ABSTRACT
Faye Wattleton, former head of Planned Parenthood, was crushed to learn that women's attitudes on abortion are not what she supposed they were. Declining support for abortion owes something to the gruesome details that emerged in the debate over partial-birth abortion. But support for abortion may be eroding primarily because sexual attitudes in general have been moving in a conservative direction throughout the 1990s. Two factors driving the conservative trend are religion and the costs of the sexual revolution (AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, the effects of divorce, dissatisfaction with promiscuous sex). Smith says Boomers, too, as they age, are developing more traditional attitudes: Gen Xers are 10 to 25 points more likely in surveys to prefer a return to traditional standards than Boomers were when they were young. And Boomers today are just as likely as Gen Xers to differ with the attitudes reported by the Boomet generation in the 1970s.
