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English- and Spanish-speaking U.S. adults’ perceptions of the most common reasons for abortion: a study of open-ended data before and after Dobbs v. Jackson
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English- and Spanish-speaking U.S. adults’ perceptions of the most common reasons for abortion: a study of open-ended data before and after Dobbs v. Jackson
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English- and Spanish-speaking U.S. adults’ perceptions of the most common reasons for abortion: a study of open-ended data before and after Dobbs v. Jackson
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Journal Article
English- and Spanish-speaking U.S. adults’ perceptions of the most common reasons for abortion: a study of open-ended data before and after Dobbs v. Jackson
2025
Overview
Background
The 2022
Dobbs v. Jackson
decision, which overturned
Roe v. Wade
, has given individual states more capacity to legislate abortion. State legislators have and continue to design and pass laws that restrict or ban abortion, often naming exceptions based on specific reasons (i.e., fetal health, woman’s health, rape). Given that these reasons often do not align with those reported by abortion-seekers, it is crucial to assess whether the U.S. public accurately understands why people seek abortions. This study explored a sample of U.S. adults’ perceptions of the three most common reasons
why
someone might get an abortion.
Methods
We analyzed open-ended data from two waves of a 2022 longitudinal survey (
n
= 681 participants;
n
= 2,043 responses per wave;
n
= 4,086 total responses) collected before and after the
Dobbs
decision in English and Spanish via Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel®. We explored three main research questions: (1) What does the U.S. public perceive to be the most common reasons for someone to seek abortion? (2) Are there differences in perceived reasons before and after the
Dobbs v. Jackson
decision? (3) Are there differences in perceived reasons across languages?
Results
Findings indicated that people perceive the three most common reasons to seek abortion to be:
unwanted/unplanned pregnancy reasons
,
violence-related reasons
, and
health reasons
. After the
Dobbs
decision, there was an increase in respondents mentioning that people have abortions for
health reasons
and
financial reasons
, and a decrease in responses related to
unwanted/unplanned pregnancy reasons, not ready/unprepared reasons,
and
partner-related reasons
. Additionally, we found significant differences in perceptions between languages (i.e., English and Spanish). We also note discrepancies between perceived reasons among our sample and reasons reported by abortion patients in national studies.
Conclusions
This study underscores the public’s misconceptions of reasons for seeking abortion and the importance of correcting such misunderstandings to ensure alignment of public sentiment and legislative and judicial policy post-
Dobbs
.
Publisher
BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
