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Abstract
Education affects individual values and beliefs, mitigates prejudices and enhances open-mindedness. Additionally, education has been shown to affect cultural traits like trust and respect in societies. Building on this literature and employing an extensive individual-level cross country data from World Value Survey (WVS), we explore the role of educational attainment and cultural traits in shaping attitudes towards abortion. Our results show that higher educational attainment is associated with stronger justification of abortion as a choice. We also show that cultural traits like trust and respect enhance the association between educational attainment and attitudes towards abortion. Obedience, however, erodes the impact of educational attainment on the individual justification for abortion. Our results are robust to a wide array of controls as well as estimates taking into bias arising out of simultaneous sample selection.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Note that in the United States, African Americans are less likely to support abortion in surveys, however, race has also been correlated with size of family, religiosity, economic class, marital status and number of children (Carter et al., Citation2009; Jelen & Wilcox, Citation2003; McCormick, Citation1975). Attempting to control for a general variable for race using the WVS is impossible as it adds 300 plus categories and reduces significance. We include a discussion about race in the final section.
2 We have also checked our results with a dummy assigned 1 for responses of ‘very good’ and ‘good’. The results remain robust.
3 We have considered this as the dependent variable in column (2) in Tables and and in columns (2) and (5) in Table .
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nabamita Dutta
Nabamita Dutta is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Lisa Giddings
Lisa Giddings is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Russell Sobel
Russell Sobel is a Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship at the Baker School of Business at The Citadel.