Attitudes towards abortion: what role do educational attainment and cultural traits play?

Education affects individual values and beliefs, mitigates prejudices and enhances open-mindedness. Additionally, education has been shown to affect cultural traits like trust and respect in societies. Building on this literature and employing an extensive individual-level cross country data from World Value Survey (WVS), we explore the role of educational attainment and cultural traits in shaping attitudes towards abortion. Our results show that higher educational attainment is associated with stronger justification of abortion as a choice. We also show that cultural traits like trust and respect enhance the association between educational attainment and attitudes towards abortion. Obedience, however, erodes the impact of educational attainment on the individual justification for abortion. Our results are robust to a wide array of controls as well as estimates taking into bias arising out of simultaneous sample selection.