ABSTRACT
In almost every year since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago has conducted a national survey of social and political attitudes. This General Social Survey (GSS) has included a battery of six questions measuring support for legal abortion. There is a general societal consensus that abortion should be legal in each of the traumatic circumstances. Seventy-six percent of those surveyed from 1987 through 1991 supported abortion under all three circumstances in our trauma scale--mother's health, fetal defect, and rape, with only 7 percent opposing abortion in all three circumstances. The narrow majority of Americans in every survey favored limited legal access to abortion. By mid-1991, two states and one territory (Louisiana, Utah, and Guam) had passed stringent restrictions on abortion, and other states had passed legislation calling for parental notification or consent and/or waiting periods. This chapter examines demographic or social group, differences in attitudes toward legal abortion.
