Re: [Fwd: Re: Abortion in Europe and US]

[Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:53 PM 8/27/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Katha Pollitt wrote:
>
>>For a different view of what the public opinion polls actually say,
>>see Slate, which had a piece analyzing what various polls actually ask.
>>The author argues that the widespread perception that support for legal
>>abortion is declining is spin.
>
>If you want to find out a time trend, you look for polls that have
>asked the same question, and preferably one by the same pollster,
>over a long period of time. Gallup has numbers going back to 1975 on
>its abortion page
><http://www.gallup.com/poll/indicators/indabortion.asp>. Basically,
>the number of people calling themselves "pro-choice" has declined a
>bit, and those "pro-life" has risen a bit, since 1994-95. Within the
>"pro-choice" camp, there's been a shift towards favoring tighter
>restrictions on legal abortions over the last several years.
>
>Unfortunately, Gallup doesn't break down its info by race, gender, or
>income. But I just got a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education's
>annual almanac issue, which is full of data, and one page is devoted
>to 1998's survey of freshman opinion. And, asked the question,
>"Abortion should be legal," the following percentages agree strongly
>or somewhat:
>
>   all    50.9%
>   men    52.5
>   women  49.5
>
>This isn't exactly what one might predict.
>
>Doug


Here is another set of figures on abortion I derived from the World Values
Survey for 1990 and 1995.
Support for abortion was measured on a scale from 1=never acceptable to
10=always acceptable.  I computed mean scores for each country - so th
ehigher the number the more acceptable abortion in that country.
Unfortunately, many countries included in 1991 survey were not included in
the 1995 survey.

higher numbers = greater overall acceptability of abortion
              1990     1995
Britain        4.35     5.28
W. Germany     4.35     5.37
Norway         5.00     5.56
Sweden         5.37     7.26
Japan          3.71     4.35
USA            4.00     3.90

These figures seem to show that while support for abortion increased in the
European countries shown above and japan - it *decreased* slightly in the
US.  However, I did not conduct statistical significance tests for the
1990-95 diffrences (that would require too much work, since these are two
separate files) - so I do not know whether the 1990-1995 differences are
statistically significant (i.e. whether the difference reflects change in
the attitudes or a statistical error).  For all European countries shown
above the difference is likely to be significant - but for the US probably
not.

wojtek