The Complexity of Views on Abortion Policy

One of the most significant challenges in public opinion research is explaining the nuances, complexity, and seeming inconsistency of people’s issue positions. The desire for a tidy, hoped-for binary story of simplicity is strong. It dominates media and is an even stronger feature of social media. But human opinions tend to be complicated in ways that defy simple classification. Probably the best example of this is abortion.

Though abortion tends to be seen through a binary lens of pro- and anti-abortion viewpoints, the actual range and nuance of public opinion on the question is quite complicated. The first point in any abortion story is that the public generally wants abortion to be available, but with some limits on the timing. When asked up until which week should a woman be able to obtain an abortion, just under a quarter of the sample takes one of the two extreme positions: 13% want abortion effectively outlawed, while 10% want to see it available through the entire pregnancy (36-40 weeks, the highest category possible).

Things get more complex when we examine the number of people who respond to a different question with an extreme opinion. This question — one frequently asked by pollsters — asks about how often abortion should be legal or illegal, with 23% saying it should be legal in all cases and 7% saying it should be illegal in all cases.

But what does “all cases” mean? The wording of this traditional question allows for multiple interpretations. Is it the case of a given pregnancy? Is it time? Is it a window of opportunity for a given woman? Is it some other standard?

When we cross the two questions described here, the issue of nuance emerges more clearly. Presumably if someone responds to the question of weeks with “0” they should want abortion to be illegal in all circumstances, but of those who responded “0” just 34% believed that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Why? Presumably the first question suggested typical situations or cued something like “any reason” in the mind of the respondent. Just 4%of our respondents were consistently in favor of both 0 weeks and abortion being illegal in all cases. Just 7% of our respondents consistently wanted abortion legal throughout the entire range of weeks and in all circumstances.

One common response to data like this is to suggest that public opinion is simply mushy and unreasonable — a function of people paying little attention to the issue or feeling ambivalent. Perhaps that is true for some people, but there are ways to harmonize all of these responses. A person might believe that any given woman should be able to obtain an abortion for any reason but that she should only be able to do so until a certain week in the pregnancy. A person might believe that any given pregnancy should not be aborted until they are told that there are extenuating circumstances. In both cases, the person thinks of a baseline case (though in different ways) and then reasons through a specific question wording based on assumptions they bring to the questionnaire. This is part of why abortion responses are so difficult to reconcile.

Some of the most current pressing abortion issues involve drugs shipped through the mail or travel to obtain an abortion. Our findings show that Republicans are fairly sympathetic to letting states ban abortion drugs, while Democrats are obviously less so.

As for travel, we asked, “Which of the following groups should be allowed to travel to another state to receive an abortion if they live in a state where abortion services are not legal?” Around a third of Americans (36%) indicated that anyone should be able to travel out of state, including 49% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans (people obviously can think of exceptions to the general rule). However, just 32% of the sample was willing to let anyone travel and also opposed banning the mailing of pills.

There is not a simple way to characterize abortion opinions, try what you will.There is not a simple way to characterize abortion opinions, try what you will.

So is there anything that we can say about abortion opinions? A few things do seem true.

First, the public does want limits of various kinds. Pro-choice advocates are right to say that the public desires access to abortion, and a healthy minority wants the kind of access that the pro-choice side envisions: women empowered to choose abortion at all stages if they deem it necessary. But this is not the broad position of the public. Most people would clearly limit it based on stage of pregnancy. Others would limit tools or methods. The idea of a full-spectrum right to abortion at all stages and with no limits is not popular.

Second, when the public is asked about women having access to an abortion procedure, different respondents seem to have different baseline cases in mind. This is why people can say abortions should be legal in many circumstances but also favor time limits. A woman who has been given the option of an abortion in the early months of a pregnancy does have a choice in the eyes of some members of the public. The idea of unfettered choice early in a pregnancy but with increasing limits placed later on in the pregnancy is clearly a position that many hold.

On top of the time limits, it is also clear that the public is occasionally warm to limits on drugs in the mail or limits on travel. But these limitations tend to be favored only by subsets of the population and are not majority positions.

We would add that abortion clearly influences but does not control people’s voting. Among those who responded that abortion should not be available during any weeks of a pregnancy (13%of the public), 1 in 10 voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, and another 13% didn’t vote at all. If we look at the people who responded that abortions should be limited to the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy, 25% voted for Harris. Similar figures obtain for those on the left of this issue, with 1 in 10 of those who favored abortion throughout a pregnancy voting for Donald Trump.

The implication of this final point is that abortion remains both complex and a cross-cutting issue for many voters — enough voters that should a candidate choose to compromise on the issue the public would not penalize them. Movement leaders might want to do so, but the vast majority of the public has no problem with every woman having a right to an abortion that is limited by both time and method.

By Christopher F. Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope

METHODOLOGY NOTE

Between August 22-29, 2024, YouGov interviewed 3,245 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 3,000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined, and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4 categories), race (4 categories), and education (4 categories), to produce the final weight. The overall margin of error is +/- 2%.