Abortion: The coming pro-life majority?

“Here we come,” said Ashley McGuire in WashingtonPost.com. For decades, urban sophisticates have dismissed those of us who oppose abortion as “religious zealots in the Bible Belt,” fighting in vain to hold back the tide of modernity. But it looks like we’re winning the battle for America’s hearts and minds. A Gallup poll last week found that only 41 percent of Americans now consider themselves “pro-choice”—a record low, and a precipitous drop of six percentage points from July 2011. Meanwhile, 50 percent now identify as “pro-life.” Forty years after Roe v. Wade, “we seem to be in the midst of a sea change,” said Dorinda Bordlee in NationalReview.com. Millions of women have learned the hard way about the “devastating consequences” of having an abortion, while advances in fetal imaging have revealed the humanity of the unborn child in a way that trumps all rhetoric.

Actually, this poll is probably a meaningless “outlier,” said Ed Kilgore in WashingtonMonthly.com. For 15 years, abortion polls have found a consistent plurality of about 49 percent of Americans self-identifying as “pro-choice.” Such a dramatic swing in a year suggests an error in sampling. Even if the poll is accurate, said Adam Serwer in MotherJones.com, its findings are more complicated than pro-lifers would have you believe. Regardless of labels, 52 percent say they favor legal abortion in certain circumstances, and another 25 percent want it legal in all circumstances. Only 20 percent, Gallup found, are true “pro-lifers,” who want abortion banned in all or nearly all circumstances. Labels aside, most Americans’ “views on whether abortion should be legal haven’t actually changed at all.”

“But that’s the puzzle,” said William Saletan in Slate.com. On other issues involving sexual behavior and reproduction—from contraception to gay marriage—public attitudes have become far more liberal in recent years. Support for legal abortion, however, is “barely holding its ground.” Let’s face it: Americans have real moral qualms about the killing of unborn fetuses. Most of us see this as a complicated moral issue, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. We subscribe neither to the pure pro-life view that a fertilized egg instantly acquires the same personhood as a newborn baby, nor to the pure pro-choice view that a five-month fetus is just a clump of tissue, to be excised at will. I’m pro-choice in the first trimester, but pro-life overall—and I apparently have a lot of company.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up