“It Makes It More Real to You”: Abortion Attitudes Following Experience and Contact With Abortion

TL;DR

This study explores how personal or close experiences with abortion shape people's attitudes in the UK, finding that such experiences make abortion feel more real and personal.

Contribution

The study contributes novel insights into how contact with abortion experiences influences attitudes, emphasizing the shift from abstract to tangible understanding.

Findings

Participants viewed abortion as more tangible and personal after experiencing or being close to someone's abortion.

Abortion attitudes were found to be largely stable despite exposure to real-life experiences.

Stigma surrounding abortion and those who seek it remains persistent in the UK.

Abstract

When positioned as part of a cluster of related social and political attitudes, abortion attitudes are characterized as somewhat fixed from a young age. The extent to which abortion attitudes are malleable, and can be shaped by experience, is under‐researched in the United Kingdom (UK).

To address this gap, we conducted semi‐structured interviews with individuals with (N = 12) and without (N = 16) abortion experience living in the United Kingdom, consisting of England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Inductive thematic analysis was used to address the research question: How does experience and/or contact with abortion shape attitudes towards abortion?

The theme From Abstract Idea to Reality illustrates participants' understanding of how abortion attitudes are developed by contact with real, lived experiences of abortion—someone's own and/or their friends’ or acquaintances’ abortions. Participants were clear that proximity to abortion helped them, and others, to see abortion as tangible, personal, and sensory (“reality”) as opposed to intangible, imagined, and conceptual (“abstract”). Subthemes capture our participants’ understanding of abortion as a reality as opposed to something imagined; abortion is a complex issue and abortion experiences are varied (Complexity of Abortion), attitudes towards abortion are largely stable (Consistency of Attitudes), and abortion, and the people who seek abortion in the United Kingdom, is still stigmatized (Persistent Stigma).

Our themes and discussion provide direction for future scholarship considering contact as a stigma reduction strategy, highlighting some potential benefits but also urging caution in oversimplifying a complicated social issue.