What Can Conjoint Experiments Tell Us about Americans’ Abortion Attitudes?

• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211053211
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Author: David Doherty
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(2) 147–156

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211053211

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What Can Conjoint Experiments Tell Us

about Americans’Abortion Attitudes?

David Doherty

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

Abstract

Ireportfindings from a pair of conjoint experiments that presented respondents with a series of profiles of pregnant women and

asked whether it should be possible for each to obtain a legal abortion.The profiles varied the reason for the abortion, gestational

age, and demographic characteristicsof the hypothetical woman. I find little evidence that women’s demographic characteristics—

including their purported ethnoracial identities—affect these judgments. In contrast, the effects of gestational age and the reason for

the abortion are substantial. Notably, the effects of gestational age appear to be linear and unresponsive to trimester and viability

thresholds commonly cited in elite discourse. I also find that thereason for the abortionbecomes more consequential asgestational

age increases. Finally, I consider whether these effects vary with respondents’party affiliation and gender. The findings offer new

insights into the contours of abortion attitudes in the United States and illustrate the strengths and limitations of conjoint designs.

Keywords

conjoint, abortion, gender gap, public opinion, experiment

A substantial body of literature has examined the roles re-

ligiosity, gender, ethnoracial identity, and an array of other

individual-level characteristics play in shaping broad support

for permitting women to access abortion (e.g., Adamczyk &

Valdimarsdóttir, 2018;Loll & Hall, 2019;Holman, Podrazik

and Mohamed 2020, for reviews, see Jelen & Wilcox, 2003;

Adamczyk et al., 2020). However, although Americans are

often crudely characterized as either “pro-life”or “pro-

choice,”attitudes about abortion are more complex than this

distinction implies (Luker, 1984;Cook et al., 1992) and many

Americans appear to have mixed feelings about this issue

(Craig et al., 2002). For many, support for permitting abortion

depends on the reason for the abortion, gestational age, and

perhaps the characteristics of the pregnant woman (Munson,

2018).

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Public attitudes about abortion can shape policy

outcomes (Arceneaux, 2002), so it is important to understand

the nature of these attitudes.

Abortion attitudes are most commonly measured using

closed-ended survey questions. More often than not, these

questions “focus on only one element of abortion—the

reasons that a woman might have to seek an abortion”

(Jelen & Wilcox, 2003, 490). However, a handful of studies

have used survey experiments to pursue finer-grained as-

sessments of the contours of the public’s abortion attitudes.

For example, Hans and Kimberly (2014) report findings from

a telephone survey that “built-out”randomly assigned aspects

of a hypothetical pregnant woman’s situation sequentially.

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Another study used the standard General Social Survey

(GSS) battery of abortion questions as a starting point and

randomly varied whether the question indicated that the

woman was “less than 3 months pregnant”(Bumpass, 1997).

In this research note I build on this work, reporting findings

from a pair of conjoint experiments that presented respon-

dents with detailed profiles of pregnant women and asked

them whether the woman should be able to obtain a legal

abortion. I make four contributions.

First, the conjoint design provides an avenue for disen-

tangling the effects of considerations that may be correlated in

people’s minds. For example, people may infer that abortions

prompted by dangers to the health of the mother tend occur

late in pregnancy or among older pregnant women. If so,

differences in responses to a survey question that, say, asks

whether abortion should be permitted if the woman’s health

endangered and one that asks whether abortion should be

permitted if the woman became pregnant as a result of rape

may conflate the effects of the reason with considerations tied

to gestational age or the age of the woman seeking the

abortion. Similarly, in the second study, I account for the

possibility that the apparent effects of other considerations

mask effects of inferences respondents may make regarding

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Loyola University, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

David Doherty, Department of Political Science, Loyola University, 1032 W.

Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60660, USA.

Email: ddoherty@luc.edu