The indirect moderating effects of racial bias in the context of abortion attitudes and mock healthcare delivery decisions

The US Supreme Court's decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case stands to exacerbate maternal mortality and other pregnancy-related health risks, especially for women of minority backgrounds. To empirically examine the psychological and behavioral consequences of Dobbs, the indirect moderating influence of racial bias on abortion-related outcomes was assessed across two experiments conducted on Qualtrics using participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. In Experiment 1, participants were randomly assigned to read information on the effects of abortion restrictions on maternal mortality that either framed the issue in terms of racial justice or did not include such a framing and then asked about their support for abortion rights. Conditional indirect effects of framing on policy support were found through the mediating mechanisms of moral outrage and realistic threat. In Experiment 2, participants imagined themselves as physicians deciding whether to perform abortions under highly restrictive laws while the patient (described as either Black or White) is experiencing complications, then asked about their willingness to perform the procedure. For the second experiment, conditional indirect effects were found through the mediating mechanism of perceived patient symptom severity. Implications of these findings for maternal health and mortality in the Dobbs era are discussed.