Abortion, men & women on the same page

Over at The Washington Post Ezra Klein has a post, The gender politics of the abortion “compromise”:

It’s sadly telling that the “compromise” proposal limiting abortion was offered by Bart Stupak, and seconded by a Republican male. The opposition was led by Diana DeGette, and seconded by Rosa DeLauro. Stupak’s proposal has female supporters, to be sure, a decision that will mainly govern women is being made primarily by men. I would bet that the final vote will show a majority of congresswoman vote against this bill.

I’ll have to look at attitudes to abortion of the duly elected representatives of the people at some point, but might be useful to remember that there is really no sex difference when it comes to attitudes toward abortion. Below are some questions from the GSS broken down by sex for the years from 1998-2008.

If you do look at the data on a more fine-grained scale, for example, limiting the set to the college educated who support abortion rights, you can discern that the issue has more salience and importance to women of this set. So I think that may explain the dominant perception among elite pundits that women feel more strongly about this issue in a particular direction: among their social class that may be so.