Work

Investigating White Americans’ Mental Images of Who Has Abortions and Its Impact on Attitudes Toward Abortion Policies

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling to eliminate the federal right to abortion (the “Dobbs decision”), a new landscape of highly variable abortion policies emerged across the U.S. Given that individuals’ attitudes toward those who have abortions wield significant power in shaping abortion policies, it is critical to understand the factors which underly these attitudes toward those who have abortions. The current work investigated whether White Americans’ attitudes toward abortion may be related to their mental representations of those who have abortions, with implications for restrictive abortion policy support. Across three pre-registered online study sets (N = 2414) and one nationally representative sample (N = 452), the findings suggest that White Americans’ mental representations of those who have abortions are suffused with racial and gender bias, particularly when imagining those who have abortions for non-medical reasons, and these visualizations impact abortion policy attitudes. White Americans’ mental representations of those who have never had an abortion, those who had an abortion for medical reasons and those who had an abortion for non-medical reasons differ in the degree to which they resemble the stereotypes of White Americans, wealth, and femininity.

Source: Communications Psychology

DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00335-1

Authors: Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, Erin Cooley, Sarah Espinel, Jaclyn A. Lisnek, William Cipolli, Sara I. McClelland