낙태에 대한 태도와 종교: 한국, 일본, 미국, 필리핀 국제비교분석

초록

This study tries to address the research question of how different people's attitudes towards abortion are depending on religion and religious groups, one the one hand, and how the difference further varies by different societies, on the other hand. As such, this study was initially triggered by a critical diagnosis of the research trend in Korea that religion studies for the last few decades tend to be pretty much deprived of rigorous empirical analysis based on the large-scale cross-national survey data. In an effort to mitigate this problem, the ISSP <Religion>(2008) module survey data for 4 countries (Korea, Japan, the U.S., and the Philippines) was analyzed to test for a set of hypotheses that were derived from the theories and findings concerning the relationship between religion and abortion attitudes. Results of data analysis turned out to be mixed together, with half and half hypotheses having confirming and disconfirming evidence, respectively. To reiterate: as compared to those who follow a religion, those who don't follow a religion were indeed more liberal to abortion in all across the countries; liberal attitudes to abortion in Korea were more prominent among the Buddhists than the Evangelical Protestants; liberal attitudes in Korea and the U.S. were more prominent among the Roman Catholics than the Protestants. Unlike the expectation, however, the hypothesis predicting that liberal attitudes in the Philippines would be most prevalent among the Catholics, followed by Protestants and Muslims, failed to be supported. Furthermore, the other two hypotheses predicting that liberal attitudes would be salient particularly in the socio- economically developed countries, for one thing, and among the socio-economically active populace all over the countries, for another, were not supported, either. Regardless of the status of empirical support, however, findings in this study possess a lot of theoretical and empirical implications for studies of the relation between religion and abortion attitudes worldwide, and these were discussed in details in the context of each society.

키워드