How Do Policies and Religiosity and Impact Abortion Practices and Attitudes: A Case Study: Romania

Cristina Bradatan, Texas Tech University
Ruxandra Oana Ciobanu, University of Geneva

It is generally accepted that a strong relation exists between religiosity and abortion attitudes: the more religious a person is, the more inclined is to display anti-abortion attitudes. This positive correlation is shown to work not only in the US, but also in other countries. In terms of abortion practices, the relation is not always shown to be strong. In this paper, we argue that this relation is not necessarily straightforward neither for attitudes nor practices and that the historical path the country went through plays an unexpectedly important role. We focus our research on an East European country and, using various data from censuses and surveys, we quantify how anti-abortion attitudes and practices, on one hand and religiosity, on the other hand, are connected within this context. Our preliminary results show that, controlling for other demographic characteristics, religiosity is either not or very weakly connected with the two variables.