News
Featured Image
 LifeSiteNews

July 16, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A Democratic pollster undermined one of the abortion lobby’s most persistent narratives recently by acknowledging that male and female attitudes on abortion are the opposite of what’s commonly assumed.

“Well, actually, women are less likely to be pro-choice,” Lake Research Partners president Celinda Lake told The Hill’s Joe Concha as part of the publication’s new public opinion show, “What America's Thinking.” Though people generally assume the opposite, she explained that was due to the fact that women tend to be more religious than men.

Polling data from a variety of organizations consistently shows that a majority of Americans would allow abortions in “few” or “no” circumstances. Gallup’s June 2018 poll on the subject concludes that abortion is “not an issue about which women have substantially different attitudes than men.”

The poll finds that men and women are equally likely to want abortion illegal without exceptions at 19 percent, that women are 5 percent more likely than men to want abortion legal in all circumstances, and that women are 5 percent more likely to think abortion should be legal “only under some circumstances.” The ambiguous “some” category is a source of recurring confusion in abortion polling, and Gallup does not offer a more precise breakdown.

Gallup also finds that women are 3 percent less likely to identify as pro-life, and 4 percent more likely to identify as “pro-choice,” though self-identification has been narrow and fluctuated since 2004. The only case in which women are significantly more favorable to abortion is among college graduates, by a margin of 10 percent.

Pro-abortion activists regularly assert that “pro-choice” is the default position of American women, as part of their broader narrative that abortion is a woman’s “reproductive right” and a defining value of modern feminism. But past overviews of polling data have found no consistent gender gap on the question, concluding that factors such as marriage and religiosity are more impactful variables than sex.

Lake also said, “millennials think that Roe v. Wade happened right after the American Revolution. They have no idea that there was ever a time when abortions were illegal.”

It’s unclear if she meant the statement literally, but The Hill referenced a 2013 Pew poll which found that only 44 percent of those aged 18-29 knew that the 1973 Supreme Court ruling dealt with abortion, 24 percent didn’t know the case’s subject at all and 33 percent were under the impression it concerned a different issue, such as education or the environment.

Pro-lifers have long attributed the fact that Roe is more popular than abortion itself to widespread misinformation about the case, such as polls falsely suggesting it only permits abortions in the first trimester, or ignorance of the facts that it ignored the question of when life begins and that many pro-abortion legal experts admit it was legally flawed.

“The Pew Research Center survey described Roe v. Wade as having ‘established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy,’” political science professor and pro-life researcher Michael New wrote this week, resulting in support for Roe above 60 percent. “However, when the Los Angeles Times described Roe v. Wade as the decision ‘which permits a woman to get an abortion from a doctor at any time’ – support fell to 43 percent.”