That, thankfully, is not the face of America.
Vox recently
commissioned a poll from communications and strategy firm PerryUndem, which has done a lot of healthcare polling, to find out how people really feel about abortion. What they got isn't too surprising, if you're a thinking, feeling human being able to appreciate nuance and the fact that life is messy and hard, but it totally flies in the face of all the rest of the polling and the politics of abortion in this country. Because it shows that
public opinion on abortion isn't black and white.
The first thing to know: 39 percent of the respondents in this poll don't identify as either pro-life or pro-choice, and how the public answers about what they do and don't believe should be legal depends a lot on how the questions are asked.
Our pollsters, Mike Perry and Tresa Undem, gave a different question to the two halves of our polling panel. They asked one half whether they agreed with the statement "Abortion should be legal in almost all cases." The other half got a different wording of a similar idea: "Women should have a legal right to safe and accessible abortion in almost all cases."
Twenty-eight percent of the public agreed with the first statement—and 37 percent with the second. That's a jump of nine percentage points in who thinks abortion ought to be generally legal, just by highlighting the fact that a woman is involved in the situation.
Delving deeper into that, huge majorities believe a woman having an abortion should have a positive experience:
Seventy-two percent want the experience to be comfortable. Seventy-three percent want it to be supportive, and 74 percent want it to be nonjudgmental.
Most Americans (70 percent) think women shouldn’t have to travel more than 60 miles to obtain an abortion. These numbers are higher than those who support the Roe v. Wade decision (68 percent) and much higher than those who think abortion ought to be legal in most or some situations (46 percent).
It gets
even more nuanced. When the people who would put the most legal restrictions on abortion, without outlawing it, are asked, 53 percent believe
Roe v. Wade should not be overturned, and "71 percent said they would give support to a close friend or family member who had an abortion, 69 percent said they want the experience of having an abortion to be nonjudgmental, 66 percent said they want the experience to be supportive, 64 percent want the experience to be affordable, and 59 percent want the experience to be without added burdens."
Here's something else: 73 percent were not aware of the fact that 1 in 3 women have had an abortion by age 45—they say that's a higher figure than they thought.
The fetus-obsessed far right has largely succeeded in taking the woman out of the debate. The pro-choice community has to figure out how to get her back in to it if we're going to succeed in stopping and in rolling back the wave of anti-woman, forced birth legislation sweeping the country.