Views of Teenage Boys
More Conservative
in 1990's

Teenage boys’ attitudes towards abortion grew “significantly more conservative,” between 1988 and 1995, according to a study published in the recent issue of the Alan Guttmacher Institutes Family Planning Perspectives. Study co-authors Scott Boggess, assistant professor at Georgetown University, and Carolyn Bradner, a medical student at the University of Chicago, examined the attitudes of 3,590 males ages 15-19 who participated in the National Survey of Adolescent Males in 1988 and 1995. According to the data, in 1988, 40.4% of teenage males disagreed “a lot” with a woman having an abortion “for any reason”; that number rose to 50.5% in 1995. That year, respondents were most likely to support abortions in cases of rape (55.4%) and when the woman's health was in endangered (61.8%). Those figures were down from 1988 levels, when 69.6% supported abortions when the woman's health was endangered (Boggess/Bradner, Family Planning Perspectives, May/June issue
www.agi-usa.org/pubs/journals/3211800.html).