The world is witnessing a coup taking place in the USA as Trump and Musk set about dismantling the US government, ignoring all congressional legislation and fiscal authority. The Constitution has effectively been suspended. Trump and Musk are leading extra-governmental operatives (young white male engineers employed by Musk) who have seized control of the Treasury payment system, and IT systems in other agencies such as USAID. They are starting to eliminate agencies created by Congress, the first being USAID. They are suspending payments authorized by law, re-interpreting the Constitution, and ignoring the judiciary. Already, several judges have made orders suspending various of their activities. They are being ignored. Ultimately, much later, such orders may end up in the Supreme Court who have already ruled that Trump has immunity for official actions.
What has led to this? How did the world’s richest man and a deeply ignorant psychopathic criminal get to seize control of government in the USA?
I recently encountered a discussion about which countries are the most and least religious. This post presents some comprehensive results for the year 2020 based on my earlier analyses of global, regional and country-level trends in religious belief and practice, and the prevalence of atheism (see earlier posts here, here, and here). These analyses used data for 110 countries from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS), covering the period 1981 to 2020 [1-3]. In previous analyses, I defined four religiosity categories as follows:
Practicing religious person: A religious person who believes in God* and is practicing**, OR a non-religious person who believes in God, is practicing, and rates the importance of God in the top 5 points of a 10 points scale.
Non-practicing religious person: A religious person who believes in God and is non-practicing OR a non-religious person who believes in God, is non-practicing, and rates the importance of God in the top 6 points.
Non-religious: A non-religious person who believes in God but rates the importance of God as any of three points at the not important end of a 10-point scale.
Atheist: A “confirmed atheist” and/or does not believe in God
Respondents were classified as “practicing” if they attend religious services or pray to God outside of religious services at least once a month. I assigned all people who do not believe in God to the atheist category. This will include some religious people who practice non-theist religions such as Buddhism.
For this post, I decided to move the atheists who said they practiced religion at least once a month to the “practicing religious person” category. In most of the regions where the prevalence of atheism was high, the percent of atheists who are practicing religious is small, at most a few percent. Its likely these are regions where there is no stigma or danger in being atheist, and the few percent practicing are likely attending religious services with other family members who are religious. In regions where the prevalence of atheism is very low, the proportion of atheists who attend religious services is generally much higher (30-40%), almost certainly reflecting stigma and danger in being openly atheist.
I moved the proportion of atheists who are practicing religious to the practicing religious category for the maps below. This adjustment makes little difference to the results. The first map shows the global variations in the proportion of country populations who are practicing religious.
Benjamin Cain recently posted an article on Medium.com, The Trump Cult and the Albatross Around America’s Neck, in which he argued that the Trump cult is fueled by southern racism, religious fundamentalism, and a backlash against modernity. He claims that “In this respect, half of the US is closer to the anti-modern Islamist states than to ultra-secular Europe.”
I realized that my recent analyses of levels of pre-modern beliefs in over 100 countries included in the Integrated Values Survey (IVS) (see here and here) could be extended to check this claim. The IVS is the combined data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, which have carried out seven waves of surveys in over 100 countries, spanning the period 1981 to 2021.
To examine variations in pre-modern versus modern values across countries and time, I estimated a continuous latent variable “modernity” based on responses to 11 selected questions in the IVS (see following box) whose responses will vary depending on how modern or pre-modern the respondent’s values are. which assumed there is an unobserved underlying continuous variable that describes the individual’s level of modernity of values and predicts (or correlates with) their answers to specific values questions. I used general linear modelling methods to estimate a continuous latent variable “modernity” from the responses to the 11 selected values questions. See here for more details.
I recently came across the 2017 Pew Research Center survey of more than 4,700 U.S. adults which found that of those who say they believe in God, 30% say they believe in some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe rather than the God of the Bible. Among those who say they do not believe in God (aka atheists), 47% say they believe in some other higher power or spiritual force. What do people mean when they say this? And do atheists and theists mean the same or different things?
Before discussing this, I first present some similar data for the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada (the mother country and two other English speaking ex-colonies).
A 2020 YouGov poll in Britain found that 27% say they believe in “a god”, 16% say they believe in the existence of a higher spiritual power, but not a god, 41% do not believe in a god or a higher power and 18% don’t know. Among British Christians, just over half say they believe in God, 16% believe in a higher power, 10% don’t believe in God or higher power, and 16% don’t know.
The 2019 Australian Community Survey found that 29% of Australians say they believe in a personal God and 32% say they believe in some sort of spirit or life force. Around two in 10 (21%) do not believe and 18% remain unsure.
A very recent Canadian survey carried out in November 2022 found that just over a third of Canadians believe in God or gods (33.6%), with a further 32.1% saying that they believe in a higher power or spiritual force, but don’t necessarily believe in a god or gods. More than one-in-five (22.1%) don’t believe in any spiritual power.
I recently came across a headline referring to a 2016 survey in Iceland which found that 0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world. My immediate impression was that this implied a zero per cent prevalence of atheism in this age group. When I read the article, I found that the relevant question gave respondents four options: the world was created in the big bang, the world was created by God, the world was created by other means, or no opinion. Outside of countries dominated by fundamentalist religious groups, most religious people would likely choose “created in the big bang”. The survey actually found that 40.5% of respondents aged 25 years and younger said they were atheist, and 42% said they were Christians.
It is certainly the case that the prevalence of atheism is higher in younger ages in the developed countries where religiosity has been declining for decades. So I thought I would take a look at the prevalence of atheism in younger adults aged 15-34 years from the Integrated Values Surveys [1-3] that took place in the last wave, in the period 2017-2020. See my earlier posts (see here and here), which examined global, regional and country-level trends in religious belief and practice, for more details on the data and definitions of atheism and religiosity categories.
Countries with the highest prevalence of atheism and non-religion in 2017-2020
The following plot shows the prevalence of religious and irreligious adults for the 31 countries with the highest irreligious prevalence (atheists plus non-religious). China and South Korea lead these countries with irreligious prevalences over 80%, followed by Sweden, Czechia, New Zealand and Japan, with prevalences in the 70’s. In terms of atheism, there are 18 countries with prevalences over 50% in the 15-34 year age group, including Australia at 53%.
In these countries, the prevalence of practicing religious generally increases with age and the prevalence of atheists generally decreases with age. The plot for the USA 2017 survey data below illustrates this.
Are these prevalence patterns predominantly due to ageing, time period or birth cohort? Since period = birth year (cohort identifier) + age it is not possible to determine the separate effects of all three factors. Ageing as a driver of religiosity would imply that people become more religious as they get older, and this seems the least likely of the three factors to fit observed age patterns over time.
Relative contribution of cohort and period to the overall trends in religiosity
I’ve attempted to estimate the relative contributions of birth cohort and period to the evolution of religiosity in the USA using a cohort projection model. I first used the data from all waves of the US surveys to impute religiosity prevalences for years 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020. I then projected religiosity prevalences for each age group in 2020 assuming that those prevalences remained constant at the values that age group would have had in the past when it was aged 15-24. Comparing this with the actual prevalences for 2020 allows estimation of the proportion of the change in prevalence over time that is attributable to cohort effects.
For practicing religious, non-religious and atheists, the cohort projection explains around 25% of the overall change, the other 75% is attributable to period. For the non-practicing religious, these proportions are reversed with 25% explained by period and 75% by cohort.
Projecting religiosity prevalences to 2030
My previous projections of religiosity to year 2020 were carried out using trends in all-ages-both sexes prevalences. I thought it would be interesting to explore projections at age-sex level for selected countries, given the likely variations in trends across age groups. I experimented with several statistical models including a period-cohort projection model, and a model that projected all four prevalences simultaneously, using seemingly unrelated regression techniques to constrain the prevalences to add to 100%. It proved difficult to get sensible results from these models when not tailored to specific country data. The disaggregation of survey data to 7 age groups for each sex resulted in highly variable prevalences across cells. The years for which surveys were available varied across countries in ways that made it difficult to develop generalized projection methods that were not sensitive to small number issues and outlier trends.
I eventually decided to do some quite simplistic projections for each age-sex category as follows:
Project from last available wave to 2022 using short-term trends given by last two waves
Project from 2022 to 2030 using longer-term trend from wave closest to year 2000 to last wave
Adjust extreme trends to either the smaller of the short and long run trends, or to trends for neigbouring age-sex groups.
I carried out these projections for five high income countries with rising prevalence of atheism: USA, Australia, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Sweden. The following plots illustrate the observed and projected prevalences for the four religiosity categories. The dashed lines denotes the projected trend for irreligion (non-religious plus atheist).
The nonreligious category includes people who state that they believe in God, but that they are non-religious and rate the importance of God as 8-10 at the not important end of a 10-point scale. In the table below, I summarize the projected prevalence of irreligion (nonreligious or atheist) in 2030 for the five countries for all ages combined and for the young adult age group 15-34 years. The irreligion prevalence is generally higher in the younger age groups, and the 2030 value gives an indication of likely future trend for all ages.
Is irreligion likely to continue increase in the future? If the economies of high income countries continue to grow, with decreasing levels of poverty, and education levels continue to improve, it is likely that religiosity in these countries will decline in the longer term. The joint global crises of global warming and the pandemic, with rising populism and rejection of global institutions and actions, may on the other hand result in economic downturns that result in a stalling or reversal of the current religiosity trends. The situation in the USA where a religious minority is actively seeking to impose its values on the entire population, and undermining the democratic system to achieve that, may likely accelerate the turning away from religion of the young adult population. The USA already has one of the fastest rates of increase of irreligion in the last decade.
References
EVS (2021): EVS Trend File 1981-2017. GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7503 Data file Version 2.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13736
EVS/WVS (2021). European Values Study and World Values Survey: Joint EVS/WVS 2017-2021 Dataset (Joint EVS/WVS). JD Systems Institute & WVSA. Dataset Version 1.1.0, doi:10.14281/18241.14.
Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen et al. (eds.). 2021. World Values Survey Time-Series (1981-2020) Cross-National Data-Set. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. Data File Version 2.0.0, doi:10.14281/18241.15.
Many of us here in Europe and Australia are watching in horror as the US Supreme Court moves towards taking away the reproductive freedom of US women. And from the noises being made by Republican politicians, access to contraceptives, gay marriage and any other human rights not recognized in the 16th century are at risk also.
During my close to two decades responsible for WHO global health statistics, I worked closely with the maternal health department on regular assessments of maternal mortality, including deaths due to unsafe abortion. My team collaborated with the Guttmacher Institute on several occasions to produce global statistics on induced abortion. Given the current situation, I was interested to see that the Guttmacher Institute and WHO released first-ever country-level estimates of unintended pregnancy and abortion (see here) a little under two months ago.
The new study analysed data for 150 countries for the period 2015-2019, and found that:
Almost half of the 220 million pregnancies globally per year are unintended.
Six in 10 unintended pregnancies end in an induced abortion (63 million per year).
Overall, 29% of all pregnancies globally end in an induced abortion.
Regional averages mask large disparities within regions for unintended pregnancy and abortion rates.
The Guttmacher/WHO study covers 90% of the 1.9 billion women of reproductive age. Almost all the missing countries (because of lack of data) are in the Western Asia and Northern Africa region, most of them Islamic states or with a dominant Islamic culture. I describe elsewhere how I imputed data for most of the missing countries and added data on legal grounds and restrictions regarding abortion. Countries classified as having abortion restrictions are those which completely prohibit abortion or allow abortion only on one or more of the following grounds: risk to life, risk to health, rape or fetal impairment. Countries classified as without abortion restrictions also allowed abortion on social or economic grounds, or on request. Given the polarization of the US states in allowing or restricting abortion, I also used information from Planned Parenthood to classify US states into two groups with and without restrictions.
First, a brief overview at the global level of the differences between grouped countries with and without restrictions:
36% of women of reproductive age live in countries with restricted access to abortion. These countries account for 33% of global abortions, 50% of global live births and 81% of global maternal deaths.
The global abortion rate per 1,000 women aged 15-49 years is 31 for countries with restrictions and 41 for countries without restrictions.
21% of pregnancies are terminated by abortion in countries with restrictions, 34% in countries without restrictions.
Average GDP per capita (purchasing power parity dollars) was $18,300 in countries without restrictions, and 71% of women aged 15-49 used modern forms of contraception. For countries with restrictions, the average GPD/capita was $8,500 and only 57% of women used modern forms of contraception.
Countries restricting abortion were much more religious with 66% of adults attending religious services at least once a month, compared to 27% in countries not restricting abortion (data on religious practice from the World Values Survey and European Values Study, see earlier post here).
These global averages conceal very large differences across regions, and between countries in some regions. I have examined these patterns by grouping countries into 11 culture zones, based on those developed by Welzel (2013) for the World Values Survey.
I modified the culture zones slightly, to include Canada in the Reformed West and keep the USA in its own separate category. I also moved predominantly Muslim countries from “Indic East” and “Sinic East to group together all countries with a predominantly Islamic culture and values. See here for full definitions of the culture zones.
Figure 1
Figure 2.
The left-hand figure 1 shows that abortion is universally legally available in most of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in the Orthodox and Islamic countries of the former Soviet-bloc and in the non-Islamic countries of Asia. It is legally severely restricted in most Islamic countries and sub-Saharan Africa. Abortion rates are substantially lower in the high-income countries of Europe, North America and Australia and New Zealand than in the Asian regions where abortion is unrestricted AND in the countries in all developing regions irrespective of whether abortion is legally restricted or available. Note that USA results have been calculated by grouping States into those with and without significant abortion restrictions.
For 2015-2019, almost half of unintended pregnancies (46%) were aborted in countries where abortion was restricted (often severely) and a little over two-thirds (70%) in countries where abortion is accessible. In the three regions where around 40-50% of women with unintended pregnancies have restricted access to abortions, overall abortion rates per 1,000 women of reproductive age differ by less than 2 abortions per 1,000 from those in countries (or US states) without restrictions. These are the USA (11 versus 13 per 1,000), the Returned West (11 versus 10 per 1,000) and Latin America (30 versus 31 per 1,000). The Returned West consists of former Soviet-bloc countries that have joined the EU, and the largest of these, Poland, is the only one to have restricted abortion, prohibiting it for fetal impairment, economic or social reasons, or on request.
People seek and obtain abortions in all countries, even in those with restrictive abortion laws, where barriers to safe abortion care are high. In fact, over the past three decades, the proportion of unintended pregnancies that end in abortion has increased in countries that have many legal restrictions in place. The figures presented above suggest that the illegalization of abortion will not substantially reduce its incidence. Over recent decades, most of the changes to the legal grounds for abortion have been in the direction of recognizing women’s rights to reproductive autonomy (recent examples include Ireland, Argentina, Mexico and Columbia).
The increasing restrictions in the USA are one of the few examples of major reductions in women’s rights occurring outside the Islamic countries. In the case of the USA, these changes are to rights that women have had for half a century and are being driven by an anti-democratic coalition of white nationalists and religious extremists who do not represent the majority views of the population. A recent issue of the Economist identified white evangelicals as the one major religious group with majority opposition to the legal availability of abortion (The Economist, May 7, 2022). A majority of Catholics, mainline Protestants and those with no religious identification think that abortion should be mostly or always legal in the USA, and support is over 75% for Jewish, atheists and non-religious with college education.
The rhetoric of some US extremists, and actions already taken to restrict health insurance coverage for contraceptive use, suggests that further restriction on abortion access may well also be accompanied by further reductions in contraceptive availability. The unintended pregnancy rate may well increase, resulting in an overall increase in numbers of abortions occurring, even if the restrictions reduce the percentage of unintended pregnancies that end in abortion. In my next post, I will examine differences in maternal mortality across countries and the extent to which they are associated with legal restrictions on abortion.
A little under two months ago, the Guttmacher Institute and WHO released first-ever country-level estimates of unintended pregnancy and abortion (see here). The new study analyzed data for 150 countries for the period 2015-2019 and found that:
Almost half of the 220 million pregnancies globally per year are unintended.
Six in 10 unintended pregnancies end in an induced abortion (63 million per year).
Overall, 29% of all pregnancies globally end in an induced abortion.
Almost 30% of induced abortions occur in countries where abortion is either illegal or heavily restricted. Earlier estimates for 2010-2014 found that 45% of all abortions are unsafe, and around 15% were performed in the least safe conditions, by untrained persons using dangerous and invasive techniques.
Regional averages mask large disparities within regions for unintended pregnancy and abortion rates.
The Guttmacher/WHO study covers 90% of the 1.9 billion women of reproductive age. Almost all the missing countries (because of lack of data) are from the Western Asia and Northern Africa region, most of them Islamic states or with a dominant Islamic culture. I describe below how I imputed data for most of the missing countries, added data on legal grounds and restrictions regarding abortion and examine global patterns using 12 culture zones which group countries based on history, values and religion.
The following plots give a taste of the global patterns I found. Culture zone and other definitions, data and methods are given in more detail in the rest of this post.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
*Note that USA results have been calculated by grouping States into those with and without significant abortion restrictions
The left-hand figure shows that abortion is universally legally available in most of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in the Orthodox and Islamic countries of the former Soviet-bloc and in the non-Islamic countries of Asia. It is legally severely restricted in most Islamic countries and sub-Saharan Africa. Abortion rates are substantially lower in the high-income countries of Europe, North America and Australia and New Zealand than in the Asian regions where abortion is unrestricted AND in the countries in all developing regions irrespective of whether abortion is legally restricted or available. Note that USA results have been calculated by grouping States into those with and without significant abortion restrictions.
For 2015-2019, almost half of unintended pregnancies (46%) were aborted in countries where abortion was restricted (often severely) and a little over two-thirds (70%) in countries where abortion is accessible. In the three regions where around 40-50% of women with unintended pregnancies have restricted access to abortions, overall abortion rates per 1,000 women of reproductive age differ by less than 2 abortions per 1,000 from those in countries (or US states) without restrictions.
Imputation of data for countries in Western Asia and Northern Africa
The 150 countries with abortion-related data represent 90% of the 1.9 billion women of reproductive age 15-49 years in the period 2015-2019. Of the eight Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) regions used in the study, the coverage of reproductive-age women by countries with data fell below 95% only for Western Asia and Northern Africa, where data coverage was only 3.4%. However, the missing women are almost entirely in one SDG region, Western Asia and Northern Africa
The region includes 24 countries, mostly in North Africa and the Middle East. Data is available only for Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. These are all former Soviet-bloc countries with legal abortion and high rates of termination of unintended pregnancies. In contrast, apart from Israel and Cyprus, the other 19 countries are all either explicitly Islamic states or with a predominant Islamic culture. Seventeen of the 19 either prohibit or severely restrict abortion.
To address the bias inherent in excluding these countries from global statistics, I decided to impute the unintentional pregnancy rates and abortion rates for the Islamic countries in North Africa and the Middle East and also for Afghanistan, Iran and Malaysia, using information on live birth rates for these countries along with the abortion data for 22 Islamic countries in the neighbouring regions Sub-Saharan Africa, South-central Africa and South-eastern Asia. Former Soviet-bloc Islamic countries were not included in this dataset.
Pregnancy rates were regressed against live birth rates for this dataset and the regression model (R-squared 0.91) used to predict pregnancy rates for the missing data. Unintended pregnancies are defined as pregnancies which were unwanted at the time they were conceived or occurred earlier than desired. Explorations of various covariates for predicting the proportion of pregnancies that are unintentional resulted in predicting of missing data using a regression on the log of GDP per capita measured in international (purchasing-power-parity adjusted) dollars and a continuous variable measuring average-religiosity for countries in 2017. Both these variables are significant predictors of the proportion of pregnancies that are unintentional and the regression on the prediction dataset has an R-squared of 0.52. I used previously estimated levels and trends in average religiosity (practicing, non-practicing, non-religious and atheist) for countries using data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS) covering the period 1980 to 2020 (see previous post here).
The only predictive variable found for the proportion of unintentional pregnancies resulting in induced abortion was the gender inequality index produced by United Nations Development Program. Regression of logit(abortion fraction of unintended pregnancies) against the logit of the 2017 value of the gender inequality index was used to predict missing abortion fractions of unintended pregnancies (R-squared 0.7).
Global and regional abortion rates for 2015-2019
With these missing values imputed for 23 countries, the abortion estimates now cover most countries in most regions, and 98.6% of women of reproductive age globally. Based on this extended dataset, the following table summarizes regional and global patterns of pregnancy and abortion for the period 2015-2019.
The Guttmacher/WHO paper in the British Medical Journal displays unintended pregnancy and abortion rates by country for the 150 countries included in their study. The estimates dataset is available here. It includes 80% and 95% uncertainty intervals. In this post, I’m interested to see the big picture at regional and global level, and I’ve not done the additional work to estimate uncertainty intervals. But it is important to keep in mind that there are many problems with data availability, reliability and completeness of reporting, particularly for an often stigmatized and contentious issue such as abortion. So the broad patterns shown below likely convey a reasonable and evidence-based assessment, but small differences between countries or regions should not be over-interpreted.
Legal restrictions in countries and US States
The legality and acceptability of abortion varies widely across the world, from Europe where it is available without restriction in most countries, to the Middle East and Africa where it is largely illegal.
I’ve taken country-level information on abortion availability and restrictions from Wikipedia, which documents legal grounds on which abortion is permitted, and gestational age limits where relevant, using the following six categories: risk to life, risk to health, rape, fetal impairment, economic or social reasons, on request. The first four of these grounds cover a fairly small percentage of unintended pregnancies and I have grouped in a single category “restricted or prohibited” countries which allow abortion only on these grounds. Countries which allow abortions on economic or social grounds or on request (with any gestational age limit set at least 10 weeks or longer) are classified as “unrestricted”. The USA has widely varying legal restrictions on abortions across the 50 states and Washington DC. I have used information on abortion access from Planned Parenthood to classify abortion access as restricted (28 states) and unrestricted (22 states and Washington DC).
Revised culture groups for countries
In earlier posts, I analyzed religious and other values by culture groups for 110 countries using data from the World Values Surveys and the European Values Study. These culture zones were based on the 11 culture zones developed by Welzel (2013).
For this post, I’ve slightly revised the culture zones to group Canada with Australia and New Zealand in the “Reformed West” zone, and kept the USA as a single separate culture zone. I’ve also revised the categories “Indic East”, “Sinic East”, and Islamic East to group together all countries with a predominantly Islamic culture and values. The revised culture zones are as follows:
Reformed West — Western European societies strongly affected by the Reformation: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, plus Canada, Australia and New Zealand;
USA — The North American culture zone included only two countries, USA and Canada. Canada’s culture is very similar to the Reformed West, and it is moved there.
Old West — Mostly Catholic parts of Western Europe being core parts of the Roman Empire: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Spain;
Returned West — Catholic and Protestant parts of post-communist Europe returning to the EU: Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia;
Orthodox East — Christian Orthodox or Islamic parts of the post-communist world, mostly parts of former USSR;
Indic East — Parts of South and South East Asia under the historic influence of Indian or Buddhist culture: Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste;
Islamic East — Countries with predominantly Islamic religion and culture;
Sinic East — Parts of East Asia under the historic influence of Chinese culture and/or Buddhism: China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam;
Latin America — Central and South America and the Caribbean;
Sub-Saharan Africa — African countries south of the Sahara.
Oceania — Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island countries.
Patterns of abortion by culture group
The table below summarizes the abortion situation for countries without legal restrictions and countries with legal restriction in each culture zone. Country-level legal status is used except for the USA where the statistics relate to two groups of states: those with and without legal restrictions on abortion (as defined above). State level estimates are not available for the per cent of unintended pregnancies, or the per cent that are aborted. I have assumed that the national percent of all pregnancies that are unintended (34%) is the same in the two groups of states, and that the % aborted in states without restrictions is the same (38%) as that in the Reformed West where abortion is 100% unrestricted. Since the national level of unintended pregnancies that are aborted is 34%, this implies that the proportion of unintended pregnancies aborted in states with restrictions is 31%.
To graphically illustrate these variations across culture zones, I repeat the two figures included near the beginning of this post:
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Globally, 60% of unintended pregnancies ended in abortion in the period 2015-2019. People seek and obtain abortions in all countries, even in those with restrictive abortion laws, where barriers to safe abortion care are high. In fact, over the past three decades, the proportion of unintended pregnancies that end in abortion has increased in countries that have many legal restrictions in place. For 2015-2019, almost half of unintended pregnancies (46%) were aborted in countries where abortion was restricted (often severely) and a little over two-thirds (70%) in countries where abortion is accessible.
In the three regions where around 40-50% of with unintended pregnancies have restricted access to abortions, overall abortion rates per 1,000 women of reproductive age differ by less than 2 abortions per 1,000 from those in countries (or US states) without restrictions. These are the USA (11 versus 13 per 1,000), the Returned West (11 versus 10 per 1,000) and Latin America (30 versus 31 per 1,000). The Returned West consists of former Soviet-bloc countries that have joined the EU, and the largest of these, Poland, is the only one to have restricted abortion, prohibiting it for fetal impairment, economic or social reasons, or on request.
The figures presented above suggest that the illegalization of abortion will not substantially reduce its incidence. Over recent decades, most of the changes to the legal grounds for abortion have been in the direction of recognizing women’s rights to reproductive autonomy (recent examples include Ireland, Argentina, Mexico and Columbia). Removal of a right that women have had for 50 years in the USA is an entirely different situation.
The increasing restrictions in the USA are one of the few examples of major reductions in women’s rights occurring outside the Islamic countries where religious extremists have taken control of government. In the case of the USA, these changes are to rights that women have had for half a century and are being driven by an anti-democratic coalition of white nationalists and religious extremists who do not represent the majority views of the population. A recent issue of the Economist identified white evangelicals as the one major group with majority opposition to the legal availability of abortion. A majority of Catholics, mainline Protestants and those with no religious identification think that abortion should be mostly or always legal in the USA, and support is over 75% for Jewish, atheists and non-religious with college education.
Reproduced from: Religion, not gender, is the best predictor of views on abortion.The Economist, May 7th 2022.
The rhetoric of some US extremists, and actions already taken to restrict health insurance coverage for contraceptive use, suggests that further restriction on abortion access may well also be accompanied by further reductions in contraceptive availability. The unintended pregnancy rate may well increase, resulting in an overall increase in numbers of abortions occurring, even if the restrictions reduce the percentage of unintended pregnancies that end in abortion.
In my next post, I will examine differences in maternal mortality across countries and the extent to which they are associated with legal restrictions on abortion.
In my previous post, I presented updated estimates of trends in average religiosity and religious values for 110 countries using latent variable analysis of data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study [1-4]. The map below plots these countries according to their latent variable values for modernity (horizontal axis) and religiosity (vertical axis) in the year 2020. The colours indicate culture zone and the shading roughly indicates the main domain of countries in each culture zone. Moving downwards to the right on this graph indicates increasing modern values and decreasing religiosity. The inspiration for this map presentation was the culture zone maps produced for earlier waves of these surveys by the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel [5]. The culture zones are defined in a previous post here.
Apart from the uncertainty in these values resulting from survey sample size limitations, differences in the ways surveys were administered, and differences in translation and cultural understanding of questions, there is also statistical uncertainty in the latent variable estimation process. Not too much should be made of small differences between countries, and I focus on the broader patterns.
The degree of premodernity of religious values is fairly similar for the Islamic East and Sub-Saharan Africa, but the African region is somewhat more religious than the Islamic region. The Indic East has higher levels of premodern values than either of these regions. One manifestation of this is the current rising level of Hindu nationalism in India along with the violent persecution of Indians of other religions. The degree of modernity of values is similar for the majority of Latin American countries and the former Soviet bloc countries, but religiosity is significantly lower in the latter, where religion is largely a marker of national identity and most are non-practicing.
The North America culture zone includes only two countries, the USA and Canada. It is clear from the map that Canada belongs with the Reformed West countries in contrast to the USA, which sits in the Old West zone close to Italy, and also not far from three South American countries: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Malta and Cyprus are also outliers for the Old West culture zone, with higher levels of religiosity and less modern values. Along the decreasing religiosity-increasing modernity axis, Qatar is at the top end and Sweden at the bottom end. China is an outlier to the lower left, with the lowest level of religiosity of all the countries, but also a modernity value towards the middle of the scale between modern and pre-modern.
It should be emphasised that this map reflects national averages for individuals and may not be reflected in laws and form of government. Increasingly authoritarian regimes across the world are imposing values that a substantial proportion of their population do not accept. The USA has a growing proportion of the population rejecting democracy in favour of minority rule and the restriction of various rights particularly for women and minority voters. Unhappiness with the results of neoliberal economic and social policies over recent decades has been successfully redirected into “values wars” rather than addressing the real causes of declining average incomes and reductions in social safety nets along with the reduction of taxation and regulation for high income individuals and companies.
References
Inglehart, R., C. Haerpfer, A. Moreno, C. Welzel, K. Kizilova, J. Diez-Medrano, M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen et al. (eds.). 2014. World Values Survey: All Rounds – Country-Pooled Datafile Version: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp. Madrid: JD Systems Institute.
Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno,A., Welzel,C., Kizilova,K., Diez-MedranoJ., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen et al. (eds.). 2020. World Values Survey: Round Seven–Country-Pooled Datafile. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute& WVSA Secretariat[Version: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp].
Gedeshi, Ilir, Zulehner, Paul M., Rotman, David, Titarenko, Larissa, Billiet, Jaak, Dobbelaere, Karel, Kerkhofs, Jan. (2020). European Values Study Longitudinal Data File 1981-2008 (EVS 1981-2008). GESIS Datenarchiv, Köln. ZA4804 Datenfile Version 3.1.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13486.
EVS (2020): European Values Study 2017: Integrated Dataset (EVS 2017). GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7500 Data file Version 3d. WVS. Archived from the original on October 19, 2013.
In a recent post, I presented revised estimates for trends in the prevalence of atheism and religiosity for 110 countries over the last 40 years. This was based on a new analysis of the 2021 release of combined data for the WVS and EVS in the Integrated Values Surveys (IVS) 1981-2021 [1, 2]. The main revision to the dataset was to correct an error in the data for the USA. This post summarizes my updated analysis of modern and pre-modern religious values and for the first time I have also carried out an analysis of time trends from 1980 to 2020. See here for full details of the construction of a revised latent variable for modern values and the analysis of time trends.
My earlier post discusses in some detail the conceptualization and operationalization of modern and pre-modern religious values. I here give a very brief overview of this in terms Kohlberg’s three stages of moral development. Stage 1 moral values focus on absolute rules, obedience and punishment and an individual is good in order to avoid being punished. In stage 2, the individual internalizes the moral standards of the culture and is good in order to be seen as a good person by oneself and others. Moral reasoning is based on the culture’s standards, individual rights and justice. In stage 3, the individual becomes aware that while rules and laws may exist for the greater good, they may not be applicable in specific circumstances. Issues are not black and white, and the individual develops their own set of moral standards based in universal rights and responsibilities. As moral values evolve through the three broad stages, the size of the in-group (“us”) with which an individual identifies typically expands from tribe to ethnic group or nation to all humanity.
In two earlier posts (here and here), I examined global, regional and country-level trends in religious belief and practice, and the prevalence of atheism. The analysis was based on data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS), covering the period 1981 to 2020. Earlier this year, I discovered that the World Values Survey dataset has been updated. Some data collected using a mobile phone app in the most recent US survey was incorrectly coded and this mainly affected the religiosity categories. Comparison of the US prevalences for religiosity show that the coding errors resulted in an overestimate of the atheist and non-religious categories as shown in the following table:
Comparison of religiosity prevalence estimates for USA in year 2020
I have now updated the previous analyses using the 2021 release of the combined data for the WVS and EVS in the Integrated Values Surveys (IVS) 1981-2021 [1-3]. In carrying out these updates, I also addressed some definitional issues which have resulted in mostly slight changes to estimates for other countries. The details of the updated analysis are described elsewhere.
Mountains and rivers 