Texas has either brought Taliban rule to America or will bring about the next coming of Christ, depending on which side of the aisle you read on Twitter today. But while the Twitterati remains polarized beyond measure, the average person has maintained an incredibly nuanced, centrist, sympathetic, and occasionally counterintuitive approach to the abortion debate.
The share of the nation that identifies as nominally “pro-choice” or “pro-life” has remained stagnant over the decades in an effective 50-50 deadlock. But this outline obscures the details of the debate.
Although 3 in 5 people do not support the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, fewer than one-third of all people support unconditionally legal abortions. The United States is a legal outlier on abortion bans, as even most of Europe bans the second (and in cases, third) trimester abortion legality still upheld by our courts. But fewer than 3 in 10 people believe second-trimester abortion ought to remain illegal, and barely 1 in 10 believe so for third-trimester abortions.
Even in cases of first-trimester abortions, U.S. morality doesn’t view all cases with equal merit. Four in 5 people support legal abortions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or those threatening a woman’s life. But a slim majority of the country believes even a first-trimester abortion ought to be illegal if the reason is simply that the mother “does not want the child for any reason.” The nation is also more broadly supportive of neurodiversity than the Twitter discourse would have you suspect. Half the nation supports criminalizing abortions to terminate a baby with Down syndrome, and 2 in 5 support doing so for abortions motivated by a mentally disabled fetus.
Nine in 10 people, including 8 in 10 Catholics and 3 in 4 pro-life adherents, view birth control as morally permissible. Obamacare’s contraception mandate and Title X coverage have rendered birth control free for the overwhelming majority of women, and with options like IUDs, which provide a near-zero failure rate for preventing pregnancy, the abortion debate has never been less tethered to moralizing about women’s sexual autonomy and behavior.
So the question now becomes the basic premise of the debate. When does life begin, and when in gestation does an embryo or fetus have the same human rights as the mother? And the truth is that the median voter doesn’t want to answer that question and grapple with its messy implications, instead adopting a perspective that can best be described with the mantra the Democratic Party has largely abandoned: safe, legal, and rare. As instinctively as the median voter may view a fetus as an actual baby, the prospect of outright banning a pregnant teenager from terminating a first-month pregnancy makes people uncomfortable. But unlike the loudest voices among the pro-choice Left, the polling makes it clear that people largely do not view abortion as a positive moral good.
The abortion debate is always fraught with emotion, but luckily Twitter is not real life. While politicos may drive a debate polarized between criminalizing first-trimester abortion and celebrating third-trimester ones, the average person has a much more sympathetic perspective.
