Crawford, B.L., Handley, M.N., Jozkowski, K.N., Turner, R.C., Lo, W. (2021, November 17 - November 20). Abortion shouldn't be legal, but it also shouldn't be illegal. American Society of Criminology, Annual Meeting ASC, Chicago, IL.
Objective: To understand if people respond similarly to questions asking if abortion be legal and questions asking if abortion should be illegal. Although the two questions are practically equivalent and in theory should yield opposing answers, we contend that people may be more likely to say abortion should not be legal than to say abortion should be illegal.
Data and Methods: Data were obtained from a quota-based sample from Qualtrics. Participants were asked about the legality and illegality of abortion across 17 different scenarios. A series of bivariate analyses were used to examine the dissonance between the legality and illegality versions of the questions.
Results: Across the 17 scenarios, 33-39% of participants who said that abortion should not be legal in a particular scenario also indicated that abortion should not be illegal for that same scenario.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that although people may indicate that abortion should not be legal in certain scenarios, they may be hesitant to say that abortion should be illegal in those same scenarios. We will discuss different explanations for this divergence and the potential implications when using survey and poll questions to examine public support for laws restricting abortion.