For decades, both sides in the abortion debate have tried to say that public opinion was already on their side and only becoming more so.
Advocates for abortion rights have pointed to polls showing that a majority of Americans support Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. Abortion opponents have cited polls showing that a majority considers life to begin at conception – and opposes abortion access in many cases.
As with so many other areas this blog covers, abortion is one in which selective readings of the polls can seem to prove opposite conclusions. After writing about abortion and public opinion in Sunday’s Times – arguing that the issue does not benefit Democrats as much as other high-profile subjects, like immigration, guns, taxes and same-sex marriage – I wanted to dig more deeply into the polls and their trend lines. For all the assertions that advocates make about public opinion, I think that a few consistent messages emerge.
The main one is that most Americans support abortion access with some significant restrictions. If you were going to craft a law based strictly on public opinion, it would permit abortion in the first trimester (first 12 weeks) of pregnancy and in cases involving rape, incest or threats to the mother’s health. The law, however, would substantially restrict abortion after the first trimester in many other cases.
Intriguingly, such a policy would be similar to the laws in several European countries, like France, where abortions are widely available in the first trimester and restricted afterward. It would also be consistent with much of Roe v Wade.
In perhaps its most famous decision of the last 50 years, the court overturned a Texas law criminalizing abortion, by a 7-2 vote. The justices found that the right to privacy required women to have access to abortions but that the state also had an interest in restricting abortion, to protect “both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life.” The decision tried to balance these interests by allowing different restrictions depending on trimester. (A later Supreme Court decision changed the standard to emphasize viability.)
When arguing that public opinion supports broad abortion rights, advocates often point to polls showing strong support for Roe. And they are right about that polling. A January 2013 poll by Gallup was typical: 53 percent of respondents said they did not want the court to overturn “its 1973 Roe versus Wade decision concerning abortion,” and only 29 percent did want it overturned.
I don’t imagine that most people who receive a phone call asking their opinion about Roe know the fine details of the decision when they answer the question. But it is worth noting that the strong support for Roe does not necessarily conflict with the strong reservations Americans express about unrestricted abortion access. Roe distinguished among the different stages of pregnancy and different developmental stages of fetuses.
About one in four Americans says they support abortion without restrictions, most polls show. Somewhat fewer Americans – typically about one in five, though it ranges from one in four to one in eight, depending on the poll – oppose abortion in nearly all cases. The rest of the country – roughly 50 percent of it – supports abortion in some circumstances and not others.
Pew’s polls (PDF), including this one from October 2012, show this pattern:
The New York Times/CBS Poll uses a different framework, but the results are consistent. These results are from February 2013:
The Gallup results are also consistent:
As Gallup’s historical chart shows, opinion on abortion has not shifted in a major way over the years. (It also does not vary much by sex, with women as divided as men on the issue.) But if one side has any slight sway on the trends, it is the anti-abortion campaigners’ side. Twenty years ago, the share of Americans saying abortion should always be legal was more than twice as high as the share saying it should never be legal. Since the mid-1990s, the share of Americans who consider themselves as abortion rights advocates (or “pro-choice” in the poll’s available answers) has also declined:
On abortion, as with almost any issue, short poll questions and answers do not capture the full complexity of people’s views. The standard Gallup questions about trimesters do not mention exceptions, for instance. And although a recent National Journal poll may seem on the surface to suggest that a plurality of Americans support the restrictions that the Texas Legislature passed last weekend, the bill includes details — no exceptions for rape or incest, the effective closing of most of the state’s clinics — that most Americans would quite likely oppose. On the flip side, some people who oppose a broad abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy also oppose abortion access in some instances, like, for example, for economic reasons or in cases when prenatal screening shows the fetus to have a nonfatal condition.
But be wary of analysts who try to take this complexity argument too far. It’s true that any snapshot of public opinion from a poll is imperfect. It is not true that if you scratch only under poll results deeply enough, you will discover the American people actually take a clear side on abortion. By any objective measure, the country is conflicted.