A nine-year study conducted in New Zealand and published in 2023 found that support for abortion slowed after the study participants became parents themselves.
The study, published in Sex Roles, examined attitudes toward elective abortions (which study authors defined as the intentional termination of a pregnancy for personal reasons) and traumatic abortion (defined as the termination of a pregnancy for a medical emergency or fetal anomaly). The researchers analyzed data from 2011 and 2019, focusing on 1,266 individuals who became parents during the study. Of these, 34% were male and 66% female.
Overall, researchers noted that though support for abortion increased throughout the study, that support waned after participants became parents. Per the study abstract: “Consistent with population trends, support for elective and traumatic abortion increased in the year(s) before participants became parents. After the transition to parenthood, support for elective abortion continued to increase (albeit at a slower rate), whereas traumatic abortion support stopped increasing.”
“Our results demonstrate that support for elective and traumatic abortion gradually increased in the year(s) before participants became parents,” the study authors concluded. “Following the transition to parenthood, however, the rate of change in support for elective abortion slowed, whereas the rate of change in support for traumatic abortion stabilized and became non-significant [stopped visibly increasing]. Our results thus suggest that the process of becoming a parent impacts the rate at which the same peoples’ support for reproductive rights changes over time, particularly in the case of traumatic abortion.”
According to PsyPost, the study did not take into account outside factors such as participants’ political views or prior experiences with abortion. The study authors note they “cannot infer definitively that the transition to parenthood causes changes in abortion support,” however, they “can be rather confident that the actual transition to parenthood impacts abortion support.”
Abortion takes the life of a child, often brutally, yet many people believe it is acceptable because they have bought one of the abortion industry’s biggest lies — that the child in the womb is “just a clump of cells” or simply “tissue.” It is only after recognizing that it is a baby human — as seen with Live Action’s Baby Olivia video — that some minds are changed. It follows, then, that parents who have celebrated the life of their child in the womb by doing things like documenting first kicks, throwing a baby shower, and planning a nursery, will recognize that supporting the direct and intentional killing of a child in the womb is a morally inconsistent position.
