America Supports Abortion
A pro-choice polling explainer
If you’re watching election coverage online or on cable television, chances are you’re getting as mad as I am. I keep watching pundits and ‘experts’ throw around absolutely nonsense numbers on how Americans feel about abortion. So in the interest of quelling my rage, here’s an explainer with the real data on public opinion and abortion.
Most Americans (61%) believe abortion should be legal. According to Gallup, a record high number of people (69%) believe abortion should be legal in the first trimester, 63% want abortion medication to be legal, and the majority of Americans believe abortion is morally okay.
On abortion later in pregnancy: Conservatives like to focus on the fact that support for abortion rights drops after the first trimester—from 69% to 37%. They believe it’s proof that their 15-week abortion bans are ‘reasonable’. (More on this in a moment.)
But what Republicans and the anti-abortion movement don’t like to talk about is that support for abortion in the second trimester has jumped by nearly 10 points in the last few years. In 2018, only 28% of Americans supported abortion in the second trimester—now 37% do. That’s a really significant!
In fact, there’s been a big increase generally when it comes to support for abortion no matter the stage of pregnancy. It’s an indication that Americans are starting to understand that pregnancy is too complicated to legislate.
For example, in 2018, just 11% of women thought abortion should be legal throughout pregnancy; now it’s 25%. Young people (ages 18-34) are also leading the charge: 33% believe abortion should be legal throughout pregnancy, up from 14% in 2018.
And in a poll from PerryUndem on ‘viability’ and pro-choice ballot measures, respondents were actually 15 percentage points more likely to support a hypothetical ballot measure when it didn’t include a ‘viability’ restriction: 45% said they’d vote ‘yes’ on a measure with no restrictions, while 30% said they’d support a version with restrictions.
Tresa Undem, a co-founder of PerryUndem, said that while even five years ago people supported a viability mandate, today, “People are saying, ‘I don’t want the government involved in this at all.’”
That’s just part of the reason why conservatives’ claim that Americans support 15-week abortion bans is such bullshit. We know voters are only getting more pro-choice by the day. The other thing to note is that the polling they’re referring to actually asked respondents whether they supported a 15-week abortion ban or “abortion up until birth.” Those were the only two options!
The truth is that Americans reject the notion that 15-week bans are ‘reasonable compromises’ by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
What’s more, conservatives are increasingly more supportive of abortion rights since Dobbs, and as a FiveThirtyEight report pointed out— “no subgroup in Gallup’s data has become notably more conservative on first-trimester abortion since Dobbs.”
All of which is to say: American supports abortion. Period. And if pundits want to talk about abortion rights, they should remember as much.
Ohio comes through!!! Thank you Jessica! For your tireless efforts to share all that’s going on to keep women from reproductive freedom!
As a Feminist and Transfeminist organizer and activist of Jewish descent, let me add in here that I'm absolutely loving the lawsuits against reproductive justice restrictions on religious grounds, as even my Orthodox Rabbi taught us in Sunday school that a gross fetus was not alive/not a person until it took it's first breath and the 'mother' (today I would definitely say pregnant person, but I'm using his words) always takes precedence...