Perception of Romanian people regarding abortion

In Romania, abortion has had a particular history, because of the extremely brutal intervention of the communist government in controlling the phenomena. After more than 15 years of democracy, we sought to evaluate the perception of abortion in population. We interviewed 1902 subjects over the age of 15, equally distributed by sex and instruction level, living in important cities of the traditional historical geographical regions of the country; the group included 185 women who had at least one abortion in their history. Subjects were asked about abortion as an acceptable option in five special life circumstances. Data were analyzed using Latent Gold, latent classes analysis (LCA) software - cluster analysis. Results: 79.66% of the subjects, especially women (p<0.05), consider abortion is a high/medium risk for the woman health. The LCA cluster analysis indicates the 3 clusters model as being the best (the classification error of the model is 0.0125). The clusters are populated by 62%, 18% and 20% of the respondents, respectively. The first cluster is a “pro-choice” cluster – people consider abortion is acceptable and justified in all five situations. The second cluster is a “pro-life” one – abortion is considered unacceptable in any circumstances. Subjects in the third cluster have different attitudes, depending on the specific situation (abortion is considered acceptable only when the pregnancy threats mother’s life or health). The situation is similar for the group of the 185 women who experienced abortion, this fact explaining the low rate of post-abortion syndrome.