What makes people who oppose abortion change their minds, or at least soften their opinions? claire_lampen reports on how pro-choice evolutions can take years, a timeline that feels painfully slow in this moment
Photo-Illustration: Josiah Whitfield; Photos: Getty In the conservative Houston community where Stephanie grew up, abortion was a concept so heinous that adults almost never mentioned it by name. Both her parents are refugees from El Salvador; her father is Catholic and her mother is an Evangelical Christian. The message she received from her family, over and over again, was that ending a pregnancy amounted to “the murder of a child, the worst thing a woman can do.
That kind of evolution on abortion is uncommon. In many cases, people who oppose abortion will never experience a life-altering event that immediately flips a mental switch. Some will gradually shed their opposition over time, as they encounter different viewpoints that wear down their beliefs.
A person’s moral and religious beliefs tend to conform to their environment because “essentially, you’ve been trained to get along,” Mercier explains. As long as you remain in an environment where views on abortion — or any charged issue — run one way, there’s little incentive or opportunity to consider a divergent perspective. If the top-down message tells you abortion amounts to infanticide, and you don’t have any other information, of course you’re going to oppose it.
Elaina Ramsey “grew up very sheltered” outside Cleveland, Ohio. In her parents’ household, sex wasn’t up for discussion. “I’m from an Asian American family, dad was in the navy, I had a very strict upbringing,” she says. Her world shrunk further when her neighbor brought her to their Evangelical church as a teen.
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