Objective:

This paper aims at understanding the correlation of cognitive development and university students’ attitude toward abortion. Cognitive development is the implementation of information processing skills that allow us to adapt to the environment as an indicator of the individual intelligence. Academic achievement has been associated to intelligence rather than to the subject’s integrative ability to the local educative system. This system might be imperfect or ideologized. Though there are biases against abortion, it is commonly justified in educative systems from a reductionist perspective.

Methods:

The researcher follows a quantitative, transversal, correlational and cuasi-experimental approach. Final grades at senior high school and average grading at the university were used to assess academic achievement; abstract reasoning assessment was completed using Blum, Galibert, Abal, Lozzia, and Attorresi’s (2001) tool; whereas Cucalón and Marcial (2017) was used to explore students’ attitude towards abortion.

Results:

The findings show there is a significant relationship between academic performance at the university (as an index of the level of integration to the educational system) and the positive attitude towards abortion. Abstract reasoning, the most representative skill of human cognitive development, results the variable of lowest ranks.

Conclusión:

Educational authorities should reconsider the quality of the educational system and its ideologizing effect. The attitudes towards abortion do no correlates to cognitive development but to the individual capacity to adapt to the imperfect educative system. The author reaches at the conclusions that idelologizing capacity is a product of the own educative system, and calls the attention on the need of rethinking the targets of our society and higher education in the country.