Making the Break: Popular Sentiment Toward Legalized Abortion Among American and Polish Catholic Laities

This comparative analysis of the structure of Polish and American Catholic laities' attitudes towards legalized abortion focuses on the dimensions and factors which influence public opinion toward legalized abortion. Latent class models are used to analyze a set of six scenarios regarding approval/disapproval of legalized abortion; we find substantial similarity in the structure of the two publics' opinions; Catholics in Poland and the USA appear to either (1) disapprove of all six reasons for legal abortion, (2) approve of all six reasons for legal abortion, or (3) adopt an intermediate position in which they approve of the three ethical/medical reasons for abortion, but disapprove of the three social reasons for abortion. Interestingly, we find no difference in the relative proportions of American and Polish Catholics who disapprove of ethical/medical reasons for abortion (a relatively small minority in each population), but Polish Catholics are much more likely than American Catholics to have ‘made the break’ from the Church's teachings; that is, to have adopted a position in direct opposition to the Church, one which approves of abortion for social reasons. Moreover, there appears to have been a significant increase in this approval between 1992 and 1993; possibly a result of the central role of this issue in the political debate of contemporary Poland. Using a latent logit model, we examine the differential influence of church attendance, cohort, and education on Polish and American Catholics' attitudes towards abortion for social reasons.