RACE DIFFERENCES IN ABORTION ATTITUDES - SOME ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE

Although Combs and Welch reported a trend of decreasing racial difference in abortion attitudes, Hall and Ferree used data from the 1982 General Social Survey to argue that racial difference were not declining. This paper updates this debate through the 1988 General Social Survey and concludes that racial differences have indeed declined over time. Morever, when new religious items introduced in the 1984 survey are included in the multivariate analysis, blacks are not significantly different from whites in their support of legal abortion. This finding obscures a more intersting pattern, however, of offsetting, statistically significant racial differences among respondents of the same gender-black men are significantly less supportive of a abortion than white men, and black women are significantly more supportive than white women. © 1990 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.