Every life is sacred…kind of: Uncovering the sources of seemingly contradictory public attitudes toward abortion and the death penalty

Abstract

Many scholars have studied public attitudes about abortion and the death penalty, but few have studied the coincidence of strong anti-abortion and pro-death penalty attitudes. What factors best explain how someone can find willful taking of life abhorrent in one context but justified in another? We find that the desire to see criminals punished, combined with a literalist orientation toward the Bible, best predict membership in the pro-life/pro-death penalty group. Policy implications flow directly from these findings. The pro-life/pro-death penalty group likely constitutes approximately 5% of the U.S. population and their literalist, punitive stance toward crime and punishment has ramifications for all crime control policy, not just capital punishment.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Drs. Travis Pratt, Noelle Fearn, and the anonymous Social Science Journal reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 We decided to use a different data set for two reasons. First, the General Social Survey (GSS), both in the cumulative 1972–2006 file and the 2006 version requires a much higher attrition of data points due to missing data. Cook (1998a) acknowledged this in her original study, which required a proportionally smaller sub-sample than the American National Election Survey (ANES) we use. Second, we feel our measure of punitive attitudes is unique and more direct. The GSS asks respondent's if they believe that, “those who violate God's rules must be punished,” while the ANES asks on a seven-point scale weather it is better to address crime problems with social aid or institutional punishment. Both questions have merit, but the GSS question may be confounded in a host of specific religious and moral attitudes whereas the ANES question is more secular.

2 We employ listwise deletion to deal with missing data problems. While this method may be problematic, we felt it was not appropriate here to use estimation techniques to replace missing values because many of the missing data were nominal variables, particularly respondents’ race. We found that listwise deletion did not reduce the sample size to an unreasonable level. Moreover, the reduced sample after listwise deletion closely resembled the full original sample on all demographic characteristics and on all the variables contained in the analysis, meaning that deleting cases containing missing data did not alter the sample in any meaningful way.

3 We understand this item might be tapping into something other than sexual restrictiveness such as opposition to legal protection on the grounds that government should not meddle in matters of social equality. Such an individual would be just as opposed to protecting gay citizens as opposed to affirmative action, the latter of which has very little to do with personal views on sexuality. The general opposition to equal rights for gay people, however, is likely linked to deep seeded ideas about sex and more specifically appropriate sex.

4 All of the dependent and independent variables used in the present analyses are attitudinal variables that are associated with an overall conservative ideology. To allay any potential concerns about endogeneity between the dependent variable and the set of predictors, we conducted supplementary analyses on our dependent variable and the measures of punitiveness, literalism, sexual restrictiveness, conservatism, and gun control. Results indicated that while these measures are all related (as would be expected), they are not so related that they could be considered synonymous with one another. The correlations between them are weak-to-modest (see Appendix A), exploratory factor analysis did not show a clear pattern of loadings on a single factor, and a forcing a single-factor solution on these variables yielded loadings ranging from .2 to .6. Again, one would expect these variables to be related—indeed, it would not be wise to conduct an analysis when there is no relationship between the independent and dependent variables—but this relationship does not rise to the level of endogeneity.

5 There was no evidence of univariate skewness or kurtosis and no evidence of multicollinearity. The largest variance inflation factor (VIF) score was 1.59 and the largest condition index value was 12.5.

6 Exodus 21: 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. 18 Anyone who takes the life of someone's animal must make restitution—life for life. Leviticus 24: 19 If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him 20: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. 21 Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death. Deuteronomy 19:21 Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.