Not Seeing the Trees for the Forest

In The abortion controversy: Conflicting beliefs and values in American society (Tamney et al. 1992), we presented a path model which attempts to help explain why people hold the particular attitude toward abortion which they do. Baggaley (1992) proposes that this description can be significantly simplified. We believe this critique is a case of seeing the forest and ignoring the differences in the trees. We might first say that, indeed, Baggaley's composite score for the six individual variables in our model which he includes in that score could be a measure of what Hunter (1991) has called orthodox moral vision or orthodoxy on the part of religious conservatives (vs. orthodoxy on the part of religious liberals). However, combining these variables ignores important inter-relationships which our model points out among these six variables. For instance, in our model four of Baggaley's five variables directly relate to abortion attitude (the major dependent variable in our model), but political ideology did notL Furthermore, we found a significant negative relationship between a belief in life-at-conception and a belief that abortion is a private matter. We would argue that the latter relationship is due only to the fact that these two beliefs are the major ideological foundations for a pro-life or a pro-choice attitude, respectively (i.e., iif you hold one, you wouldn't hold the other), and not due to the general nature of these two beliefs. Baggaley finds correlations between our demographic (vs. more attitudinal) variables and his composite score. One important finding in our model is that social traditionalism is an important foundation for the pro-life position of conservative Protestants, buit not for Catholics. (In fact, we found that Catholics tended to be somewhat less traditional than other religious groups.) This important finding would not have been discovered without examining the individual relationships between each variable in Baggaley's composite score and these demographic variables. Baggaley also criticizes our use of LISREL analysis. We spent some time in the

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