Premarital sexual permissiveness, personality factors and religiosity as predictors of attitude towards abortion among Nigerian female undergraduates

Abstract

The Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey affirmed the high rate of abortion when it revealed that 91.73 percent of government hospitals and 97.58 percent of private hospitals in Nigeria have attended to patients suffering from abortion complications on an annual basis. This study therefore examined, premarital sexual permissiveness, personality factors and religiosity as predictors of attitude towards abortion among female undergraduate students in a Federal University located in the Southwestern part of Nigeria. A Cross-sectional survey research design was adopted with convenient sampling technique used in selecting the participants, who consisted of 348 female students of the said federal university. The age of the participants ranged between 17-27 years with 243 of them being Christians and 105 being Muslims. Findings revealed that personality, sexual permissiveness and religiosity jointly predicted attitude towards abortion (p<.05) and accounted for 11.5% of the variance in attitude towards abortion among female undergraduate students. Results show that personality traits of openness to experience (β=.201; p<.05) and neuroticism (β=-.222; p<.05) emerged as significant independent predictors of attitude towards abortion among female undergraduates; also, sexual permissiveness (β=.229; p<.05) was a significant independent predictor of attitude towards abortion among female undergraduates. Further results are elaborately captured in the body of this paper. Based on the findings of this study, adequate recommendations were made with directions for future research suggested.
Key words: sexual permissiveness, personality, religiosity, attitude to abortion