The Insurance Value of Abortion and Support for Reproductive Rights

Existing scholarship holds that Americans’ views on abortion policy are determined by their moral and religious beliefs. In this article, we argue that these beliefs are only part of the story. We propose that some Americans support pro-choice policies even if they have moral qualms about abortion because they are afraid of an unplanned transition to parenthood. Accessible abortion offers a kind of “insurance” against this risk. We expect individuals’ support for abortion rights to decline after they become parents, since abortion’s prospective insurance value declines after individuals have had their first child. Using panel survey data from the CCES, we find that the transition to parenthood makes Americans less supportive of abortion rights than they had been previously. This appears to be especially true of conservatives and practicing Christians, indicating that some members of these groups support abortion as a form of protection against unplanned parenthood until they experience life-cycle changes that reduce their personal interest in protecting reproductive rights. We conduct a variety of robustness tests to rule out alternative mechanisms that might link parenthood to a conservative shift in abortion policy preferences, bolstering confidence in the insurance mechanism proposed here.