Surge in US voters backing legal abortion as midterms loom

Alistair Dawber

Support for legalized abortion is growing in the United States, according to a new poll, putting voters at odds with politicians working to ban terminations.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn almost 50 years of federal abortion access, support for the rights of women to choose has grown. The ruling handed power over the issue back to states, several of which have moved to effectively ban terminations.

There appears to be a gulf, however, between mainly Republican officials seeking tougher restrictions on abortion and voters.

The latest poll, commissioned by The Wall Street Journal, showed that 60 per cent of voters believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The number is up from 55 per cent in March, before the decision of the Court in Dobbs v Jackson which dissolved enshrined abortion rights.

Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said that terminations should be illegal except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered, compared with 30 per cent in March. Six per cent of people said that abortion should be illegal in all cases, down from 11 per cent.

The court’s decision has thrust abortion rights to the front of the national political debate before midterm elections in November. President Biden has said that he is looking for ways for the federal government to act, but with only thin majorities in both houses of Congress he has pressed voters to elect more Democrats if they want federal abortion protections.

Dobbs also appears to have galvanised activists who have mobilised across the country.

Writing in The New York Times, Tom Bonier, a Democrat and the chief executive of TargetSmart, a data and polling company, said that women were registering to vote in large numbers. “In my 28 years analysing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed,” he said.

Republican politicians have largely welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, and in states such as Texas and Oklahoma it is becoming almost impossible to have a legal abortion. Other states are looking at ways to clamp down on women who travel across state lines for a termination and to make it a criminal offence to help women seeking an abortion.

“Abortion is not an issue that most people, prior to Dobbs, spent a lot of time thinking about,” Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster who conducted the poll with Republican colleagues, told the Journal. “What Dobbs has done is, one, we’ve had a national conversation about it. Two, it has gone from hypothetical to real.”

Democrat voters are unsurprisingly most in favour of abortion rights, with 92 per cent saying it should be legal in all or most cases. One per cent of party supporters said that it should be illegal in all cases.While Republicans are more sympathetic to Dobbs, 27 per cent think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Fifty-six per cent said it should be illegal except in limited cases and 11 per cent said it should be illegal in all cases.

Voters will cast their midterm ballots while considering a number of issues, but the decision in Dobbs has made abortion one of the most important. In Kansas, a state that tilts heavily towards the Republicans, a referendum last month on abortion access resulted in a healthy majority for terminations remaining legal.

Likewise, in a special election for New York’s 19th congressional district seat a fortnight ago, Pat Ryan, the Democrat who campaigned on an overtly pro-choice platform, beat his Republican rival in what is typically regarded as a bellweather seat and one that might ordinarily be expected to go to the Republicans during a Democrat presidency.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/growing-number-of-americans-back-legalised-abortion-6hb58pp0k