Between beliefs and borders: migration, religion, and abortion attitudes

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Abstract
Abortion remains a uniquely contentious issue, rooted not only in moral concerns but also in its broader implications for women’s reproductive autonomy and population dynamics. These tensions become particularly pronounced in migration contexts, where they intersect with debates on integration, cultural identity, and perceived demographic threats to the majority population. We investigate how abortion attitudes among immigrants and their descendants evolve over time spent at destination and across generations, whether this varies when individuals move from less to more liberal settings or vice-versa, and how it is moderated by religion and religiosity. We adopt a multi-sited approach, fitting cross-nested multi-level models on a sample of individuals in thirty-one European countries and originating from ninety-three countries. We find clear patterns of intra- and intergenerational convergence with destination-country views and divergence from origin-country ones, even for migrants moving to more conservative settings. Highly religious individuals across all major faiths are less likely to be aligned with prevailing attitudes in both origin and destination countries, suggesting their views may be shaped by transnational religious frameworks. These findings challenge assumptions that abortion attitudes are either stable or follow a unidirectional liberalizing trajectory, and that patterns of “blocked acculturation” are more prominent among Muslim immigrants.

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