Vicky Yang | Stephen Klineberg | June 24, 2015
Texas has a long history of enacting laws that seek to restrict abortion rights, despite the pro-choice views of the general public. Texas Senate Bill 5, for example, enacted and signed into law in July 2013, bans abortions after 20 weeks of gestation and requires abortion facilities to meet all the regulatory standards for surgical healthcare facilities, thereby forcing many of the state’s abortion providers to close their doors.
The Kinder Houston Area Survey has asked about abortion attitudes in all of its 34 annual surveys. Strikingly, as seen in Figure 1, there has been virtually no change in area residents’ views of these complex and consequential issues over the years: Harris County residents have been consistently both anti-abortion and pro-choice. The 2015 survey, for example, found that 58 percent assert that abortion is “morally wrong,” but 63 percent are opposed to “a law that would make it more difficult for a woman to obtain an abortion.”
A large portion of area residents thus espouse traditional values for themselves, yet respect the rights of others to make different decisions in their own lives. Of the 809 Harris County residents who participated in this year’s survey, 439 (58 percent) asserted their belief that abortion is “morally wrong.” Of those 439, 244 (56 percent) were nevertheless opposed to “a law that would make it more difficult for a woman to obtain an abortion”; the remaining 195 (44 percent) were in favor of restricting the right to choose.
Why do so many area residents endorse both the anti-abortion and pro-choice positions? We conducted a regression analysis among the 439 respondents who asserted that abortion was morally wrong to determine which factors were most powerful in predicting opposition to a law restricting access to abortion. Figure 2 presents the most important predictors.
The pattern shown in the figure suggests that empathy has much to do with tolerance in this connection. The respondents with lower household incomes and lower levels of education are more likely than those in better socioeconomic circumstances to recognize that some women may be forced to make this difficult decision because of the situations in which they find themselves. This is also the case for the respondents age 30 and older (at 62 percent) compared to those under the age of 30 (at just 29 percent), and for blacks and Hispanics (at 55 and 61 percent, respectively), compared to Anglos (46 percent).
Figure 2: THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THOSE WHO SUPPORT THE “RIGHT TO CHOOSE” AMONG THE RESPONDENTS WHO BELIEVE ABORTION IS “MORALLY WRONG” (N=439; 2015).
Social support also clearly makes a difference in this connection. The anti-abortion respondents who are Democrats and therefore identify with a group that generally supports abortion rights are considerably more likely than Republicans to express support for a woman’s right to choose. Similarly, the anti-abortion respondents who attended religious services in the past month, interacting closely with people who are generally opposed to abortion rights, are much less likely to take the pro-choice position.
The majority of Harris County residents have indicated consistently over the years of surveys that they personally believe abortion is “morally wrong,” yet most are nevertheless unwilling to impose a hard-and-fast rule on all persons regardless of the circumstances in which they might find themselves. That reluctance is one of the reasons why Houston has been able to develop into a modern, generally progressive, and tolerant city.
Yang, a rising junior at Rice University, assisted in developing and analyzing the 2015 Kinder Houston Area Survey.