are more motivated to have children to be more negative about abortion, and that is exactly what the scattered literature on this question suggests. For example, Jones and Westoff, (1) using National Fertility Study data from which they derived a six-item abortion attitude scale, found that the intention to have a smaller number of children is associated with a greater acceptance of abortion. Faden and colleagues (2) used a 10-item scale with a sample of 190 women and found that the "justifiability" of abortion was best predicted by the woman's ideal family size. Similarly, Singh and Williams, (3) using data from a national opinion survey of men and women, found that ideal family size predicted which respondents reported that they would have an abortion under three different circumstances and which said they would not. In these last two studies, a smaller ideal family size was a ssociated with a more accepting attitude toward abortion.

The problem with these and related studies is threefold. First, they do not measure childbearing motivation directly, but instead rely upon proxies such as ideal or intended family size. However, the relationship between childbearing motivation and desired family size is only modest and, to some extent, nonlinear. (4) Thus, variables based on feelings or intentions about family size are probably not good proxies for childbearing motivation.

Second, a variable based on family size is a single, very general measure of an individual's feelings or intentions and does not do justice to the complexity of childbearing motivations. If there is a relationship between childbearing motivations and attitude toward abortion, it is precisely this complexity that needs to addressed.

Third and finally, most relevant studies do not control for factors that may be responsible for any association between childbearing motivations and abortion attitudes, or that may moderate the strength of any association. For example, none of the three studies cited above examined how the association between ideal or intended family size and abortion attitudes varied by sex or parity. Such variations would be of great interest, because both childbearing and abortion make very different physical and emotional demands on the two sexes, and because the actual experience of childbearing probably has an important effect on both childbearing motivations and attitude toward abortion.

This article will attempt to deal with these shortcomings in our knowledge base, drawing upon data from an ongoing study of childbearing motivation in married couples living in the San Francisco Bay area.