MORAL REASONING AND POLITICAL-CONFLICT - THE ABORTION CONTROVERSY

We argue that the abortion controversy has one major source - religion - and two less important ones - attitudes towards sexual permissivene ss and women's employment. Traditional Christianity promotes oppositio n to abortion using three distinct modes of moral reasoning: through d eductive moral reasoning, by the Christian world view's implication th at abortion violates the sanctity of life and is a rebellion against G od's design; through authoritative moral reasoning by appeal to Cathol ic dogma; and through consequentialist moral reasoning, as a means of control over sexuality and as a means of confining women's activities to the home. Even aside from Christian belief, adherence to traditiona l morality promotes opposition to abortion on these consequentialist g rounds. We posit a model in which religious belief, anti-feminism, sex ual permissiveness, and attitudes towards abortion are distinct concep ts (a four-factor model) rather than all simply aspects of a single co nservatism factor. We develop reliable, multiple item attitude scales; show that our four-factor model fits the data much better than the on e-factor alternative; and test our hypotheses on new data from a large , representative national sample of Australia (N=4540). Using maximum likelihood structural equation methods, we find that deductive reasoni ng from Christian belief is the most important source of opposition to abortion, with strong effects both direct and indirect. Exposure to t he authority of the Catholic hierarchy is a real but weaker source of opposition. Consequentialist reasoning from traditional moral views on sex - partly buttressed by religion, partly independent of it - is al so influential. But views on women's employment matter only a little, contrary to received wisdom.