Ethics Newsline®

From the Gallup News Service:

“An abortion rights march of ‘historic size’ is being planned for Washington, D.C., this weekend…. The march presents a good opportunity to review where the public stands on abortion, and how abortion is likely to factor as an election issue.

“Americans are sharply divided in their identification with the two political sides of the abortion debate: 48 percent consider themselves ‘pro-choice,’ while 45 percent identify as ‘pro-life.’

“A different question designed to tap more specific attitudes about the legality of abortion finds Americans generally favoring restrictive laws. More than half the public says abortion should be ‘legal only in a few circumstances’ (40 percent) or ‘illegal in all circumstances’ (17 percent). Four in 10 favor less restrictive laws, saying abortion should be ‘legal under any circumstances’ (26 percent) or ‘legal under most circumstances’ (14 percent).

“But when asked whether the current laws should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are, only 37 percent want stricter laws. The plurality — 40 percent — wants the laws to remain as they are, while a smaller percentage (20 percent) thinks they should be less strict.

“This leads to one of the prime motivating factors behind this weekend’s event: the future makeup of the Supreme Court….

“Last fall, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll measured public reaction to the charge that Bush wants to ban all abortions in the United States. Exactly 50 percent said he does; 37 percent said he does not, while 13 percent had no opinion.

“A different question is whether the perception of being anti-abortion will hurt Bush at the polls in November. It appears that the net effect of perceptions that Bush wishes to ban abortion is not entirely damaging to his potential re-election. Of those who think Bush will ban all abortions, more than half (58 percent) said this will have no effect on their support for him. Seventeen percent said it would make them more likely to vote for him, while just slightly more, 23 percent, said it will make them less likely….

“Abortion attitudes have been quite stable over the past several years. In fact, for most of the nearly 30 years Gallup has been tracking abortion attitudes, the majority has preferred to see abortion legal, but only under certain circumstances. The percentage holding one or the other of the extreme positions has shifted somewhat. The percentage saying abortion should be legal in all circumstances gradually rose from 21 percent in 1975 to 34 percent in 1992, and then slipped back to the 25 percent range in 1996, at about which it has stayed ever since. The percentage saying abortion should never be legal has varied from a low of 12 percent in 1995 to a high of 22 percent as recently as May 2002.

“Gallup typically finds small differences in men and women’s attitudes on abortion. Consistent with this, an aggregate of abortion surveys from 2001 to 2003 finds no statistical difference in the percentage of men and women identifying with the pro-choice and pro-life labels. Overall, 47 percent of men and 48 percent of women call themselves ‘pro-choice,’ while 45 percent of men and 43 percent of women call themselves ‘pro-life.’

“Younger women and baby boom-era women are a bit more likely to be pro-choice than older women are. …[T]he average ‘pro-choice’ figure for women aged 18 to 49 (52 percent) is significantly higher than the average of 42 percent among women 50 and older….”