Abortion: A new pro-life majority?

last updated 8 January 2015

Looks like we “pro-lifers aren’t the oddballs that we’re cracked up to be,” said Dennis Byrne in the Chicago Tribune. In this time of supposed conservative decline, 51 percent of Americans recently told Gallup pollsters that they considered themselves “pro-life,” while only 42 percent went with “pro-choice.” Not only is this the first time pro-lifers have been in the majority since Gallup started asking the question in 1995, it marks a jolting shift in public opinion from even last year, when the percentages were 50–44 in favor of the pro-choicers. We should be wary of reading too much into a single poll, said Michael New in National Review Online, but “no political movement has ever been hurt by gaining public support.” More and more people, it appears, are coming to the conclusion that abortion is murder.

Not so, said David Frum in Canada’s National Post. The Gallup poll is misleading, “and threatens to send Republicans careening in precisely the worst possible direction.” For some strange reason, Gallup heavily “oversampled” Republicans in this poll: Thirty-two percent of those interviewed were self-described Republicans, when only about 20 percent of the voting public now identifies with the GOP. Including too many Republicans skews the result, especially as those still loyal to the party are mostly hard-core social conservatives, who are zealous in their opposition to abortion. But adamant opposition to abortion is a major turnoff to moderates, highly educated whites, and women—critical voting blocs the GOP has alienated. So if the party reads this poll as a green light to become more strident about making abortion illegal, it will reduce its already narrow appeal.

What all the polls on abortion show, said William Saletan in Slate.com, is that Americans have complicated, mixed, and even contradictory feelings about abortion. About two out of three people, polls indicate, view abortion as the taking of a human life. Yet 72 percent say it should be legal, at least in the first trimester. That’s why the majority identified themselves as “pro-choice” during the Bush administration, when the public worried we were headed back to the bad old days of illegal backstreet abortions. Now, with Obama and the Democrats in power, “people feel more confident that abortion will stay legal, and therefore they’re more willing to focus on their moral discomfort with it,” leading to a spike in “pro-life” numbers. On abortion, America is right where it’s been for decades—in the murky, uncomfortable middle.