The interacting roles of abortion stigma and gender on attitudes toward abortion legality

Abortion remains a hot-button political topic in the United States. Previous research demonstrates the impact of religiosity and gender on attitudes toward abortion legality. However, limited work has examined the relationship between abortion stigma and abortion legality attitudes. Furthermore, as both gender and religiosity are connected to stigma, it is plausible that gender, religiosity, and stigma might interact to drive abortion legality attitudes. The current work used an online, self-administered sample of U.S. adults, recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. A moderated moderation analysis aimed to demonstrate the effects of abortion stigma on abortion legality attitudes, and explore interactions between gender, religiosity, and abortion stigma. Results showed a significant main effect of stigma on legality attitudes, such that increased stigma was related to more negative attitudes. Furthermore, there was a significant three-way interaction of religiosity, gender, and stigma. For men, religiosity significantly predicted abortion legality attitudes at low stigma, but for women, religiosity was related to legality attitudes at all levels of stigma. These results have implications for prediction of abortion legality attitudes, policy support, and voting behaviors and can inform abortion stigma reduction programs.