The Surprising Stability of American Public Opinion Towards Legal Abortion

• In Event: What Determines Views on Contemporary Political Issues?

Abstract

In recent decades, America has undergone dramatic change in public opinion on a religiously-oriented social issue—attitudes towards same-sex marriage. Yet, at the same time, another prominent religiously-oriented social issue—attitudes towards legal abortion, has barely budged. In fact, in 1975, Gallup found support for legal abortion “under certain circumstances” at 54% and support for illegal in all circumstances at 21%. Those figures in 2019? 53% and 21% respectively. While there’s been, of course, modest movement, the notable feature of public attitudes towards abortion is its amazing stability. And, yet, this stasis has persisted during a period of dramatic change in American politics in public opinion from the dramatic polarization of the parties, to the geographic and demographic realignment of the parties, to the strong left-ward shift on LGBT and related cultural attitudes, to the increasing secularization of Americans.

In our analysis, then, we attempt to explain this surprising stability of abortion attitudes by exploring these attitudes over time among politically-relevant sub-groups based on party, race, gender, religious affiliation, etc., in order to uncover the underlying shifts taking place that are being hidden by the overall stability. We find that the overall stability hides a fairly dramatic polarization of abortion views by party since 1990. Democrats have moved modestly left while moderately decreasing in proportion of the electorate while Republicans have moved more substantially right, while undergoing a smaller positive change in electoral proportions. Republican partisanship plays an especially prominent role in the abortion attitudes of women, college graduates, and frequent church attendees. We also find that the dramatic rise of non-religious Americans—the most liberal religious grouping on abortion-- is almost perfectly offset by strong anti-abortion shift among Evangelicals as they slightly declined in relative number. Our findings help shed light on how abortion attitudes contribute significantly to the increasing levels of party polarization in the mass public.

Authors

• Melissa Deckman, Washington College

• Steven Greene, North Carolina State University

• Mary Kate Lizotte, Augusta University