>Not enough to make it legal when they were in office, and they didn't cite the Church as the reason, they cited population pressure
Which doesn't really support your contention that the Polish population is "pro-choice".
> Because the topic was not Church power to make abortion
> illegal, which can surely have some effect on opinion, it was the connection
> between opinions and churchgoing.
I didn't see anything about churchgoing in the topic. Between this, and some of your later comments (in particular your suggestion that I was alleging an "explosion of religiosity" among Polish youth), I can see that you're missing my point. I never said that the people themselves are necessarily True Believers. What I think is the crucial factor is the way that a powerful church can dictate the terms of the discussion, so that its view becomes the *default* one, to the point that people don't even consciously identify it as a religious belief. They have certainly been able to dictate the terms of the discussion in this country, where they still run 95% of the schools.
> In Italy the controversy is not around
> Catholic doctrine but around fear of being engulfed by immigrants.
I don't think that's entirely accurate either. The language that has been used by mainstream politicians against abortion has been very much the language of the "right to life". Look at the stuff that Giuliano Ferrara was coming out with. Xenophobia has always been a factor in opposition to abortion and at a time when there's a general wave of it sweeping through Europe, of course they're going to make the most of it, but they've hardly abandoned the personhood-from-conception strategy.
> It looks
> to me like socialism or a socialist past or a strong left is a better
> predictor of opinions on abortion than the the depth of Catholicism.
Doesn't explain why you have so many anti-abortion socialists in places like Ireland, Nicaragua, Chile.
> Or how about investigating various factors
> having to do with the strength and history of feminism?
Feminism and a strong Church don't exactly go hand-in-hand, either.