We investigate the distinctiveness of state attitudes and their impact on attitudes toward legal abortion. We find modest differences in the level of support for legal abortion and for additional restrictions on abortion, but these differences are not significant after controls for the demographic characteristics, religion, and ideology of each state's citizens. Our results suggest that the abortion debate is a national debate, and that state differences in abortion attitudes can be explained by differences in the charateristics and other attitudes of the states' citizenry.
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