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Title: | Pro-Life Policy Preferences Partly Reflect Desires to Suppress Casual Sex, Not Solely Sanctity of Life Concerns |
Authors: | Moon, JW Krems, JA |
Keywords: | abortion;morality;attitudes;self-interest;strategic morality |
Issue Date: | 16-Mar-2025 |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Citation: | Moon, J.W. and Krems, S.A. (2025) 'Pro-Life Policy Preferences Partly Reflect Desires to Suppress Casual Sex, Not Solely Sanctity of Life Concerns', Social Psychological and Personality Science, 0 (ahead of print), pp. 1 - 11. doi: 10.1177/19485506251320681. |
Abstract: | Pro-life individuals often emphasize sanctity-of-life concerns as driving their opposition to abortion. This implies the straightforward prediction that the more strongly people oppose abortion for such reasons (e.g., “abortion is murder”), the more they will endorse policies preventing abortions (face-value account). An alternative suggests that typically nonconscious reproductive goals (e.g., discouraging casual sex) influence policy preferences; this strategic account predicts a different pattern of policy endorsement: all else equal, abortion opponents will prioritize abortion-preventing policies discouraging casual sex. A pilot study and two preregistered U.S. experiments (N = 1,960) provide relatively greater support for the strategic account: the strongest abortion opponents more strongly endorse policies that prevent abortions by discouraging casual sex (e.g., abortion bans, abstinence-only sex education) over policies that do not (comprehensive sex education)—even controlling for conservatism and religiosity. Commonly voiced arguments against abortion may be more rhetorically effective but less reflective of genuine drivers underlying arguers’ beliefs. |
Description: | Supplementary material is available online at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506251320681#supplementary-materials . A preprint version is available at PsyArXiv under a CC BY license at https://osf.io/j5dn3_v1 . It has not been certified by peer review. |
URI: | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/30598 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506251320681 |
ISSN: | 1948-5506 |
Other Identifiers: | ORCiD: Jordan W. Moon https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5102-3585 ORCiD: Jaimie Arona Krems https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2590-2241 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Life Sciences Research Papers |
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