Fox News poll: Pro-Life 49%, Pro-Choice 43%

posted at 1:16 pm on May 19, 2009 by Patrick Ishmael
[ Abortion ]    printer-friendly

Following Gallup’s report from Friday, Fox News now confirms with its own poll that the number of Pro-Life Americans is apparently on the rise.

The poll finds 49 percent of voters today describe themselves as “pro-life” and 43 percent as “pro-choice” on the issue of abortion.  This is the first time more voters have described themselves as pro-life in the poll since April 2004. 

Last year, the numbers were essentially the reverse of the current findings — at that time 41 percent said they were pro-life and 49 percent pro-choice (September 2008).

Over the last 12 years of polling on this question, more people identified as pro-choice in all but four polls. 

Why Fox’s finding was buried in a more wide-ranging report on “Where Americans Stand on the Issues” is anyone’s guess, but the pro-life/pro-choice results do serve to underline the fact that attitudes on abortion are in flux. Whether it’s the fiasco at Notre Dame where abortion — a practice that has wiped out between one-quarter and one-third of my generation  – was lumped in by Catholic administrators as only one issue in an apparent “basket of issues,” or something else is still unclear. And statistically, it’s unclear how enduring this trend will be.

But make no mistake: This is emerging as a major civil and human rights issue, as William McGurn alluded in the Wall Street Journal today (and was linked to in the headlines): 

In the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, there is a wonderful photograph of Father Ted Hesburgh — then Notre Dame president — linking hands with Martin Luther King Jr. at a 1964 civil-rights rally at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Today, nearly four decades and 50 million abortions after Roe v. Wade, there is no photograph of similar prominence of any Notre Dame president taking a lead at any of the annual marches for life.

Father Jenkins is right: That’s not ambiguity. That’s a statement.

Perhaps a poll conducted two years ago among 18-29 year olds in Missouri — which is (at least almost) always a national bellwether – may have been sign of things to come.

Some have speculated that there is a self-interest component to abortion attitudes, and that the young—particularly young women—ought to be more supportive of legal abortion than those whose childbearing years have passed. That seems to have been true in 1992: those under age 30 (both women and men) were the most strongly pro-choice (39%), and the least strongly pro-life (23%). Those aged 30-49 were just slightly less pro-choice (36% strongly pro-choice / 25% strongly prolife); only those aged 50 and older were evenly divided on the issue (30% strongly pro-choice, 29% strongly pro-life). Moreover, within each of these age groups, women were more strongly pro-choice than men were. 

While this might be evidence for the self-interest hypothesis, something interesting happened to the newest voters entering the electorate. Today’s 18-29 year olds are as strongly pro-life (36%) as older voters, and are less strongly prochoice (18%) than their elders. This youngest cohort’s passage into adulthood coincided with the ascendance of partial-birth abortion as the issue’s dominant frame; for them, the “abortion wars” of the 1980s and early 1990s were a dim memory at best. This is also the generation for whom fetal ultrasound images (often of a very high quality) have become ubiquitous, which has doubtlessly increased the sensitivity of many to the possible humanity of the unborn child. Furthermore, these voters have come of age with legal abortion, perhaps with the realization that they themselves could have been aborted had their parents “chosen” differently. As a result, today’s young voters have had their perceptions of the abortion issue shaped by many considerations other than a self-interested desire to divorce sex from its consequences. Indeed, particularly for those who may have reflected on the narrowness with which they themselves might have escaped abortion, the whole notion of self-interest seems to have been stood on its head.

I hope what we’re seeing continues. This is the right direction, but there is still a long, long way to go.

Blowback