Capturing compassion: A survey of Mexican Catholics assessing abortion support by reason for abortion and degree of Catholicism

Factors Associated with Support for Adolescent Access to Contraception Among Mexican Catholic Parents

“…This echoes evidence from the United States, where adolescent access to contraception and especially sex education is widely supported, regardless of factors such as religion (Constantine et al 2007;Barrett et al 2014) and political affiliation (Kantor and Levitz 2017). Our findings also contribute to evidence that the individual Catholic opinions about sexual and reproductive health issues do not always align with the dictates of the Catholic hierarchy (Küng et al 2018), and that Catholic people often find creative ways to reframe Catholic dictates to specific needs and desires (Hirsch 2008). Catholic opinion should not be seen as an unsurmountable barrier to implementing policies to expand adolescent access to modern contraceptive methods.…”

“…Rather, it is the measure that asks about contraception and Catholicism together that is associated with both outcomes, suggesting that this measure better describes how respondents understand what it means to be Catholic and the behaviors expected of Catholics. This finding is supported in literature on abortion that also suggests that we lose nuance with broad measures of Catholicism (Küng et al 2018). Previous work on the intersections of religiosity and contraception has urged researchers to "explore the interplay between how people interpret religious teachings as sources of opportunity and constraint" (Hirsch 2008).…”

“…We included two measures of religiosity: self-identified strength of Catholicism (very Catholic, somewhat Catholic, and not at all/a little Catholic) and perceptions of a good Catholic; particularly, a binary indicator of whether someone who uses contraception can continue to be a good Catholic. We selected these measures of religiosity based on previous work (Küng et al 2018 ), which found that self-reported strength of Catholicism and behaviors of “good” Catholics had more explanatory power than attendance at mass or other measures. We explored additional measures about religion and spirituality: respondents were asked about their idea of God, which we dichotomized into God as protecting vs. forgiving, punishing and rewarding, or imposing rules.…”

“…We then developed two logistic regression models, one for each outcome. We included covariates based on literature, results from bivariate tests, and our own previous work (Küng et al 2018 ). We did not include all Catholic value and belief variables in our final models; we excluded the measures of idea of God and respect as the most important Catholic value due to nonsignificance in bivariate analysis.…”

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“…El caso mexicano refleja el nivel de descentralización que un sistema federal puede producir en esta materia, ya que mientras en el Distrito Federal se aprobó la legalización del aborto durante los tres primeros meses de embarazo, en muchos otros estados hay iniciativas para prohibirlo explícitamente (Rodríguez et al, 2011). Recientemente, un estudio de opinión pública ha demostrado que la mayoría de los católicos mexicanos apoya el aborto en ciertas circunstancias (Küng et al, 2018).…”