Teen Vogue, the magazine that shut down its print operations after Hillary Clinton lost and Condé Nast realized it functioned as little more than toilet paper at a sorority social, has an interesting addition to “Across the Aisle,” their article series attempting to document political divides. Abortion, the outlet says, is “popular.”
Abortion has been largely presented as a ride-or-(literally)-die issue. The truth is, though, abortion is largely condoned. One could even say abortion is popular. #AcrossTheAisle https://t.co/HLNxx9We35
— Teen Vogue (@TeenVogue) October 3, 2019
“Abortion may have incredibly vocal opponents, but polling that’s been conducted since before abortion was legal shows that reproductive choice was and remains popular,” Caitlin Cruz writes. “Maybe it’s time for the national media to treat abortion supporters as the loudest voices in the room.”
To her credit, Cruz actually cites public opinion polls. Unfortunately, Cruz obviously doesn’t know how to read them.
Cruz rightly notes that since prior to Roe v. Wade, binary public opinion polling on abortion has remained largely stagnant. But to extrapolate that a majority of the nation has believed that abortion ought to be legal in “certain” circumstances isn’t remotely equivalent to saying it’s “popular,” and a few extra minutes of poll analysis elucidates the fact that “safe, legal, and rare” became the galvanizing slogan in support of abortion legalization. Namely, that the public wants early-term abortion available as a last resort, not abortion on demand as a cause célèbre.
For the past two decades, the binary polling of the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” dichotomy has narrowed to nearly a 50-50 split, but that narrow majority of people supporting legal abortion “only under certain circumstances” has held almost completely constant since 1975. Most significantly, the percentage of the country that believes abortion should be legal in certain circumstances is almost identical to the portion of the country that believes purely elective abortion ought to be illegal.
Combine the 21% of the country that is unconditionally pro-life as well as another 30%-plus that supports abortion under certain circumstances, and a clearer picture appears: Most of the country begrudgingly supports legal abortion, but only in the first trimester.
This is much more an emotional than a rational view, but on a gut level, it makes sense. The most successful wave of the pro-choice movement relied on appeals to pathos, advertising low-income women accidentally killing themselves in back alley abortions. As Mad Men once described the pre-Roe era, abortion was “an option for women who had no other options.” And the states weren’t alone in treating abortion as such.
Although the procedure popped up throughout history, almost always in the immediate weeks after conception, abortion remained illegal in most of Europe until the two decades prior to Roe. It’s only in activist circles that abortion is “popular,” and even then, most pro-choice supporters rightly deride women such as Lena Dunham who made a mockery of the severity of the act. They do not try to sell it as a frivolous thing, but as a last resort.
