Islam is not the Reason: the Attitude to Abortion, Divorce and Premarital Sex in Nine post-Soviet States

Abstract

This paper examines patterns of support for conservative attitudes toward abortion, divorce, and premarital sex in nine societies of the former Soviet Union. We use the World Values Survey data from Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan collected in 2011-2013 to discuss the reasons of lifestyle intolerance. Using latent class and other multivariate analyzes, we find that the degree of religiosity is a more important predictor of conservative values than is the Islamic cultural legacy. For instance, people in the Christian and very religious countries of Armenia and Georgia are far more likely to condemn sex before marriage or abortion than are Muslims in more secular Kazakhstan. Interestingly, the watershed between the heterogeneous and uniform societies does not coincide with the economic divide as there are rich and poor countries in the sample. Instead, the watershed is best described by the country’s degree of religiosity, which may well be an effect of economic development awhile ago rather than at the present time. Latent class analysis suggests that populations are more heterogeneous with regard to attitudes toward abortion, divorce, and premarital sex in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. In Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, there is more unanimity in reprobation of abortion, divorce, and premarital sex.