New Study Reveals Americans Are Actually Supportive When People Talk About Getting an Abortion
How would you expect people to respond if you told them that you’d had an abortion? Who would you tell, and why? Despite the fact that many women do talk about their abortions with family and friends, many still think of abortion as shrouded in secrecy. And because of this stigma, we might assume that people will react poorly if we share our own experiences. A new study challenges this perception—it found that in the majority of cases, people in the United States actually receive support and sympathy when they talk about their abortions, especially to close friends.
Sarah Cowan, an NYU sociologist, analyzed data from a nationally-representative survey of Americans to discover what happens in these “abortion disclosure” conversations—that is, conversations where one person turns to another and says, “I had an abortion.” She found that the majority (58.3%) of reactions to abortion disclosures were positive, with people categorizing listener reactions as sympathetic, supportive, or both. About one third of participants perceived the disclosure experience as a mix of positive and negative. Only about 7% of people perceived their disclosure experience as negative. This is very different from what we see on social media and on TV, when talking about abortion often provokes harassment and even death threats. Talking about your abortion person to person, according to this study, might actually positive experience.
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