The Effect of First-Person Suffering Accounts on Abortion Attitudes

• In Event: Private Experiences with Public Consequences

Abstract

Do first person narratives that convey suffering affect abortion attitudes in the United States? Abortion is typically covered as a political issue as opposed to a health issue (Woodruff 2019), but the 2022 Dobbs decision changed both abortion policy and media coverage. As a health issue, abortion stories are told in varying levels of detail. News writers and abortion activists face choices over which details to share, and first-person narratives about dangerous pregnancies are sadly more common. Should women share their sad stories, or do tragic details fall on deaf ears?

We ask if first personal accounts of suffering affect both emotional responses and policy attitudes. We hypothesize that these stories increase negative emotions (sadness, anxiety, anger) and boost support for abortion rights. In contrast, the first-person narratives could trigger an avoidance response, akin to “compassion fatigue” (Kinnick et. al 1996), by which people disengage to avoid uncomfortable feelings. Research on attitude change shows that abortion attitudes are particularly stable (Pacheco and Kreitzer 2016, but see Deckman et. al 2023) and for many, resilient in the face of counterarguments (Eagly and Chaiken 1995). We also hypothesize that partisanship and living in a state where abortion was banned will moderate the effect of the treatment.



We test our hypotheses experimentally using a survey experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey of 1000 respondents on the Cooperative Election Survey. Respondents across the treatment and control conditions read the same real news story about Texas' six-week abortion ban. In the treatment condition, respondents read an additional paragraph that included a first-person account of a woman who was unable to obtain an abortion despite knowing that her baby would be stillborn or die shortly after birth. The story includes her account of learning that she must continue with the pregnancy, giving birth, and watching her baby die. This research contributes to our understanding of emotion in politics, and sheds light on the rapidly changing landscape of abortion attitudes in the United States.

Authors

• Shana Kushner Gadarian, Syracuse University

• Bethany Albertson, University of Texas at Austin