Post-socialist desecularization and abortion among young people in Serbia and Croatia

Ignjatović, Suzana and Mentus, Vladimir (2023) Post-socialist desecularization and abortion among young people in Serbia and Croatia. In: Annual International Scientific Conference "Religious Education and Religiosity of Young People": book of abstracts. Institute of Social Sciences, Belgrade, p. 31. ISBN 978-86-7093-269-2

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Abstract

Post-socialist desecularization has directly or indirectly shaped the patterns of socially acceptable norms of sexuality and reproductive behavior. However, the impact of religion on public attitudes towards sexuality and reproductive culture is not monolithic. This paper explores abortion attitudes as the most debated reproductive issue, commonly associated with the opposed secular and religious worldviews. We hypothesize that the revival of religion and religious organizations in the public sphere has shaped the dominant social norms concerning sexuality and reproductive behavior, especially abortion attitudes, but not in the same direction in Serbia and Croatia, despite similar trends of desecularization. We compared abortion attitudes of young people aged 16-29 in the two countries over the twenty years of post-socialist transformation. We used data from Round 3 (1995-1999) and Round 7 (2017-2022) of the World Values Survey. The converging patterns of non-religious and religious attitudes toward abortion indicate a trend of significant social change in these two societies. In further analysis, we looked at the differences between dominant religious denominations in Serbia and Croatia (Orthodox Christians and Catholics, respectively) and their dogmatic and social implications on social control and moral order in these two societies. Historical generations of young people (mid-1990s and 2020s) are compared to see if there has been a long-term impact of liberal or “emancipative” values on abortion attitudes, despite the prevailing desecularization.

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