As others have pointed out, ppl who favor abortion are sometimes inconsistent—many say abortion should be legal for “bodily autonomy” but are okay with laws about seatbelts or food regulations. In short, we all probably choose nice-sounding moral principles when they’re available

Although abortion opposition is an interesting case to examine this, we don’t think this phenomenon is limited to opponents of abortion

These findings lend relatively more support to the strategic account--importantly, these results also hold when controlling for things like religiosity and conservatism, so they don't seem to be just group-based heuristics

Perhaps more importantly, if we look only at the strongest abortion opponents (who strongly agree that abortion is murder), these participants show pretty strong support for the punishment and abstinence-only policies, but significantly less support for comprehensive sex ed

The more people oppose abortion (that is, agree with statements like "abortion is murder"), the more they like policies like punishment and abstinence-only--but the *less* they like comprehensive sex ed

Notably, comprehensive sex education really only differs from abstinence-only education in not explicitly being against casual sex

In pre-registered studies, we tested between these accounts by experimentally assigning people to rate bills that propose to reduce abortions in different ways, e.g., punish women getting abortions, abstinence-only sex ed, or comprehensive sex ed

This “Strategic Account” would suggest that abortion opponents don’t just support any policy that prevents abortions, but they will especially favor policies that do so while simultaneously discouraging casual sex

But people might have other goals influencing judgments. People who disapprove of casual sex also tend to disapprove of abortion, and many people view abortion bans as being more about discouraging casual sex

If abortion opposition is all about reducing harm toward the unborn (what we call the "face-value account"), then we might expect people who oppose abortion to support whatever policies might reduce abortions