Posted on 01/22/2013 8:23:39 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If you're hung over from drinking the blues away on Inauguration Day, bad news: It's time to open another beer. New numbers on the 40th anniversary of Roe:
According to the poll, 54 percent of adults say that abortion should be legal either always or most of the time, while a combined 44 percent said it should be illegal – either with or without exceptions...
In addition, a whopping 70 percent of Americans oppose the Roe v. Wade decision from being overturned, including 57 percent who feel strongly about this...
By comparison, just 24 percent now want the Roe v. Wade decision overturned, including 21 percent who feel strongly about this position.
Much of this change, the NBC/WSJ pollsters say, is coming from African Americans, Latinos and women without college degrees --- all of whom increasingly oppose the Supreme Court decision from being overturned.
Before today the highest number NBC/WSJ had recorded for keeping abortion legal in all or most cases was 49 percent in 2008. When you drill down into that data, you find that the number who want abortion legal in all cases — no exceptions, presumably not even for late term — is 31 percent, which is also a new high. Say this for Obama’s new coalition — they elected the right guy.
As for overturning Roe, despite the sturm and drang of Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Americans have never been keen on doing so. Pew’s recent poll on abortion found 63 percent opposed to the idea; in 1992, the number was 60 percent. NBC/WSJ sees a bit more movement over time but support for the status quo has been constant through the years in their data too:
Why the recent uptick? NBC’s pollsters speculate it's partly a backlash to the Akin/Mourdock rape comments last year, but I don’t know. My sense is that backlashes like that tend to burn out fairly quickly. Obama won and Akin and Mourdock both lost, so the “threat” of a post-Roe world has passed for abortion supporters. I think the likelier explanation, as noted in the excerpt, is changing demographics. Pew published a set of polls a few weeks after the election showing that the 18-to-29 group that got Obama reelected was also the age demographic most supportive of keeping abortion legal in all or most cases. They were also far more likely — 14 points more likely — than any other age group to say that government should do more than that government is doing too much. Imagine their surprise when they find out America can’t pay for the government it has right now.
Now that you’ve digested those numbers, try to digest this one. Exit question: Do these numbers augur the eventual end of SCOTUS confirmation fights over Roe? A newly elected Republican president would be caught between social conservatives in his base, who want the decision overturned, and pretty much the entire rest of the electorate, which doesn’t. Makes me wonder if GOP candidates won’t start veering away from the idea of getting rid of Roe via new appointments and pushing the idea of a Human Life Amendment instead. They could sell it is a true democratic solution, the way the Founders intended, knowing all the while that it hasn’t a prayer of passing.
Update: Almost forgot: If you believe Pew, a majority of the 18-to-29 group that’s now steering the ship of state and that strongly opposes overturning Roe doesn’t know which issue Roe v. Wade actually dealt with.
Public school products.
I am a stranger in a strange land.
Including most of the members of my church.
This last election was gift-wrapped for the GOP according to all the polls. Two things went wrong (abortion and fraud) and it isn’t possible to say which was the more major. But given that the three GOP senate candidates (Allen, Mourdock, and Atkin) who made any sort of an issue about abortion all got killed, the GOP has no other safe assumption than that it needs to leave the abortion issue alone.
Conservatives don’t abort their children. Liberals do. Why should we stop them?
Apparently we have indeed reached the tipping point - this country is a far cry from the Great Nation I remember from by childhood and early adulthood.
Given the election results last November, this is hardly surprising. Can we PLEASE dispense with the fiction that this is still “a center-right nation”. The current occupant of the WH is a dedicated hard Leftist along the same lines as Hugo Chavez. A center-right nation wouldn’t elect such a person dog catcher let alone anything else.
They need to poll outside of their news rooms.
At best you could make it a state’s right case. At *best*. And a few might actually ban it. A national ban will never EVER happen. It’s going to start costing more and more elections. I don’t like abortion, but if you gotta make a fight out of it, I say move to a country that bans it or try to make it a state thing.
I think the odds of it being even up to any state in the next 100 years is 5% or less and shrinking all the time.
Before I totally give up, I’d like to see a more trustworthy poll on this, as it is a National Barak Channel poll (1000 adults).
I totally agree. Not the nation I knew growing up. It has become a nightmare. I hardly recognize this country anymore. And we are no longer a superpower anymore as well. PLEASE let’s end that fiction as well.
Same here. Stunning isn’t it?
by leaving it alone, what do you mean?
Exactly. The longer we live in the bubble the worse it will be .... and it is BAD.
America is a pathetic shadow of what it once was.
Morally bankrupt. The culture is an open-sewer. And the government/media complex has turned the country into a one-party statist entity, ruling a population of dependent serfs. Everything that used to be defined as good and virtuous are now deemed evil, and everything that used to be defined as evil is now praised and celebrated.
It’s quite a thing to behold. Especially for those of us that have memories and knowledge of the greatness that was this country.
The timing of the release of this poll is not mere happenstance. The 40th anniversary of Roe vs Wade and the annual March for Life in Washington on January 25th will be large and enthusiastic. The MSM propaganda in the form of a poll is intended to marginalize those who believe life begins at conception and should be protected.
How was it gifted wrapped with Romney as the candidate, who was nearly identical to obama on social issues.
Well, you should know on most items of concern to conservatives.
It should have been gifted wrapped if the Republicans had not run a liberal.
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