Blind Spots in Abortion Attitudes: Investigating the Nuance of UK Women’s Pro-Choice Perspectives

Abstract

Abortion attitudes are typically contextualized as pro-life or pro-choice, yet these characterizations ignore the complex ideas that individuals hold about abortion. To address this gap, we conducted a thematic analysis of 28 semi-structured interviews with women in the UK, both with (n = 12) and without (n = 16) personal abortion experience. The theme “blind spots” captures patterns in our participants’ accounts, wherein complexity and even conflict would emerge within expressed abortion judgments. Our subthemes highlight those conflicts between more and less restrictive abortion attitudes that occurred when considering either the same (self or other) or different (self vs. other) attitudinal objects. Many participants were unaware of the conflicting and nuanced attitudes they held about abortion, evidenced by an inability to integrate these positions into a clear and consistent judgment, indicating that a dichotomy of abortion attitudes may be too simplistic.

Keywords:

• Pro-life
• pro-choice
• abortion attitudes
• reproductive health
• abortion

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Authors Contributions

Dr. Nicole M. Lozano: conceptualization, methodology, validation, formal analysis, resources, data curation, writing–original draft, writing–review and editing, co-supervision.

Dr. Lora Adair: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, writing–original draft, writing–review and editing, project administration, co-supervision, funding acquisition.

Julieta Baker: formal analysis, investigation, visualization, writing–review and editing.

Ssanyu Kayser: formal analysis, investigation, writing - review and editing.

Aneeka Shrestha: formal analysis, investigation, data curation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).