Between Beliefs and Borders: Migration, Religion, and Abortion Attitudes

Despite decades of global abortion liberalization, the issue remains deeply polarizing.  Its contentiousness stems not only from moral and normative concerns, but also from the broader societal implications it carries, including women’s rights and its potential impact on population dynamics. These tensions are particularly acute in migration contexts, where they intersect with debates on integration, cultural identity, and demographic threats to majority population.  Yet, while immigrant attitudes toward gender and sexuality have been widely studied, abortion remains underexamined.  We investigate how the abortion attitudes of immigrants and their descendants evolve over time and across generations, and how religion and personal religiosity shape these trajectories.  We adopt a multi-sited approach, fitting cross-nested multi-level models on a sample of individuals in 31 European countries and originating from 93 drawn from the European and World Values Surveys. Our results show clear patterns of convergence with destination-country norms and divergence from origin-country views—even when migration flows from more liberal to more conservative settings. However, highly religious individuals across all major faiths are less likely to align with prevailing views in either context, underscoring the influence of transnational religious frameworks. These findings challenge assumptions of stable abortion attitudes and simplistic narratives about “blocked acculturation,” particularly among Muslim populations.

Alessandro Ferrara is a post-doctoral researcher at the Free University in Berlin and a visiting researcher in the Global Sociology unit. He is also a research fellow at the WZB Health and Social Inequality Research Group and the Einstein Center for Population Diversity.

Yasemin Soysal is Research Professor of Global Sociology at WZB, University Professor at the Free University of Berlin, and the Deputy Co-director of the SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence. 

Alicia Vignali is a master's student at Humboldt University of Berlin, specialising in Social Science Research. She also holds a master in Gender, Policy and Inequalities from the London School of Economics.