Abortion, Religion and Sex
Note: It appears you have not yet completed the interactive activity,
Whose Body Is It Anyway?. If you work through this - it'll take about 5 minutes - before reading the analysis below, things will make a lot more sense. At the end of the activity, you'll find a link that will return you to this page.
Whose Body Is It Anyway? has to date been completed by 109985 people. The charts below present some of the data that have been collected.
It is worth noting three things before proceeding. The first is that "morally permissible"
here means that a person either endorsed the proposition that abortion is always
morally justified or the proposition that it is normally morally justified
(but only in exceptional circumstances in the late stages of pregnancy). The second
is that a belief about the moral status of abortion is not equivalent to a belief
about the right to abortion. So, for example, it is possible to think that abortion
is not morally justified, but that women have the right to abortion. The
third is that you can't easily generalize about the wider population on the basis
of the data presented here - not least, religious belief is significantly under-represented
among visitors to this web site.
It is clear from the charts above that religion is the most significant predictor
of a person's stance on the morality of abortion: if you're a Christian, then likely
you're going to think that abortion is not morally permissible, if you're
an atheist, it's the other way around. This is the expected result. Less expected
is the fact that a higher percentage of males than females think that abortion is
morally justified - a difference that is easily statistically significant. One thought
here is that this result is an artifact of the importance of religion - that is,
a higher percentage of females than males in this sample are religious (it's worth
noting that differing levels of religiosity almost certainly explain the variation
between countries we see in the third chart). So let's look at men and women of
no religion.
Respondents who self-identify as belonging to "No Religion"
As you can see, the difference between males and females remains even when you factor religion out of the equation. It is a small difference, but it is statistically significant - the samples sizes here are 61804 and 48026 people, respectively - and certainly it is curious that it exists at all. It isn't possible to rule out some systematic bias in the sampling, but it isn't easy to see what this might be (especially given that the difference is greater for the younger age group).