Would you tell him you'd had an abortion?
One in three American women has had an abortion. But oddly enough, it turns out that if your friends and family know you strongly oppose abortion,
they won't tell you about their own experiences with abortion, or you won't hear them:
... people who are opposed to abortion are less likely to hear about the abortions that the women in their life have had, compared to the people who describe themselves as pro-choice, according to a new study published in the Sociological Science journal. So abortion opponents underestimate the number of women they know who have had abortions.
Compared to the people who think abortion should be widely accessible, the Americans who oppose abortion under all circumstances are 21 percent less likely to have heard about a personal connection who ended a pregnancy. And the Americans who think abortion should only be allowed in extreme cases — if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, for example — are 12 percent less likely to have heard about someone else’s abortion.
That may mean that opponents of abortion are less likely to understand women's choices in a personal way, and are more able to dismiss abortion as something other people do, not people like them, not people they respect.
This gap in what abortion opponents know about who has abortions is also reminiscent of the recent study finding that politicians—especially conservative ones—believe voters are far more conservative than they actually are. It's almost like conservatives have trouble listening to people who don't agree with them.