The “abortion imaginary”: Shared perceptions and personal representations among everyday Americans

Abstract

Drawing upon 217 in-depth interviews and the concept of the “social imaginary,” we introduce the “abortion imaginary”—a set of shared understandings regarding abortion and abortion patients. We identify four interrelated facets of the U.S. abortion imaginary pertaining to who gets an abortion and why: maternal inevitability, economic decision-making, relationship precarity, and emotional fragility. We then show how shared perceptions of abortion patients diverge into polarized opinions, revealing how those who know someone who has had an abortion differ from those who do not. Centering personal “exemplars,” we integrate conceptual work on social imaginaries with contact theory to illuminate how divergent opinions coexist with shared cultural understandings.

Collective understandings of who gets abortions and why form an “abortion imaginary,” with consequences for abortion opinion.

INTRODUCTION

Abortion holds perennial salience in U.S. political life (1) but relative silence in everyday social interactions (2). Opinions on abortion motivate voters, activists, and elected officials like few other issues (3). Many Americans personally know someone who has had an abortion (4) but judiciously disclose their own abortion opinions (5). Fearing stigmatization, abortion patients often keep their abortions secret (2, 6). The clandestine nature of such a common and highly politicized experience means that Americans necessarily rely upon what we call the “abortion imaginary” to fill gaps left by personal and factual knowledge. Knowing someone who has had an abortion interacts with the abortion imaginary, prompting different opinions and widespread political ramifications (7).

Existing scholarship on abortion attitudes spans the “worldviews” and mobilizing tactics of activists [e.g., (3, 8, 9)]; dominant political and cultural messaging [e.g., (10–13)]; and how everyday Americans’ views on legality correlate with personal demographic characteristics [e.g., (14, 15), see also (16)]. We add to this important work the concept of an abortion imaginary: a set of understandings regarding abortion and abortion patients. The abortion imaginary is “imaginary” in two ways. First, similar to all “social imaginaries” (17), an abortion imaginary captures a set of learned, experienced, inferred, and generalized representations that interact to orient and delimit understandings of a social issue. Second, it differs from the empirical reality of who actually gets abortions and why; hence, it cannot be interpreted as a factual depiction of abortion or the typical abortion patient.

By leveraging the conceptual tools of social imaginaries (17) with special attention to differences by whether a respondent knows or has been an abortion patient (18), we build upon long-standing work demonstrating the importance of the “pictures in our heads” for opinions (19, 20). Distorted views of racial minorities, for example, elevate prejudice and invoke hostility toward racial policies including affirmative action (21, 22). Imagining welfare recipients as undeserving and detached from the mandate of personal responsibility for work and family fuel negativity toward welfare (23, 24). Numerous theories in social science and humanities–contact theory, cultivation theory, and theories of impersonal influence among them–link shared perceptions and personal connections (25–27). We approach the abortion imaginary with these examples in mind, attuned to the commonality of abortion in American life. We will show that commonly held but often inaccurate beliefs—here, regarding abortion patients—gain a foothold in abortion opinions.

Two research questions guide our work: (i) How do U.S. residents imagine abortion patients and their circumstances? and (ii) How do U.S. residents call upon the abortion imaginary when articulating their opinion on abortion? We answer these questions by examining 217 in-depth interviews with a randomly selected, closely representative sample of U.S. residents. Our analysis illuminates what undergirds Americans’ abortion opinions: an abortion imaginary that draws upon enduring narratives about gender, motherhood, race, class, and individualism. We further delineate a key source of opinion divergence: whether the interviewee personally knows someone who has had an abortion, that is, has access to an exemplar. In so doing, we expand beyond the correlates typically identified in survey research, nuancing our understanding of everyday Americans’ abortion opinions. We further reveal personal exemplars—abortion patients whom respondents know personally—as a mechanism for attitudinal divergence without changing a largely shared social imaginary. Different opinions coexist with a shared imaginary.

Democracy compels citizens to form opinions without knowing others’ specific circumstances. How (and how accurately) Americans imagine abortion and abortion patients matters for how Americans think and feel about abortion and, by consequence, how abortion is morally and legally prescribed in the United States as a whole.

Abortion and abortion patients in the United States

Abortion in the United States is a common and often silent personal experience. At current rates, the number of legal abortions exceeds 900,000 annually, and a quarter to a third of U.S. women will terminate a pregnancy by age of 45 (28). Considerations of “who” makes an abortion decision and “why” prefigure much of the research on abortion attitudes (29), reinforcing the procedure as a choice imbued with moral meaning. The majority of Americans express mixed views on abortion’s morality while favoring legal access (4). Long-standing indicators of abortion opinion, however, vary by hypothetical patient characteristics and contexts (30), pointing to the need to examine perceptions alongside empirical data on who actually gets abortions in the United States and why.

The majority of abortion patients in the United States are heterosexual women in their 20s, unmarried, and poor. Black and Hispanic women represent a disproportionate number of patients (28 and 25%, respectively) (31). Nearly all abortion patients are high school graduates and one in five has a college degree. Sixty-two percent identify as religious, most as Christian—24% Catholic, 17% mainline Protestant, and 13% evangelical Protestant (31). For most, it is their first abortion. The majority of abortion patients (60%) are already mothers (32). Half used contraception the month before they became pregnant (31). More than 90 percent of abortions occur within the first trimester (32), posing low physical risk and far fewer complications than childbirth (33).

Most women seek abortions for financial reasons—often, they cannot afford to raise another child (34)—and abortion’s price tag represents a substantial financial obstacle (35). A first-trimester abortion will cost around $500, excluding costs associated with transportation, missed work, childcare, and so forth (35, 36). About half of patients pay this expense out-of-pocket, regardless of their insurance status, offsetting these costs with financial assistance, usually from the man involved in the pregnancy (37). Abortion patients typically need help with costs, logistics, or childcare (38), all the more so amid heightened restrictions following the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade. Rarely is abortion an experience between just a patient and an abortion provider, circumscribed as it is by legality and social norms.

In addition to finances, when making an abortion decision, women commonly weigh factors such as pregnancy timing, their relationship with the person involved in the pregnancy, future plans, and the needs of their other children (34). While 14% of abortion patients are married and about a third cohabitate with their partners (31), “bad relationships with men” and the likelihood that a “new baby would derail life plans and career goals” commonly factor into abortion decisions [pp. 38 and 40 in (35)]. A sizable minority seek an abortion because they want “to be good moms to their existing children” [p. 38 in (35)]. While some abortion patients have completed their childbearing or do not want children, almost 40% want children in the future (39).

Made more complex by the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, a constellation of state regulations shapes abortion access. States variously stipulate gestational limits and waiting periods, disallow state or private insurance to cover the procedure, or ban abortion outright (35, 40, 41). Before an abortion, most women receive counseling that feels helpful, albeit less so if state-mandated (42). Public frames constrain available meanings for women who do not wish to be pregnant, painting the issue as a moral one (11). Religion prescribes terminology and meanings corresponding to pregnancy, “abortion,” and “personhood” (43). Abortion patients may narrate their decision as morally unremarkable, morally problematic but justified, or morally desirable (44). Many selectively share their abortion experience, disclosing only to the other person involved in the pregnancy and their own mothers while avoiding those who may stigmatize them (2, 6). The relative silence of personal abortion stories creates a disconnect between politicized abortion discourse and abortion as a common lived experience (45).

Decision difficulty and perception of community stigma are the strongest predictors of a woman’s emotional response to her abortion (46). After an abortion, most women voice a sense of relief (35, 46–48), although they experience a range of emotions. Over time, all emotions felt about an abortion decline in intensity and most women rarely think about it years later, counter to policies framed as protection (49–52). The overwhelming majority believe abortion is and remains the right decision for them (46). Despite an array of moral views, most abortion patients, as with most Americans, support legal access to abortion (4, 53).

Factual profiles aside, the perceptions that everyday Americans hold regarding abortion and abortion patients remain largely unexplored [see (54) for an exception). News coverage and fictional programming communicate an impression hardly representative of the reality of abortion care, access, or outcomes (55). Parallel research on welfare recipients, immigrants, and racial minorities corroborates the importance of perceptions for corresponding attitudes (21–24, 56). Research on abortion opinion itself activates abortion patient perceptions, as evidenced by an outsized emphasis on abortion context, reasons informing a decision, and stigma (57).

The pervasiveness of imagination in abortion opinion calls for deeper inquiry into the ways that everyday Americans imagine abortion and abortion patients, or what we call the abortion imaginary. Toward this end, we invoke the concept of a social imaginary.

Social imaginaries

Social imaginaries encompass the “ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (17). As a kind of cultural schema [(18); see also (58, 59)], social imaginaries evoke deeply held and normative aspects of social life. Examples include social imaginaries for heterosexuality (60), climate (61), and race (62).

A social imaginary acts as an implicit background to everyday life (63). A “wedding” social imaginary, for example, might conjure elements widely shared in popular culture (e.g., My Big Fat Greek Wedding) or religion (e.g., the symbolic use of gold in Hindu wedding rituals) or something more personal (e.g., my aunt’s wedding). More than a stereotype, a social imaginary goes beyond cognitive associations attached to a specific category of people, encompassing broad understandings of a social issue (64, 65). Often intangible, social imaginaries provide “general parameters” that enable common practice [p. 6 in (63); see also (17, 66)].

Building upon existing work, we define a social imaginary as a set of internalized representations that interact to orient and delimit understandings of a salient sphere of public life. Representations are both collective and personal, concrete and abstract: formed from experience and observation as well as inference and generalization. Ahead, we organize the properties of a social imaginary into three active strains: orienting, creating, and framing. This situates our empirical inquiry into social imaginaries and abortion opinions.

Orienting: Social imaginaries structure how individuals understand themselves in relation to the broader society (61, 67). They operate as a kind of “mental map” with markers to organize unfamiliar or unknown landscapes. Recognizable social and personal markers (e.g., “a public library”; “my public library”) establish relative positions. Similar to maps, social imaginaries bridge micro-level interactions and positions to macro-level understandings of the world around us.

Creating: Social imaginaries delineate not just what is, per Weberian “ideal types” (68), but what is possible (61, 69–71). They help people conjure “times they did not experience, people they have not interacted with, or events that have not happened yet” [p. 359 in (72)] and “fill in the context when that context is not given” [p. 14 in (73)]. Social imaginaries do not just reproduce the social world but hold the capacity to produce it (74). Their flexibility and capacity for change further differentiates a social imaginary from stereotypes and other cultural concepts presumed more stable, such as worldviews (8, 75). Research on social imaginaries explores their creative capacities across different domains, revealing how an imaginary exposes or renders invisible connections between individual actions and broader social functions (60, 70).

Framing: While social imaginaries can be sites of creative resistance (62), reimagining or contesting a social imaginary requires the articulation of visions through that very imaginary (67). Challenges to the heterosexual imaginary, for instance, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, get articulated through a heteronormative framework (76). By framing what “is” and naturalizing what “ought” to be (77, 78), social imaginaries generate broad consensus despite differences.

We call upon social imaginaries to understand abortion opinion for three primary reasons. First, social imaginaries allow us to explore the tandem influence of collective and personal representation on abortion opinion. Following Strauss (18), we treat social imaginaries as a sort of cultural model or schema (58, 79), a body of work that points to the relevance of specific, concrete “exemplars” alongside collectively held understandings. As we show below, whether our respondents know someone who has had an abortion matters for abortion opinions against the backdrop of a shared imaginary.

Second, social imaginaries offer a framework for understanding how people may hold shared understandings but not shared attitudes. While scholars commonly attribute differences in attitudes or actions to distinct, fragmented, or dissimilar worldviews [e.g., (8), specific to abortion], social imaginaries explore how these differences can occur within a shared background (80). Theoretical work on worldviews generates empirical observations of polarization (1, 81) and “culture wars” (82) but offers less to explain consensus.

Third, our focus on social imaginaries builds upon foundational sociological ideas regarding imagination as a collective, critical, and creative social force (72, 83). Social imaginaries center the role of imagination in enabling people to hypothesize and opine about the unknown. Accordingly, social imaginaries provide tools for understanding how imagination entwines with knowledge and experience to produce real beliefs and actions (73, 84). Here, we explore empirical connections between individuals, a social imaginary, and opinion by turning to the concept of personal exemplars.

Personal exemplars (18, 59) refer to specific examples that one knows personally (e.g., “my gay uncle” or “my experience as a victim of domestic violence”). Exemplars foster continuity in a social imaginary by fitting into a “typical” category or having explainable variation [(18); see also (85)]. While a social imaginary need not be wholly accurate to be consequential [e.g., (24)], if personal exemplars regularly contradict it, then the imaginary will fail to provide a sense of expectations and familiarity in new settings (86). Misfit exemplars (e.g., “female chairman” and “Mr. Mom”) may well prompt social imaginaries to evolve, albeit slowly, and ideas to move from nonsense to commonsense or the reverse [e.g., (70, 87, 88)].

By attending to exemplars within a social imaginary framework, we can explore how unique personal experiences interact with broadly held understandings to shape or shift opinions (56, 67, 89, 90). How this happens, however, remains underexplored (91, 92), although scholarship working from contact theory (25) offers one possible explanation.

Personal contact with an outgroup member that defies expectations can reorient one’s view of an entire group (93). This is evidenced across a variety of groups, from racialized minorities to people without homes to sexual minorities and people with substance use disorders (25, 94–96). Access to personal contact, however, is uneven. Selection bias means that people tend to socialize with or disclose to people who are already accepting, as is the case with abortion disclosures (2). Personal networks shape contact and, thus, stipulate exemplars to which one has access (97). Reckoning with the uneven distribution of exemplars within a broader social imaginary extends contact theory to contend with wider cultural and sociocognitive processes that sociologists show shape social action [e.g., (58, 79, 98–102)].

Ahead, we marshal nationally representative interview data to illuminate features of the U.S. abortion imaginary. We show that the abortion imaginary is widely shared despite abortion opinion being a site of persistent polarization (1, 103). While some features of the imaginary accurately reflect empirical data on abortion and abortion patients, others expose missing or misinformation. To make sense of divergence in Americans’ abortion opinion, we revisit our data to showcase a key difference in how interviewees articulate their views: whether or not the respondent knows someone who has had an abortion, that is, has an abortion exemplar.

Our findings will demonstrate that respondents with an abortion exemplar (self or other) call upon that exemplar when articulating their opinion on abortion. Respondents without an abortion exemplar, by contrast, conjure a person or story that activates imagined dimensions of abortion and abortion patients. The presence of an exemplar reduces a respondent’s reliance upon the social imaginary without immediately changing its contents, while the absence of an exemplar increases reliance upon the imaginary. This produces different, albeit overlapping, opinions on abortion within a shared abortion imaginary.

RESULTS

We begin with our first research question: How do U.S. residents imagine abortion patients and their circumstances? Americans’ abortion imaginary exposes factual assumptions and mental images of “who has abortions” and the contexts of abortion experiences. Its central character is a heterosexual, cisgender, childless, sexually active younger woman experiencing an unplanned and undesired pregnancy following consensual sex despite available contraceptive options. This is her first and likely only abortion; it is readily accessible to her, requires little help, and will happen safely at a “clinic” during her first trimester. These background “facts” proffer the implicit knowledge enabling four interrelated themes that comprise the foundation of Americans’ abortion imaginary: maternal inevitability; economic decision-making; relationship precarity; and emotional fragility. Ahead, we describe each of these facets using interview data.

Four facets of Americans’ abortion imaginary

Facet #1: Maternal inevitability

The woman of Americans’ abortion imaginary is not already a mother but will be, eventually. Maternal inevitability names the way that interviewees describe an abortion patient as a woman who will someday, willingly, bear and raise children when she is “ready.” Maternal inevitability embeds in the imaginary a host of gendered and classed assumptions that uphold a “motherhood mandate” (104) and dominant ideologies of “good” mothering (105).

The not-yet-a-mother status of women in the abortion imaginary surfaces especially in the ways that interviewees reference age with corollaries to appropriate timing for childbearing. The woman who has an abortion is “young,” in her teens or twenties, and “maybe not fully prepared for what’s to come”:

I feel like maybe a lot more abortions are, like, teens to 20-somethings. They’re just starting out...They probably still live with Mom and Dad.

I think of, like, someone my age [29] or younger having one, not someone that’s almost approaching 40.

Age in the imaginary communicates not only a point in the life course but also evaluations of self-knowledge, maturity, and self-sufficiency required to parent. Allusions to age and “readiness” to parent produce different rationales for abortion while simultaneously assuming that all women aspire to motherhood.

A “girl” is presumed “too young” for motherhood: “That 16-year-old is like, ‘Oh shit; I got pregnant. I need to move on from this’”; “It’s a 16-year-old unplanned pregnancy that—they’re not ready for this yet.” Interviewees conjure an “immature,” “irresponsible” teen who ends her pregnancy: “younger teens [who] were irresponsible tend to go and try to get an abortion”; “If you’re young and immature, you’re more likely to [have an abortion]”; “You don’t want to have teen moms all over—It’s a matter of public health.” Others emphasize age-based dependence: “What comes to my mind is probably, like, mostly teenagers, unmarried, like, ‘What am I gonna do? I can’t tell my parents this.’” Teenage status conveys incompatibility between the demands of mothering and compulsory schooling: “I would picture, like, a teenager who’s just like, ‘Oh, no. What am I gonna do? I don’t wanna ruin my life or put off college or whatever.’”

An imagined “college” woman (of traditional college age), by comparison, experiences pregnancy “too soon” given other goals. Respondents call to mind “a young woman that has her whole life ahead of her and has plans, and [a pregnancy] wasn’t planned [...] especially if they’re going to school and college, [...] looking for a career or preparing to start one.” Reflecting a middle-class ideology expanded upon in a subsequent theme, college marks a step in the life course that necessarily precedes parenthood. Motherhood before college graduation would:

…not just kind of ruin your life at that time, it would also ruin the child’s life. Because you’re not giving that person the best of what you could give them in the rest of the world. You’re not at a good stage in your life, so you wouldn’t be able to raise a child.

Unlike the actual profiles of abortion patients, Americans imagine first-time, would-be-mothers; in the imaginary, “mothers” do not have abortions. Women who do not wish to become mothers remain outside the imaginary, virtually unaccounted for among interview excerpts. Talk of maternal “readiness” and its absence explains much of why women in the abortion imaginary opt to end the pregnancy. “Most women in their lives hope to have kids,” says one interviewee, “and I think they want to have kids when they’re ready.” Another describes how “They’re not ready to have children; they’re not married; they want to live their own life—and this is impeding on the life that they have planned.” Another imagines an abortion patient saying to herself, “‘I don’t wanna have my child yet. I think the child can get in the way. I don’t wanna be a mother yet. There’s other things I wanna do.’” Variations on the words “ready” or “time” appear in 41% of coded excerpts, while fewer than 10% of excerpts include references to existing children.

Maternal inevitability implies a woman’s eventual readiness to parent—something that “all” women will do. A majority of interviewees subscribe to the inevitability of motherhood at the same time that they do not see abortion patients as mothers already.

Facet #2: Economic decision-making

A second dimension to Americans’ depiction of abortion patients in the abortion imaginary is economic decision-making filtered through class and race, provoking classist and racist judgments.

Resonant with empirical data (34), Americans imagine childbearing as an economic decision and abortion patients as economically motivated. A pregnant woman in the imaginary makes a choice not only about parenthood but also about financial solvency well into the future: “One of the biggest things I think that, especially a young lady that is in that position is thinking, is money.” A third of coded excerpts describe the financial consequences of an abortion decision, using words such as “money,” “afford,” “financial,” “expensive,” and “debt.” Interviewees imagine childbearing as a particular burden to low-income women: “The rich can just afford to do more than the poor can…it’s not cheap to have a kid…And parents do sacrifice a lot when they have kids.”

Leveling judgment on an imagined abortion patient’s economic decision-making, Americans draw upon longstanding classist and racist stereotypes that cast her decision as individual, tied to key aspects of her character, rather than as an outcome of structural inequality. We begin with this economic framing and its classist qualities before turning to its intersection with race and racist evaluations.

Interviewees forward two depictions of financially stable and successful (or soon to be) women who have abortions: “career” women and women who want to be “good” mothers. The “career” woman who gets an abortion is imagined as finishing her education, starting a promising career, or on the cusp of professional advancement and economic success. One interviewee explains how women “find themselves in a situation where: “shit,” this is going to ruin their life. They want to go to college; they want to get a career.” Correlating an abortion decision with educational and professional success, interviewees revisit the language of “readiness.” One describes “women or couples who are very career-focused [...who] are afraid of how this baby is going to impact their lives. They’re not ready yet, they’re- it’s just not the right time.” Judgments on career women lead some interviewees to evaluate her as appropriately ambitious and others to call her “selfish” or taking “the easy way out.”

A second iteration is the woman who chooses abortion to delay motherhood to conform to norms of intensive mothering associated with middle-class norms of “good” mothering. One interviewee imagines a woman thinking, “‘I am a single mother and working two jobs, I don’t have time, I would not be able to dedicate myself to the child.’” Another echoes this concern, saying, “They aren’t gonna be able to afford to raise the kid well, you know? The kid will not be able to eat well or live in the best conditions.” While evaluations vary, interviewees imagine the abortion patient placing the prospective child at the center of her decision-making: “They know deep in their hearts that they cannot provide a good, happy, healthy life for a child.”

Both articulations position women as rational, future-oriented, and wanting to have children at the “right” time–when childbearing will not endanger economic success or when she achieves a level of economic stability to provide a “good” life for a child. While interviewees are often critical of an imagined, financially stable woman who makes an abortion decision, most affirm, nonetheless, the validity of the economic logic behind her decision.

By contrast, lower-class women play a different role in the abortion imaginary through presumptions that poor women do not have abortions; they have babies. Some describe this as an emotional decision akin to what Edin and Kefalas (106) observed among low-income women who put children ahead of economic goals. One interviewee says: “I think a lot of really poor people tend to have children. You know, that’s what I have witnessed throughout my life a lot. Because it brings happiness to them, regardless of how much money they make.” Another interviewee distances poor women from good mothering by naming the despair that low-income families must endure: “I don’t want to say it’s irresponsible of her, but I see this all the time—the low income—they just can’t afford it, and life is miserable for the child. And how unfortunate is that?”

Some interviewees activate the enduring myth of the “welfare queen” (107, 108) within the imaginary by conjuring critical, racist images of families benefiting from social support upon having more children, typically in the absence of “responsible” family planning: “They’re the ones that wouldn’t be smart enough to plan ahead.” In this way, the abortion imaginary embeds evaluations of who “will” or even “should” end their pregnancies alongside those who do not, wielding classist, racist stereotypes about the fertility, socioeconomic standing, and motivations of women making pregnancy decisions. To some, the choice to have a family as a poor person of color is itself irrational:

I mean, [children] cost a lot of money and it could set you back economically for the rest of your life. Not that you wouldn’t love the child and everything. But I don’t know how Blacks or Mexican families that are already at the poverty level keep getting pregnant and don’t go for the abortion.

Other interviewees invoke racist stereotypes to portray women of color as making economically motivated decisions to have children that create a burden for society:

This might sound a little racist, but—if you have a baby and you’re on welfare, that’s more money for you. So, I think some people have babies for that reason, for more money. And not just the Blacks, but, I mean, there are families that do that.

There’s so many people that are just popping out kids for the check from the city, or the government, and they don’t take care of those kids. I mean, those are the people that shouldn’t be allowed to have seven different baby daddies with seven different kids.

The majority of these women who go through generation after generation just popping out kids and not breaking that cycle are rats. We throw money at them. We push ’em aside into housing—they don’t improve society or themselves or their children’s lives. They’re just there taking money and food and not doing anything for anyone.

The choice and consequence of parenthood is simultaneously positioned as individual (“she will have to live with that decision”) and a threat to all: “We, as taxpayers, end up paying for those kids one way or another.”; “I don’t think a crack mother should be giving birth to a baby. If she chooses to have an abortion, you might be saving society.”

Against a backdrop supposition that poor children–especially poor children of color–can burden all of society (109), some interviewees go so far as to describe interventions akin to eugenics, suggesting, for example, compulsory contraception:

There’s plenty of aid out there, but at some point, unemployed, unemployable people that don’t want to work—people that don’t want to try, people that don’t want to contribute—shouldn’t be having babies to get more financial, government money. It just needs to stop. [...] Give [the mother] a [birth control] shot and you’re done for a while. Get a job, we’ll think about reversing the shot.

For minority communities, or communities where the women keep repeatedly having all these children that they can’t afford, I don’t believe abortion should be the only out. Give them birth control. Something that they are going to use, something that’s implanted—what do they call it? I know my daughter had the little thing in her. Classes. Train them about what they should do.

Evaluating an economic decision to have a child as irrational and preventable, however, does not necessarily translate to support for abortion in the imaginary.

Americans’ abortion imaginary characterizes women through the stratified prism of race and class: racial minorities have children despite being less ‘ready’ to parent, their children framed problematically as a social burden and hindrance upon social mobility. Well-timed white middle-class fertility, by comparison, is not juxtaposed against upward mobility in this manner. Financially stable white women “plan” their futures and occasionally make “mistakes” prompting selfish decisions aligned with their economic interests; lower-class women of color “do not plan” and, thus, make “irresponsible” decisions to parent children they cannot afford.

Facet #3: Relationship precarity

A third dimension to interviewees’ abortion imaginary is relationship precarity. Americans view women who choose abortion as, more often than not, on their own. Words including “unwed,” “unmarried,” “unstable,” “single,” and “alone” appear repeatedly across excerpts. The imagined relationship from which pregnancy occurs is temporary, unstable, and financially unsupportive, at best.

The sex within the imagined relationship is consensual. Stipulating nonconsensual sex as rare complements some interviewees’ contention that pregnancy falls under the purview of personal responsibility (“Rape and incest is an astronomically minute number”). Casual sex without intent to marry dominates the relationship context of imagined abortion patients:

That’s actually the most common thing that happens, right? Where men and women have sex for whatever—whether it’s premarital or no marriage in the offering at all, and she doesn’t want to marry the man she had sex with and got pregnant by…? I think that happens a lot.

Occasionally, interviewees presume the abortion patient to entertain multiple, noncommitted relationships—indicated, perhaps, by not knowing the identity of the “dad.” Interviewees reference “sugar daddies,” “sexual escapade[s],” and “promiscuous” women. Relationship instability (or “irresponsibility”) may be interpreted as what led to her unplanned pregnancy. One interviewee imagines her thinking, “Hey, I was just having a good night and ended up getting pregnant and why should I have to suffer for that, so let’s kill it.”

Suppositions of relationship precariousness mean that marriage (especially a “good” marriage) is nearly absent in the abortion imaginary. Interviewees portray marriage as a comparably stable environment facilitating planned decisions regarding fertility and family, rendering abortion uncommon among married persons. “I feel abortion doesn’t really happen necessarily in marriages,” one interviewee says, reasoning that couples “go into marriage with a game plan for [children]” and would be able to “deal” with “an ‘oops’ child.” When marriage does enter the imaginary, it is usually paired with other kinds of precariousness: spousal abuse, a “failed” relationship, disinterested fatherhood, financial duress, or other mitigating factor that would motivate a married woman to seek an abortion.

Given these expectations of precariousness, an imagined abortion decision is simultaneously imagined as an evaluation of a relationship with the man involved in the pregnancy. With abortion as the outcome, interviewees commonly conclude that a male partner was not a good candidate for long-term partnership, marriage, or fatherhood. Would-be-fathers will “disappear” or will not be “involved.” Interviewees envision that “the dad doesn’t want anything to do with the kid” or that “the father’s not going to be in the child’s life, and the father’s abusive, and a woman is beaten on a daily basis.” Abortions happen within “bad” or “broken” relationships. Relegating men to the sidelines amplifies assessments of an imagined women’s sole agency, such as when interviewees say “it’s a woman’s body” or “she should have the decision-making power to do what’s in her best interest.”

The abortion imaginary depicts women with an unintended birth as left to parent alone. In this rendering, abortion and marriage function as social safety nets relieving women of relational, parental, and financial burdens.

Facet #4: Emotional fragility

A fourth dimension of Americans’ abortion imaginary is emotional fragility. Interviewees describe women as suffering amid the “sad,” “unfortunate,” “tough,” or “traumatic” circumstances of unplanned pregnancies and abortion decisions (these four words appear 58 times across excerpts). Rather than empowered and in control, she is fragile, uncertain, afraid, weak, and at risk. One in three coded excerpts evoke emotion or mental health explicitly, nearly all with a forlorn tenor.

Interviewees describe the woman seeking an abortion variously as doing her best in a scary situation, suffering from mental illness, a victim of her circumstances, afraid, struggling, unhappy, in need of support, and pensive. Others more negatively evaluate her as looking for an easy or quick fix, careless, naïve, ignorant, irresponsible, foolish, selfish, promiscuous, callous, greedy, self-absorbed, shortsighted, reckless, flippant, and sinful. Virtually absent are descriptors that convey strength, bravery, and control. Some interviewees assess negative character traits as temporary and circumstantial, framing an abortion decision as “out of character.” Some extend expressions of empathy more readily to women they describe as victims of circumstances than to those they describe as the bearers of enduring character flaws.

Imagined abortion decisions are emotionally laden. Interviewees use words such as sadness, grief, scary, emotional, guilt-ridden, mournful, devastating, traumatic, hard, tough, unlucky, and unsupported to describe the context of an abortion decision. Respondents rarely characterize abortion circumstances as supportive, well-counseled, proud, fully controlled, or short-lived. Interviewees depict women who end their pregnancies as emotionally fragile both at the time of an abortion decision and, perhaps, forever thereafter. Abortion is a “heavy” experience; it “weighs” on women and “there is no way to describe what it does to the soul.” Interviewees imagine abortion causing a woman long-term harm: “it seriously affects some of them for the rest of their life”; “Abortion can mentally cause problems, you know, after the fact, [...] some people have problems dealing with that.” Her abortion decision is a life-long burden: “They’re gonna have to live with it the rest of their life.” One interviewee reflects the belief that “you can be forgiven, but the lifelong repercussions of dealing with your sin and the mental consequences, the physiological consequences, can be unbearable.” Emotional fragility in the imaginary is not temporary but chronic, reverberating as a description for all who have had abortions.

Presented altogether in Table 1, the four facets characterizing Americans’ abortion imaginary pertaining to abortion patients interact and overlap to orient, create, and frame the ways Americans think about abortion and abortion patients in the United States.

Table 1. Facets of the U.S. abortion imaginary pertaining to abortion patients.

Maternal inevitability: Depicts an abortion patient as someday, willingly, bearing and raising children when she is “ready.”

Economic decision-making: Depicts an abortion patient’s decision as economically motivated, provoking classist and racist judgments: Financially stable women terminate a pregnancy in the interest of career or “good” mothering; poor women of color “burden” society with children they are not “ready” for.

Relationship precarity: Depicts instability and nonsupport in an abortion patient’s connection to the man involved in the pregnancy, leaving her to navigate parenthood alone.

Emotional fragility: Depicts an abortion patient as making a decision from a position of weakness rather than one of strength, predicting prolonged emotional suffering.

Consequences of the imaginary for opinions on abortion

We turn now to our second research question to contend with the consequences of this imaginary: How do U.S. residents call upon the abortion imaginary when articulating their opinion on abortion? Here, interview data reveal how access to personal exemplars helps to explain the different ways Americans exercise the imaginary when articulating opinions on abortion.

Three in 10 interviewees (29%) report no known personal connection to someone who has had an abortion, whether through their own experience or that of a friend, family member, or other close association. Asked to explain their views on abortion, this group of interviewees calls upon the abortion imaginary described above, making reference to women’s inevitable motherhood, economic decision-making, relationship precarity, and emotional fragility. By way of example, one interviewee references emotional fragility when explaining that the law has an obligation to regulate abortion to “protect,” because “we’re putting so many women in a position that they regret and [that] they wouldn’t have had to live with if it wasn’t legal.”

Americans without personal exemplars distance themselves from the woman in the abortion imaginary by using devices of extrapolation and counterfactuals that excise themselves and known others from the abortion imaginary. Using extrapolation, interviewees interject themselves or family members into hypothetical pregnancy scenarios. Unable to conjure real people or motivations, interviewees extrapolate from their own (different) experiences, commonly (and hypothetically) concluding that “I” (or “my daughter” or “my wife”) would not choose abortion:

Looking at my own kids that are running around my house—sounds like a herd of elephants!—I couldn’t imagine terminating one of their pregnancies, I just can’t even fathom it!

I know my wife would not. I know what her beliefs are. She believes in life.

[If raped], I don’t know if I would abort it, just me personally.

If one of my daughters got pregnant, I would take the child and just help out. Or somebody would.

If I were ever in that situation, I’d be mortified and terrified. I’d, probably, in my mind, want to get an abortion, but I probably wouldn’t, just because, I mean, it was my decision to have sex.

Extrapolation compels interviewees without exemplars to see abortion seekers as “others” who differ from oneself and one’s loved ones. The absence of an exemplar increases distance between interviewees and imagined abortion patients: Those women made a decision that I or my family member would not make. Given this disjuncture, the social imaginary figures largely in their prescription of abortion regulation.

Interviewees without exemplars frequently depict themselves as protagonists who would continue a pregnancy rather than choosing abortion. One participant finds it “impossible for me to even understand” that someone “can’t imagine their child being with another family, but they’re ok with aborting them,” extrapolating from his own upbringing: “Today, we look at families who are in poverty or can’t afford to have more children...everybody used to live that way! When I was a kid, nobody had anything...we’d do our best to scratch up a dime to go buy a candy bar...now our accumulation of stuff has become more important than the life of a baby.” Extrapolation licenses support for abortion regulation to prevent imagined others from making a choice “I” would not make.

In the absence of abortion exemplars, interviewees also use counterfactuals: contrasting exemplars of women who continued their pregnancies. Counterfactuals include friends who faced a dangerous pregnancy but “lived through it”; women who placed a child for adoption; “miracles” where a baby was not supposed to live but did; and children born with disabilities living “purposeful” lives. For example: “A mom and dad couldn’t be a mom and dad, and now they have a little one…I’m a huge believer in adoption”; “I’ve met a person that was born of a rape”; “I’ve seen very powerful messages by a man who has no arms and no legs...You just have to have a positive attitude.” Miracle stories feature skepticism toward science or doctors who forecast dire pregnancy outcomes: “I’ve seen some amazing things happen in my years...I don’t buy what the medical doctors say”; “[My friend] was in the hospital and on bedrest because it was a life-or-death situation. And they [mother and baby] ended up both making it. The doctors recommended that she end her pregnancy to save her life, but she didn’t.”

Counterfactuals include stories about babies born who go on to become loved and contributing members of society: “My sister adopted a baby out of [rape] and she became a very great woman”; “My mom made the right decision [to give birth to me]; thank you.” Less commonly, a counterfactual will showcase struggling parents and children born into hardship: “Everybody’s heard the story about the 14-year-old who got pregnant from the uncle. Yeah, that’s f’ed up. Nobody wants to raise that kid”; “The lady’s like 70, she’s got this 40-year-old wheelchair bound child she’s been taking care of her whole life… I don’t think I could do that. …I don’t know if I’m that good of a person.” Unable to summon personal examples of women who have had abortions, this group of interviewees turns to counterfactuals of women who have not, upholding them as examples of good mothers, albeit burdened by the requisite “sacrifice.”

Both extrapolation and counterfactuals designate as inscrutable the woman in the abortion imaginary who ends her pregnancy: “Holy crap; how could someone kill this?!”; “I can never imagine what someone would go through—just a lot of sadness—it’s just such a horrible thing to think of going through.” Interviewees without exemplars do not extrapolate themselves into narratives that end in abortion nor offer counterfactuals marked by abuse, for example, which might open avenues to support abortion access. Rather, exemplars conjured through extrapolation and counterfactuals stand alongside the abortion imaginary to explain one’s support for abortion regulation.

Interviewees with abortion exemplars call directly upon that personal representation when explaining their opinion, as would be predicted by contact theory (25). The quarter of female interviewees who disclose a personal abortion experience (n = 30) and 9% of male interviewees (n = 9) who disclose awareness that a pregnancy with which they were involved was terminated call upon the self as an exemplar, tethering the imaginary to their own stories:

It does emotionally bother you, probably the rest of your life. Because you think about it, you know? I didn’t have children, probably because I felt I didn’t deserve to, after having an abortion.

Nobody knows what the woman is goin’ through in her decision to do that…Like with my situation, and the condom broke.

Even though it was our child, it was very important for me to let [my wife] know that not only is it her choice, but I’d support her either way. She had a lot of fear.

One interviewee introduces as an exemplar the secretive abortion she had at 18 that “I have lived with my whole entire life”:

Do I think there should be a law about abortion? Yes. Do I think it should have specifics to it? Yes. Do I think that there should be a reason to have an abortion? Yes. Do I think that we should be educating people on it? Yes. But do I think that we should take away the right to make a choice? No.

Other interviewees with exemplars in their social networks name how such connections deepened or changed their views: “By meeting some people who went through it—talking it out in my relationships and everything—I have definitely changed my mind about [abortion]”; “I honestly hadn’t thought of abortion that much up to that point.” One explains how hearing about a friend’s abortion catalyzed her support for legal access:

I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, like, you—of all people? You are so not what I would picture in my head,’ which is horrible to say, because it could be any population, but at that age I didn’t have an understanding of the world. I was very naïve. So, that, kind of, probably, was the kick-starter of, ‘Oh my gosh…’.

Exemplars compel interviewees’ support for individual decision making, lessening the weight of a shared imaginary on views toward legality: “You never know what she’s going through...like, financially, or how her marriage is even going, so there might be a reason why she might not wanna keep the baby. So, I guess it should be her choice.”

The ubiquity of exemplars (and conjured, contraindicative exemplars in their place) within interviewees’ discussions of abortion legality is symptomatic of a broader correlation: Interviewees with exemplars express greater support for legal abortion whereas those without exemplars express greater support for abortion regulation. To be clear, we find a correlation within the data but cannot draw conclusions better suited to quantitative data (such as the strength of the correlation). We further cannot claim whether this is a causal relationship or merely a matter of selective disclosure. Given that abortion opinion itself censures disclosure of abortion stories (2), personal exemplars work simultaneously as a symptom of the imaginary and a potential catalyst for change.

Asked to opine on legal dimensions of abortion (questions which are themselves prefigured by an abortion imaginary), Americans do not just reference laws, a medical procedure, or publicly available repertoires; they recall (or conjure via extrapolation and counterfactuals) a specific someone in a distinct context. Not knowing anyone who has had an abortion creates a void that gets filled by the imaginary. We see this in how Americans without exemplars from real life conjure their own exemplars—specific, known people (such as themselves or a daughter) in hypothetical or lived situations that counter an abortion decision and, thus, reinforce stereotyped, absolutist views in a way that exemplars often do not amid the fraught, unequal, and uncontrollable circumstances of the human experience. Those with exemplars express lower support for legal regulation in the interest of prioritizing individual decision-making, while those without exemplars express higher support for legal regulation in the interest of “guiding” strangers toward what they perceive as the right decision.

DISCUSSION

We reveal what Americans imagine when they are asked to consider abortion patients and how they call upon those representations when articulating their opinion on abortion. In doing so, we name and explore empirical dimensions of the U.S. abortion imaginary. We expose truths and inaccuracies in portrayals of abortion patients. We deepen work on social imaginaries by showing how the presence and absence of an exemplar mediates the relationship between a social imaginary and personal opinion. We show how general and largely uniform beliefs about abortion relate to wide divisions in opinion among everyday Americans. While an abortion imaginary undoubtedly interacts with other social imaginaries (gender, race, class, parenting, and more), it distinctively maps expectations regarding a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy.

An abortion imaginary, as with any imaginary, finds traction in alignment with other widely held beliefs. When Americans imagine abortion patients, they evoke shared cultural understandings of women and good motherhood. Maternal inevitability, economic decision-making, relationship precarity, and emotional fragility show how gendered, classed, and raced ideas about women suffuse perceptions of abortion patients. While some facets of Americans’ abortion imaginary exhibit fidelity to the empirical realities of abortion patients (e.g., most are unmarried, and financial precarity is a major reason for abortion), others land far afield (e.g., that most do not have children or that poor women avoid abortion to access welfare). Imagined facts, beliefs, and experiences work in sync as “a more interesting form of cognition than knowledge of perceptible facts” [p. 339 in (18)]. The accuracy of the social imaginary matters in the case of abortion because the extent of its deviation from real life makes personal exemplars especially consequential. A social imaginary coproduces ignorance under the guise of belief (73, 110). An exemplar may be encountered as substantiating or unexpectedly nonconformist.

Through a widely shared abortion imaginary, Americans internalize pronatalist beliefs that all women desire and will attain motherhood, excising from the imaginary those who do not wish to have children. Unlike “pro-choice” and “pro-life” activists’ warring visions of motherhood as inclusive or exclusive of paid professional roles (8), everyday Americans across the board invoke “readiness,” which perpetuates the belief that all women hold primary responsibility for parenting, coterminous paid roles notwithstanding. Readiness legitimates delaying motherhood until it is possible to meet the conditions of middle-class, self-sacrificial childrearing: emotionally, financially, and time “intensive” (111), wherein women experience “competing devotions” to parental and worker roles (112).

Similar to storytelling, an abortion imaginary does “the work of institutions” to reify and normalize social inequalities [p. 117 in (113)]. Americans overwhelmingly view pregnancy, abortion, and motherhood through a lens resonant with an American ethos of individualism. While the abortion imaginary acknowledges the challenges of motherhood, it does so while positioning individual women as personally responsible for unintended pregnancies and their outcomes, ignoring larger structural issues at play: The “agency myth” predicts women’s self-efficacy and control (114) while minimizing men’s influence on decisions (115). Few Americans mention barriers to pregnancy avoidance (116) or to abortion (40), instead describing pregnancy and parenthood as easily preventable through responsible decisions. The fertility of poor women of color becomes especially problematic through this lens: read, mythically, as “irresponsible” and motivated by the desire for more children or welfare (117, 118). Americans visualize an abortion decision as a racialized litmus test of women’s economic ambition and abortion patients as young, unsupported, emotionally fragile, not-yet-mothers in precarious situations.

An abortion imaginary loses traction, conversely, when it contradicts personal exemplars. Representations from one’s own network—i.e., someone who discloses an abortion—render powerful typecasts less abstract and expose deviations or inaccuracies in the imaginary. Support for gay marriage and declines in prejudice track similarly to personal connections (21, 93, 119). Notably, selective disclosure to abortion exemplars along attitudinal lines (often, to avoid stigma) limits exposure to personal exemplars in the first place (2). Opportunities to shift other axes of the imaginary may not be similarly limited.

Americans give special credence to exemplars in how they exercise their imaginary in political sense-making. Our data provide evidence that personal representations operate as a key mechanism for translating an imaginary into an opinion, showcasing the role of imagination in motivating “culture in action” (see (101, 102)]. Personal exemplars within social imaginaries help to explain movement in individual Americans’ abortion opinions, an arena depicted as otherwise generally stable upon adulthood (92).

This is a distinctly social phenomenon: segregated social networks and the selective disclosure of information combine to give individuals a skewed perception of the larger population. Those with an exemplar call upon it even as they reference elements of a shared social imaginary. Those without an exemplar conjure one through extrapolation and counterfactuals, relying upon “imagined relationships” in place of self-disclosure (88). Exemplars need not overhaul an imaginary to be consequential for opinion, as contact theory would seem to imply; individual representations may still influence action without upending cultural consensus.

Both the real and the imagined of abortion in the United States matter for everyday Americans’ opinions on abortion and, by extension, aggregate public opinion. Americans’ abortion imaginary forecloses on alternative narratives that might normalize childlessness, reduce abortion stigma, or grant alternative meanings to family planning (11, 120). Those committed to portraying abortion patients as empowered, strong, and resolute will clash against an imaginary depicting abortion patients as irresolute and disempowered, choosing a lifelong traumatic burden. Those upholding good motherhood will encounter the perceived (albeit inaccurate) mutual exclusivity of “mother” and “abortion patient,” both identities marred by racism, classism, and intersectional inequalities.

We cannot conclude from our data whether imaginaries drive policy or policies drive imaginaries, but prior work suggests complex pathways (22, 73). Consequences of the abortion imaginary may include punitive state laws framed as shielding a fragile woman from harm (e.g., mandatory ultrasounds, waiting periods, and outright bans), evaluating a woman’s “reasons” for seeking an abortion or criminalizing health care workers who perform abortions. Although speculative, we contend that a different imaginary, say, one marked by resolution and empowerment in place of emotional fragility, would not lend itself as well to support for such laws. Shifting opinions will require deep knowledge of everyday Americans’ awareness and imagination.

Looking past abortion, people infer from their own networks and relationships to larger patterns with regard to any number of controversial, concealed, or stigmatized issues—poverty, race, immigration, violence, and more—foretelling inaccurate but enormously consequential imaginaries. With increasing network segregation, filtered media consumption, and the proliferation of “fake news,” we might anticipate that Americans will encounter ever greater epistemic closure, internalizing information that conforms with pre-existing biases and extrapolating when making consequential political and social decisions; until, for some, an imagined other becomes personally known.

Limitations and future research

Social scientists (including ourselves) are not merely passive observers but active cocreators in what we call the abortion imaginary. A prefigured abortion imaginary prioritizing the “who” and “what” of abortion shaped the questions that appeared in our interview protocol, potentially precluding other important themes. Our closely representative sample of everyday Americans also poses limitations in that it, similar to the U.S. population, is majority white and thus unable to make claims as to how Americans of color might imagine abortion differently. Future studies could oversample specific subgroups to identify components missed by a nationally representative sample.

Further, without national survey data to operationalize observed dimensions of a U.S. abortion imaginary, we are unable to test universality or causality. Such a survey might also test whether certain dimensions of the imaginary intensify with and without personal exemplars. Moreover, while we focus here on women in the abortion imaginary, interview data could be explored for other dimensions in the universe of abortion (e.g., how interviewees imagine a “baby”/“fetus” or the man involved in the pregnancy). Experimental and multidisciplinary work could ascertain what it takes to shift someone’s understanding of abortion or corresponding attitudes, with implications for laws. Further research could link voters’ abortion imaginaries with their voting behavior. Activist-scholars could design and test content to cultivate desired shifts.

This line of inquiry would also benefit from comparative analysis. We suggest two here: first, as we are only able to examine the abortion imaginary for the contemporary United States, exploring how it differs across time (e.g., post-Dobbs decision) and cultural contexts (e.g., 121) presents fruitful avenues for research. Second is a comparison to imaginaries that differ in degree of exemplar access (either due to differences in prevalence, network segregation, or disclosure), which could also illuminate whether the exemplar’s influence differs by its concordance with the confidant’s social imaginary. In these cases, the impact of exemplars may vary, generating new insights. Studying an array of social imaginaries carries promise for increased validity for opinion research more broadly, endorsing the contention that public opinion be understood as not merely an aggregate of individual opinions but as a collective in itself (122).

Social imaginaries bridge what we know to what we do not, linking our micro-level experiences and interactions to our macro-level understandings of the world. Absent sufficient knowledge or exposure regarding who has abortions in the United States and why, Americans fill their voids with prominent social narratives on gender, race, and class in America. The resultant abortion imaginary portrays maternal inevitability; economic decision-making filtered through race and class; relationship precarity; and emotional fragility. An abortion imaginary tells us as much about abortion as it does about how pregnancy operates in contemporary American society, infused with expectations of victorious individualism on unequal social footing. Finding an imaginary that is widely shared but personally exemplified hints at what inhibits empathy and attitudinal change in a fraught cultural arena. Whether and how we know and imagine others holds political consequence, structuring the barriers or opportunities we create for them.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

To distill the contours and consequences of an abortion imaginary, we use the National Abortion Attitudes Study (NAAS), a comprehensive in-depth interview study of Americans’ thoughts and feelings regarding myriad aspects of abortion. Following a pilot (n = 20), we recruited interviewees via a two-stage process. First, 2500 letters went to a random subset of addresses across six geographic zones, eliciting between 10 and 16% response rates per zone. Recipients did not initially learn that the study topic was abortion. Respondents completed an online prescreener gathering their sex, race, age, religion, religious attendance, marital and parental status, political party, and ideology (from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative”). Invited to indicate openness to an in-depth interview (abortion then disclosed as the topic), 94% consented. Among refusals (6%), lack of time appeared most prominently among responses to an open-ended question asking why.

The resulting list was used to construct a sample of U.S. residents closely representing characteristics of the U.S. population, targeting quotas drawn from population estimates available at the time (see Table 2). To balance quotas, we strategically recruited additional interviewees via snowball sampling and targeted recruitment in neighborhoods with high proportions of residents with underrepresented characteristics.

Table 2. Sample characteristics for NAAS interview data.

Self-identification and legality questions are replicated from Gallup (“With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?”; “Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?”). The morality question is replicated from the General Social Survey (“Leaving aside whether or not you think abortion should be legal, are you morally opposed to abortion or not, or would you say it depends?”). Percentage reporting having had an abortion is calculated as a percentage of women in the sample (n = 118). The third column compares NAAS sample characteristics to population data more proximate to data collection but released after data collection, pulling from the U.S. Census, Pew Research Center, PRRI, Gallup, and the General Social Survey. HS, high school; GED, General Educational Development; AA, Associate of Arts; BA, Bachelor of Arts; BS, Bachelor of Science.

Characteristic	N	% of full sample	% Nationally
Gender
Female	118	54	51
Male	99	46	49
Race
Non-Hispanic white	147	68	59
Non-Hispanic Black	30	14	12
Hispanic	23	10	19
Asian	5	2	6
Other (including multiracial)	12	6	5
Age (“generation”)
18–22 (“Gen Z”)	10	5	7
23–38 (“Millennials”)	72	33	21
39–54 (“Gen X”)	49	22	20
55–73 (“Boomers”)	73	34	22
74+ (“Silent”)	13	6	8
U.S. census region
Northeast	42	19	17
Middle Atlantic Division	42	19	13
Midwest	51	24	21
East North Central Division	41	19	14
West North Central Division	10	5	7
South	42	19	38
East South Central Division	42	19	6
West	82	38	24
Pacific Division	41	19	16
Mountain Division	41	19	8
Marital status
Single never married	65	30	30
Married	114	53	52
Other	38	17	17
Parental status
No children	89	41	34
Children	128	59	66
Religion
Protestant	88	41	45
Catholic	46	21	22
Jewish	9	4	1
Other	15	7	6
No religion/nothing in particular	59	27	23
Education
HS degree/GED or less	56	26	39
Some college or AA	33	15	31
BA/BS or more	118	54	30
Other	10	5	–
Ideology (1–7)
Liberal (1–3)	72	33	33
Moderate (4)	72	33	35
Conservative (5–7)	73	34	32
Self-identification
“Pro-choice”	115	53	48
“Pro-life”	72	33	46
Both/neither/other	30	14	6
Legal position on abortion
Illegal all	30	14	20
Legal certain	110	51	50
Legal any	75	35	29
Moral position on abortion
Morally opposed	74	34	29
Morality depends	84	39	44
Not morally opposed	59	27	28
Abortion exemplar
Report having had an abortion (women only)	30	25	25
Report knowing someone who had an abortion	155	71	59
Total	217	100

A team of five interviewers—including two of the authors—conducted a total of 217 interviews in 2019. Most transpired face-to-face at semipublic locations such as public library study rooms. Interviewees provided informed consent to participate in confidential, audio-recorded interviews averaging 75 min that were later transcribed and coded using Atlas.ti, cross-checked for intercoder reliability. Interviewees received a $30 gift card for their participation.

Data for this article derive primarily, although not exclusively, from participants’ responses to the semistructured protocol questions: “When you think about who gets abortions, who and what comes to mind?” and “what do you think some of the reasons are that people have abortions?” These questions appeared in the protocol after an initial rapport-building inquiry regarding participants’ “big picture” and core values and a set of open-ended questions beginning with, “when you hear the word abortion, what first comes to mind?” Interviewees next offered early memories of the topic and explored what “connects” to their views, prompted to consider family members, religion and spirituality, political orientation, public figures, moral commitments, and more. This section concluded with an invitation to share any personal experience they might have with abortion (self or other), paired with the aforementioned questions regarding abortion patient perception. At this point, not quite halfway through the interview, participants had not yet been asked any standardized survey questions nor presented with the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice.”

Systematic coding of transcripts produced a total of 338 excerpts on abortion patient perceptions. Focused coding surfaced patterns in abortion patients’ perceived demographics, reasons for getting an abortion, relationship status, parental status, character, abortion history, gestational timing for the abortion, and context and emotions surrounding the abortion decision. We additionally coded and analyzed interviewees’ use of hypotheticals (293 excerpts). We operationalized exemplars using responses to the question “Do you know anyone personally who has had an abortion?”, paired with stories or disclosures volunteered throughout the interview. While the interview elicited opinions on legality in a variety of ways, we focus here on responses to a replicated Gallup question: “Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?” While critiqued for its lack of measurement specificity regarding “circumstances” (14, 123), Gallup polls are among the most widely used in secondary analyses of U.S. abortion attitudes (16). NAAS interviewees were invited to clarify their interpretation of “circumstances” within the in-depth interview, accordingly. Interviewees were additionally asked the seven-item “Rossi scale” of GSS legality questions and open-ended questions regarding their preferences for state and federal laws on abortion, not reported in the current analysis.

Our analysis forefronts interviewees’ perceptions of women. Following Pugh (124), we used interpretive analysis to unearth four of the most salient themes inductively. We identified “emotional fragility,” for example, after first generating an excel column containing shorthand summaries of every coded excerpt that evoked emotional signposts (n = 102). We next identified repeated or closely synonymous words across excerpts (e.g., “afraid,” “fearful,” and “scared”) and took account of the absence or comparatively small number of disconfirming antonyms (e.g., “unafraid”). Returning repeatedly to interviewees’ words within the context of full transcripts increased our confidence that these four themes capture foundational dimensions to Americans’ abortion imaginary concerning abortion patients. We do not claim that these are the only dimensions to the imaginary nor that these themes are mutually exclusive; our analytic decisions were driven by what appeared most prominently in our data.