Americans Aren't as Divided on Abortion Rights as It Seems: Survey

Most voters want women to have access to safe and affordable abortions.

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The state of abortion access in America is, to put it bluntly, not very good. While the procedure has been legal since 1973 with the passage of Roe v. Wade, states have enacted more than 1,000 laws that restrict a woman's access to the procedure. About 25 percent of those laws have been passed in the past five years alone. 

For years, polls have suggested that Americans are extremely divided on the issue: 55 percent say it should be legal all or most of the time, and 40 percent say it should be illegal all or most of the time. But according to a new national poll, a great deal of our understanding about how voters view the abortion debate is inaccurate. A new survey conducted by PerryUndem
Research/Communication for the National Institute for Reproductive Health found that, contrary to what it seems, a majority of voters support a woman's access to abortion, and want it to be easily accessible and affordable. 

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The survey polled 1,109 registered voters between Dec. 17 of last year and Jan. 15 of this year, and found that only 45 percent of voters were aware of the "recent trend of states passing laws making it harder for women to get abortion care." Slightly more than half of voters — 55 percent — either didn't know (35 percent) or were unsure (20 percent) about the existence of these laws. The survey alerted voters to the nature of the around 300 laws passed since 2010 that make it harder for women to obtain abortions, and polled them about their attitudes towards these laws. 

"Once you start to show people the sheer volume of state legislators' efforts to undermine women's rights and women's access to abortion care, and demonstrate to [voters] what that means for women," voters are "shocked" and "appalled," said NIRH president Andrea Miller.

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Sixty-three percent of respondents said they believed the laws were "going in the wrong direction," which was a majority opinion across every demographic group except for Republicans, who were more evenly divided on the issue.

After hearing about the laws, a little more than half of voters said they would pay "closer attention" to politicians' views on reproductive rights, and 51 percent were less likely to want to re-elect candidates who put up roadblocks to abortion access. 

Prior to conducting the online survey, PerryUndem and the NIRH held 34 focus groups across eight states including those hostile to abortion rights, like Texas and Ohio, and liberal enclaves in New York and Colorado. Miller said that the debate in focus groups was far more nuanced and complicated than what leading polls by Pew and Gallup suggest. 

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"With public polling on abortion," said PerryUndem partner Tresa Undem, "the standard question is about legality." An example of a typical question about abortion from a Gallup poll: "Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal under only certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?"

"This has been the question that's been asked for years and years and years," she said. But in focus groups, Undem noticed that people who might say abortion should only be legal in certain cases tended to have other pro-choice views.

"Almost half of them would have views that you wouldn't expect. Half of them don't want to overturn Roe. More than half want a woman to feel supported during the experience. So, there's something wrong with that question that's been asked over and over, where it's just not measuring opinion accurately," she said.

"What we found, across the board," Miller explained, "is that there isn't an understanding of the full scope" of the abortion laws being passed at the state level. Based on the focus groups, the NIRH poll administered a new set of questions that focused on asking voters what they wanted the abortion experience to be like for women, and how they felt about the new laws being introduced at the state level.

Voters want abortion to be "the antithesis, the opposite experience, of the direction that all of the state laws are going," Miller said. "We need to start engaging people in this discussion in a different way if we want to not only reflect and respect people's true attitudes about abortion, but also start to change the political and policy discourse in a way that is truly representative."

The findings suggest that, although lawmakers are fighting to defund Planned Parenthood and abortion providers are facing increased harassment, voters are relatively supportive of abortion.  Most voters "actually want a woman who has decided to have an abortion to be supported, to feel like her decision is being respected ... to be able to have it accessible, affordable, in her community without embarrassment, without pressure," Miller said.

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From: Cosmopolitan
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