Race differences in abortion attitudes: Some additional evidence

Abstract Although Combs and Welch reported a trend of de-creasing racial differences in abortion attitudes, Hall and Ferree used data from the 1982 General Social Survey to argue that racial differences were not declining. This paper updates this debate through the 1988 General Social Survey and concludes that racial differences have indeed declined over time. Moreover, when new religious items introduced in the 1984 survey are included in the multivariate analysis, blacks are not significantly different from whites in their support of legal abortion. This finding obscures a more interesting pattern, however, of offsetting, statistically significant racial differences among respondents of the same gen-der—black men are significantly less supportive of abortion than white men, and black women are significantly more supportive than white women. Social scientists have consistently reported that blacks are less suppor-tive of legal abortion than whites, even after controls for socioeco-nomic status and other demographic variables, gender-role attitudes, attitudes toward sexual behavior, and religion (Combs and Welch, 1982; Hall and Ferree, 1986; Secret, 1987). These differences are sur-prising in light of differences in abortion rates: black women are twice as likely to have abortions as whites, a ratio which has held relatively constant for more than a decade (Henshaw and Silverman, 1988).' Combs and Welch (1982) used data from the National Opinion Re-search Center's General Social Survey (GSS) and found a lessening o