“If pressed for our views on abortion, most of us would struggle to be succinct. There are political edges to navigate, of course, but legal, medical, social and moral considerations as well. Rarely do our opinions lend themselves to single sentence answers, much less a simple checking of one of two boxes on a survey. For sociologists, this complexity presents a unique challenge.”

That’s how Shannon Evans O’Brien starts her piece in the National Catholic Reporter on my recently released book, Our Lives: What Abortion Attitudes Reveal About Who We Are As Americans. I appreciate how her article points to the role of the real and the role of the imagined in Americans’ abortion views — what I call in the book the “abortion imaginary.” Such ideas undergird Americans’ ideas about the “good,” too. Simple labels often fall short.

Read the full NCR piece here.

Find a copy of Our Lives.