Abortion and Family Formation: Circumstance or Culture?

Research using opinion surveys and abortion-patient censuses has found that opinion and practice on abortion often appear incongruent. This is generally attributed to circumstantial pressures that motivate women to make an atypical choice, conceived in terms of rational utility; but it may also be due to the fact that the socio-cultural values of women having abortions are not representative of their opinion group. Taking participa-tion in marriage and family formation behavior as indicators of traditional cultural values, I examine fertility data from the National Survey of Family Growth (N=10,847) in order to determine whether women having abortions differ significantly in their opinions regarding such behaviors from those not having abortions. I find that women having abortions are twice as likely never to marry, 37 % more likely to divorce, have (on average) twice as many lifetime sexual partners and three times as many partners before marriage, have fewer children, and experience both earlier sexual onset and later marriage. Having successive abortions or abortions on different pregnancies affects these differences not at all or only slightly. I argue that these differences suggest that abortion decisions stem in large part from diverse sociocultural values rather than from circumstantial concessions