How Much Does Abortion Polling Actually Matter?

The incoherent picture that emerges from abortion polling tells pro-lifers that more debate, more honest discussion, more politics are needed.

Abortion is an infamously difficult issue to poll, made all the more challenging by the fact that the issue was confined to public-opinion polling — rather than explored through public political debate — since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. On other hot-button political topics, pollsters have been able to regularly test the validity of their survey findings against the political reality of how people vote. When votes don’t match up with polls, they can go back to the drawing board and rethink their methodology. (Or at least they’re supposed to.) Because Roe effectively removed abortion from the democratic process, there have been very few comparable opportunities over the past half century for analysts to discuss the political implications of the issue in anything other than abstract terms. Dobbs changed that.

On the evidence of the polls, Americans occupy almost every imaginable position on abortion. On the one hand, a Gallup poll conducted in May found that 55 percent of Americans identify as “pro-choice,” versus just 39 percent who identify as “pro-life.” The next month, a Pew poll found that 61 percent of U.S. adults believe that “abortion should be legal in all or most cases,” compared with just 37 percent who believe that “abortion should be illegal in all or most cases” — and the month after that, Pew found that 57 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.