How many Latter-day Saints have ever had an abortion? The dataset I used last week about masturbation also had a question about abortion history, so we can do the same thing here. Once again, with our 322 Latter-day Saints it’s not super tight confidence intervals, but it’s not just ballparking it either.
The question is: “How many times have you ever been pregnant (or made a partner pregnant) that resulted in an elective abortion?”
The question wording’s a little too cognitively difficult for my taste (e.g. I would have preferred some gendered skip logic with a simple”have you ever had an elective abortion” for women), but it’s good enough for our purposes.
We find that:
6% of Latter-day Saint men indicated yes, and
7% of Latter-day Saint women.
For non-Latter-day Saints these numbers are 15% and 22%, respectively.
So, again in a finding that should not be surprising to anybody, Latter-day Saint men and women tend to have fewer experiences aborting their children than their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts. Latter-day Saint women are at 1/3 the rate of non-Latter-day Saint women, and men are at about 1/2 to 1/3 of the rate.
So while abortion is genuinely rare in the Latter-day Saint community, it’s not unheard of either. About one out of every 14 women in a representative congregation will have had an abortion so, I don’t know, two in a relief society lesson? (Although I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s negatively correlated with activity, even among self-identified Latter-day Saints, so the visualization of how many people sitting in a relief society lesson might not be apropos).
On then on the male side about one in every 17 have had a child aborted, so again maybe two per EQ meeting (depending on the size of your EQ and RS).
At the outset we should note that this question doesn’t tell us how many have had abortions while they were Latter-day Saints. When my father was a mission president in Russia he mentioned that nearly all older female converts had to have the special interview-with-a-mission-president to get baptized because in the late Soviet cultural context abortion was basically their contraception. By the same token, while we can assume they were at a higher “risk” of abortion while they were non-members given the numbers above, we have no justification for assuming they were all pre-Latter-day Saint abortions. The distribution of people having abortions when they were less active or non-members, or the abortions that fit into the Church’s list of exceptions, is unknown. In any case, Latter-day Saint women and men who have had a child aborted are rare but not non-existent.
The survey did ask when they had their first abortion. At this point we’re dealing with 18 cases of abortions by current members of the Church, so it’s not big enough to draw any conclusions about distribution, but it’s still interesting. Four refused the question, six were teens, four were in their 20s, one in their 30s, and three in their 40s.
It also asked “looking back upon the [first] abortion now, which of these statements best captures your feelings about it?” Of the men seven answered this question, with four saying “while it may not have been an easy decision, I have never regretted it,” two saying “there have been times when I regretted it, but overall, I think it was the right decision,” and one saying “I wish she had not had the abortion.”
For the women two of them indicated “while it may not have been an easy decision, I have never regretted it,” one of them said “there have been times when I regretted it, but overall, I think I made the right decision,” three of them said “I wish I had not had the abortion,” and two of them said “none of these statements characterize my feelings about it today.”
Finally, it also asked them “did you feel that decision to have the [first] abortion was the right thing to do at the time?” For the Latter-day Saint cases eight of them (four men, four women) indicated “I was sure it was the right thing to do,” one of them (a male) indicated “I wondered whether it was the right thing to do or not,” two of them (one man, one woman) indicated “I thought it was the wrong thing, but I felt the need to go through with it,” one woman said “I thought it was the wrong thing, but I was encouraged by others to do it,” and three of them (one man, two women) indicated “none of these statements characterize my feelings about it at the time.” So feelings about their abortion were often complex and ran the gamut.
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