I must say this is a remarkable feat of data collection. The Pew Research Center asked more than 40,000 people from 40 different countries around the world their opinions on seven moral issues, ranging from infidelity to birth control. The graph below shows the median answers respondents gave on each topic. As you might expect, extramarital affairs were widely perceived as the least morally acceptable behavior/issue on the list; contraception was the most:
Let’s analyze just the issue of abortion. Globally, a sizeable majority (56 percent) find these kinds of life-ending procedures unacceptable, while a plurality (15 percent) say they are. However, digging into the data a little deeper, the median responses from each respective country were far more interesting. According to the numbers, in the U.S. alone 49 percent of respondents said abortion was not acceptable while just 17 percent said it was. (Twenty-three percent -- shockingly -- responded that abortion wasn’t a moral issue at all).
So while generally speaking Western European and North American countries are more inclined to support abortion rights, according to the researchers, anti-abortion sentiment in the United States is strong. There were also zero countries on the list in which more than 50 percent of respondents said abortion was morally acceptable, although some countries came perilously close to that threshold.
Follow the link above to examine more of Pew's findings; there's a lot of data to digest.
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