Abortion.

I don't have a view on abortion. It's not my place to. I'll never be pregnant. I'm a man. I think it's up to women themselves to choose and not for me to tell them. If, and this is a highly unlikely scenario, I'd ever impregnated somebody I would hope they would at least discuss it with me before making a decision but that decision, ultimately, would be theirs.

In that respect, that means I'm 'pro-choice' rather than 'pro-life' but I don't think those terms really help anybody. A lot of the pro-life brigade seem to think life ends at birth. They fully support policies that ensure infant poverty and often they are vehemently in favour of having no restrictions on gun ownership. They don't seem very pro-life then.

Last night's Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk, The Social and Cutural Factors Influencing Attitudes To Abortion, was not about whether or not abortion is morally right or morally wrong. Both speakers, Dr Lora Adair (a senior lecturer at Brunel University in Uxbridge) and Dr Nicole Lozano (an assistant professor in psychology at Angelo State University in Texas), were firmly pro-choice and they were there to talk more about what influences people's attitudes on abortion.

After all, lots of women have abortions, it's estimated that one in three of the female population of the UK will have one, but very few speak about the experience and even fewer speak about it publicly. You almost certainly know somebody who has had an abortion and hasn't told you.

The evening kicked off with a story about a woman called Diamond. Diamond became pregnant as a teenager. She was quite naive and she didn't know who she could talk to about it. So she spoke to her mum. Her mum told her that if she had an abortion she'd never be able to have kids. That simply isn't true. It's a popular abortion myth to go along with the oft told lie that having an abortion can give a woman breast cancer.

But Diamond believed her mum and she had the baby. Though Diamond, now, does not regret bringing her child in to the world she does regret that she was not told the truth when she was pregnant. When Diamond became pregnant for a second time, this time better informed, she chose to have an abortion.

The reason for telling this story is because it's one that illustrates how people's attitudes about, and knowledge of, abortions affects whether they choose to have one or not. Dr Lozano's research has been primarily carried out in rural Texas and her takeaways have been that denying women access to abortions can create many problems.

These mothers may face economic hardship for years and years, they may have their credit scores lowered and be forced into debt, and having an essentially unwanted child may force them to stay with violent partners. Violent partners who may indeed insist on yet more children. Unsurprisingly, the development and well being of the children involved is often affected too.

Abortions are relatively safe procedures nowadays. Being forced to give birth is far more dangerous. For some women, it is life threatening. Yet some women still feel stigma and shame about accessing abortion services. Some people tell them that by having an abortion they're killing a baby and nobody wants to do that.

But why should one person care what one other person does with their uterus? Dr Adair proposed, quite controversially I thought, that judging and controlling other people has, historically, been quite useful for human society. Spitting indoors and poor food hygiene being things that society has deemed socially unacceptable and if you were to spit indoors or run a disgusting kitchen you'd be looked down upon. This, in a way, forces people not to do those things and makes life safer for everyone.

Reproductive rights are less clear and in trying to look at how people form their attitudes on abortion, Dr Adair first looked at which kind of people, broadly speaking, disprove of abortion. She found it was mostly older people, mostly men, mostly people of a religious persuasion, mostly less well educated people, and mostly more conservative minded people.

Obviously there is much nuance and there are many exceptions but, on the whole, those findings won't be a major surprise to most of us. On a country level, studies show that anti-abortion attitudes are more prominent in very religious countries and countries with very restrictive abortion laws. Of course there's a big, almost pregnant, bulge in the middle of that Venn diagram.

In March 2022, a survey was taken on attitudes to abortion. People were surveyed in four countries (UK, USA, India, and Mexico). Roughly 50% male, 50% female, 87% heterosexual, and with a wide range of political views and an average age of forty-one years old. The countries involved have huge differences in the amount of gender inequality (the UK is the most equal, India falls very far behind) and very different attitudes about casual sex.

But gender inequality didn't seem to affect attitudes as much as perhaps some people would expect. The graph was very confusing but it seemed pretty much to confirm everything written in the previous few paragraphs. In both the UK and India it is easier to access an abortion than it is in either Mexico or the USA and, whaddya know?, survey respondents in India and the UK had more liberal attitudes to abortion than those in Mexico and the USA.

So it seems that a country's laws don't just change how viable it is to access a safe abortion but how people in those countries feel about it. That's why the June 2022 reversal of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court is so pernicious. Abortion is now fully banned in thirteen American states and they're not all in the south. They stretch from West Virginia to Idaho and from Wisconsin to Texas.

When laws change it changes how people think. In some cases it gives them permission to entertain thoughts they may have already had in the back of their heads. This is dangerous for women and it's dangerous for society and it's where the talk ended because time was running out. It was interesting even if it had not been particularly conclusive.

But then how could it be? This is one hot topic that's not going anyway any time soon. The Q&A took in anti-vaxxing, bodily autonomy, benevolent sexism (!), the United Nations, human rights, some more Roe v Wade for good measure, and The Satanic Temple of Salem, Massachusetts which looks fascinating and had me thinking of signing up. Especially as they don't actually worship Satan but instead work together to promote broadly progressive causes. 

Including reproductive rights. I'd like to thank Dr Lora Adair and Dr Nicole Lozano for an interesting and informative talk and also to thank Kat Ford from Merseyside Skeptics and her cat (which is called cat, Kat's cat Cat) for hosting and, as ever, Skeptics in the Pub - Online for making these fortnightly Thursday evenings something to look forward to.