Misreading Abortion Polls

Published



Mother Jones‘s Adam Serwer takes a look at the new Gallup poll showing “pro-life” Americans outnumbering “pro-choice” Americans by a 9-point margin and writes:

[A] large majority—77 percent—of Americans support abortion being legal in all or “certain circumstances,” and just 20 percent of Americans are actually “pro-life” in the sense that opponents of legalized abortion understand the term. Another way of saying this is that most Americans are actually pro-choice even if they sometimes identify as pro-life. 

Ramesh Ponnuru corrects Serwer’s inaccurate reading of the polls:

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