Exploring the Underlying Poll Numbers behind Abortion (3)

Should Abortion be . . . legal/illegal in all/most cases?

Entry 3 in this series, we’re going to look at the underlying survey numbers from Pew, AP-NORC, Quinnipiac and Marquette on their question (indistinguishably worded, as we saw yesterday) “Which comes closest to your opinion on abortion? Abortion should be . . . Legal/illegal in all/most cases.” (That’s AP-NORC’s wording.)

Numbers

Let’s start off looking at the most recent numbers.

Pew’s are from early March, and their breakdown is: 25% legal in all cases, 36% legal in most cases, 27% illegal in most cases, and 10% illegal in all cases. (We’ll get to plotting trends over time in a minute, but for now note that those numbers are roughly unchanged from Pew’s results in different surveys from recent history.) 2% had no answer.

AP’s numbers are from mid-May, shortly after the May 2 leaking of the Dobbs draft decision, repealing Roe, that mostly matched the ultimately released decision. Their breakdown: 32% legal in all cases, 33% legal in most cases, 26% illegal in most cases, and 8% illegal in all cases. The numbers look slightly more pro-abortion. Maybe that reflects movement since the leak, although a margin or error of 4.0 percentage points suggests otherwise—except when it comes to the “legal in all” category. 1% are unaccounted for, providing some form of “no answer.”

Here’s Quinnipiac, numbers gathered during the same 5-day timeframe as the AP: 31% legal in all cases, 34% legal in most cases, 20% illegal in most cases, and 10% illegal in all cases. Quinnipiac had a full 5% reply “don’t know/no answer.” Quinnipiac also had a narrower margin of error at only 2.5 percentage points.

Finally, here’s Marquette’s early May numbers: 29% legal in all cases, 38% legal in most cases, 24% illegal in most cases, and 8% illegal in all cases. 1% skipped the question.

The Four Options

At this point, I actually want to take an aside to ask: what do those 4 options mean? “Legal in all cases” is clear enough: the belief that babies have no legal rights until they are outside the womb with oxygen in their lungs. The biology behind that bright line may be a bit dodgy, but it’s clear what that means.

All the other three are murkier, though. “Abortion should be illegal in all cases.” That sounds straightforward enough, but—what about the case of ectopic pregnancies? An ectopic pregnancy (literally from Greek meaning “out of place”), per the Mayo Clinic, “occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus . . . An ectopic pregnancy can't proceed normally. The fertilized egg can't survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated.” (Emphasis added.)

If you’re suspicious about the Mayo Clinic being soft on the personhood of unborn children, here’s bona fide pro-lifer Allie Beth Stuckey making the same claim about the physical impossibility of handling an ectopic pregnancy, and here again (at length). It’s also the case, though, that some pro-lifers (such as Stuckey) categorize treatment of that differently altogether: “Miscarriage care and the removal of an ectopic pregnancy are not abortions.” (Emphasis added.)

The practical question I have: when people say that abortion should be illegal in all cases, do they include treatment for ectopic pregnancies, or do they mean refuse to categorize those as abortions altogether? It doesn’t add much variability to the discussion, but it’s at least worth noting.

The two “most” responses are obviously intriguing, since they invite the question of where people draw the line. Why would abortion be legal “in most cases”? Is an unborn baby human some of the time? I’m speculating that the most plausible read of this is that these respondents think that abortion should be legal for most of a pregnancy, but not at the end where it’s undeniably a recognizable baby just a couple inches away from the outside world.

I think this was sort of reflected by Joe Rogan’s musings recently: “It gets weird when the baby gets like six months old . . . I am 100% for a woman's right to choose. But as a human being, just a person observing things, there's a big difference between a little clump of cells and a fetus with the eyeball and the beating heart.” (I don’t know how you square those opinions. Is it unduly mean to say that Joe Rogan is “interesting to hear, but not to listen to?”) And yes, as pro-lifers pointed out, babies develop those eyeballs and heartbeats around 6-8 weeks.

Similarly with “illegal in most.” I would guess that this refers to the philosophically-unsound-but-politically-ubiquitous carveouts for cases of rape and incest.

I say “guess,” but we also have the option of looking at Marquette’s breakdown of specific policies. They asked about several, but one of them was about the same 6-month threshold Joe Rogan mentioned, namely: “[Ban abortions after 6 months of pregnancy] Here are some limits on when during pregnancy an abortion might be banned, except in cases of medical emergencies, that some states are considering. How much do you favor or oppose each of these proposals?”

The percent that either strongly or somewhat favored this was 46 + 19 = 65%. That’s pretty close to the complement of the 25-to-32% that believe in “legal in all cases” above, suggesting that, if people are asked about time limits (like Marquette asked them) (rather than anatomical limits), that probably is more or less what they mean.

First Plots Over Time

The first plots we’ll look at are Pew’s. Pew itself displays their trends thus:

As we saw from their questioning, we can break each of those into 2 separate lines. Here’s what that looks like, going back to the their data from June 2001:

The colors red/orange/gold/green represent “illegal in all”/etc. The story here is a little more confused. (Although there wasn’t much of a story to the first graph in the first place.) If you squint, it looks like green is trending down, red is trending up, and the sizable majority of Americans in “most cases” one way or the other aren’t really budging.

There’ll be more to come tomorrow, hopefully wrapping up trend lines for the other 3 pollsters and then circling back to the various spins on this information.