A Stunning Shift in Public Opinion Post-Dobbs

It’s been four years since the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion. The 6-3 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed nearly 50 years of legal abortion and returned the issue to the states. Today Americans live in places that are moving in two diametrically different directions. Some of the strictest bans on abortion went into effect in Texas and 12 other mostly Southern states, while ten states, including California and Montana, pursued constitutional amendments that enshrined the right to abortion and other reproductive rights.

In Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America, political scientists Laurel Elder, Steven Greene, and Mary-Kate Lizotte draw on publicly available surveys and other datasets collected between the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and the 2022 Dobbs ruling to chart how Americans have come to hold stronger, more progressive opinions about abortion access and express greater frustration with conservative, restrictive policies. 

One of the more striking findings for the researchers was that people who have had an abortion, or who have a close friendship or association with a person who’s had the procedure, are more supportive of abortion access. Individuals with limited knowledge of or experience with abortion, such as some fierce pro-life legislators, are some of the strongest opponents of abortion access. 

Elder, a professor of political science at Hartwick College, and Greene, a political scientist at North Carolina State University, spoke with me about this stunning shift and what it means for the Supreme Court, the midterm elections, representative democracy, and the future of abortion access in America. 

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Makela Reid: In May, the Supreme Court granted a stay in Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana, allowing access to abortion pills by mail—for now. How does this decision affect public perceptions of abortion policy?

Laurel Elder: The key thing is that after Dobbs, we saw a significant policy shift to the right in many states. They banned and heavily restricted abortion, and now there are discussions about banning abortion pills. Public opinion has reacted to that by moving in a more pro-choice direction. Even though the Supreme Court stayed that decision, so you can still send abortion medication through the mail, it keeps up this idea that there’s this constant attempt to further restrict access to abortion. 

As long as people keep reading about these attempts, people are going to continue to either hold or continue to move in a liberal direction, saying, “You know what, I don’t want government involved at all in this,” or “I definitely see myself as pro-choice now, whereas I used to see myself as more in the middle on this issue.”

Now, if they had actually upheld that Louisiana law, ruling that you cannot send abortion medication through the mail, we would have seen the issue rise in visibility, and we would have seen even further dramatic shifting toward greater support for abortion access.

Steven Greene: On some level, Republican politicians recognize how bad it would be politically if they start checking mail and arresting women. The pro-life movement has a lot of very frustrated people because abortion medication is a successful workaround and has become the most common form of abortion for American women. That is probably why they are willing to take increasingly unpopular political actions—because they are clearly losing in the court of public opinion.

Read: The Mifepristone wars—and what they mean for Black women

Abortion rights can be a very powerful motivator for voters, especially Democrats—and yet many Americans seem less interested in the issue this midterm election season. Why is that?

Laurel Elder: Quite a few people have said to me, “I’m surprised it’s not a bigger issue,” or, “Do you think it’s not going to matter in this election?” And I would say no, it’s still a really important issue. One in four American women will have an abortion over the course of their lifetime, and over half of women and men know someone who either has had an abortion themselves or knows someone [close to them] who has had an abortion. 

And that doesn’t even capture the number of people who are thinking about starting a family. For them, abortion access looms large in their decisions about where to go to school or get a job. Without a doubt, the biggest election outcome predictors are how people feel the economy is doing and what they think about the incumbent, and those just dominate everything else. That’s what happened in 2024 and that’s largely going to be the story of 2026 as well. But abortion is still an important issue, and the landscape has changed post-Dobbs in a way that does advantage the Democrats more. So even though it’s not dominating the headlines, it is a powerful issue that hasn’t gone anywhere.

Steven Greene: The truth is, in 2022 in particular, abortion was just so salient. It almost surely played a significant impact on the outcome of those midterms, and really did save the Democrats to some degree. In some sense, it’s probably never going to be quite that important again, as it was right in the wake of the Dobbs decision. There’s a new normal of how it has changed politically, but just because we’re not seeing the level of impact we had in 2022 doesn’t mean it’s not still playing an important role.

Overall, how has public opinion on abortion changed since 2022?

Laurel Elder: The politics of abortion have changed in the wake of Dobbs in three major ways. One is that public opinion has shifted more in a more progressive direction. Democrats, women, and young people used to say they would feel more comfortable with some restrictions on abortion access, and now they support abortion for any reason. 

Second, there’s been a shift in prioritization. For decades, it was those who are pro-life and Republican who prioritized the issue of abortion higher than those who are pro-choice. That has totally reversed in the wake of Dobbs, and now it is Democrats and people who identify as pro-choice who are much more likely to say that this is a top issue motivating them to go out to vote. 

Third, the Republican Party is super cross-pressured on this issue. Depending on how you measure it, 30 to 50 percent of Republicans support abortion access in some form, didn’t want to see Roe overturned, or do not like these complete bans. Those people are demobilized right now: they’re less likely to vote, and they’re a little bit more likely to abandon their party. We also found that it was those who supported bans and restrictions who had the lowest level of knowledge about reproduction.

You emphasize the importance of elite cues in forming public opinion: Would Democratic candidates be more successful in their midterm races if they talked about the issue in greater detail?

Steven Greene: Both parties appear to be avoiding the issue in most of the high-profile races. Abortion is not something I’ve seen Democrats talking much about right now. Kamala Harris tried to really push abortion in 2024, and I want to say it didn’t work. Then again, who’s to say? Maybe she would have lost by another percentage point or two, if not for that. Those counterfactuals are really hard. But when one looks at the actions of politicians, you don’t really have Democrats making this a big part of their campaigns in these contested primaries.

On the Republican side, there’s some frustration online among the pro-life activists—that their party is not pushing harder and not doing more. But I think we see among Republican politicians the recognition that—outside of notably conservative states—it’s a losing issue for them electorally now and they’re not pushing it the way they have in the past. 

Laurel Elder: The reality of our contemporary news environment is that Donald Trump is the headline, so whatever he’s saying and doing is driving the headlines. And for the very good reasons that we lay out in the book, Trump does not want to talk about the issue of abortion or reproductive rights. It’s not a good issue for the Republican Party in post-Dobbs America, and so he’s never going to be the one that chooses to talk about it. But the reality is that abortion is an incredibly important issue to most Americans. 

Is there a threat to democracy when there is such a stark contrast between right-wing abortion policy and public opinion?

Steven Greene: Texas has tried to outlaw abortions, and they haven’t been able to, and there’s your democratic legitimacy problem. To some degree, federalism plus abortion medication is the escape valve. Women in states like Texas are still having plenty of abortions. But it would be a very different state of affairs if this was not the case, if you couldn’t drive across state borders to get that abortion or couldn’t get the medication in the mail. 

Federalism makes things complicated, and the fact that we have 50 separate state policies on abortion really does matter—we see this dramatic patchwork of laws with various lengths of bans and ranges of punishment.  But where federalism has a real impact, and where I wish people cared more, are the real and well-documented horror stories, where they say, “Oh, well, we can’t treat you here, because even though you may die from this pregnancy, the hospital may get sued, or we may put the doctor in jail, so can you drive to Illinois this weekend? Can you fly?”

I, perhaps naively, thought this would have more of an impact politically, and am saddened that it doesn’t, because there are very real cases of women dying or undergoing immense trauma and having their lives put in extreme danger unnecessarily.

As abortion views become more radical among whites, anti-Black sentiments have become more strongly associated with anti-abortion attitudes. How do you see these attitudes interacting with the gerrymandering moves to suppress Black voices on issues like abortion?

Laurel Elder: Abortion in American politics has always been about so much more than access to and restrictions on abortion care. In what I think is a surprise to many people, racial attitudes are now strongly associated with abortion attitudes. That doesn’t necessarily mean a Black-white divide on the issue—in fact, there’s not a very big one—but it just means people who have high levels of racial resentment are more likely to oppose abortion. 

This could easily lead to more conservatives being elected in Southern states in Congress, but redistricting is more on the congressional level rather than the state legislative level, and it’s the state legislators and governors who are mostly passing these abortion laws. But it speaks to the profound way that race is still this huge factor in American politics, even in places where you don’t expect it.

What are the next issues looming in the abortion debate?

Laurel Elder: There’s a lot, because the pro-life movement was very happy with Dobbs. It was a long-fought victory that had been in the works for decades, but all the statistics show rates of abortion haven’t gone down at all, maybe even have gone up a little bit, and so they are not satisfied. There are efforts to establish criminal penalties for women who have abortions. Restricting access to IVF and birth control are very real issues. The FDA is currently reviewing abortion medication. 

We don’t know where they’re going to end up on that, but some states are going to continue to try to restrict abortion medication from coming into or being used in their states. There will be continued efforts to control people going over borders to get access to abortion. All of these restrictive efforts are going to continue, and some of them will be successful, even if Democrats do well this fall. This is going to keep public opinion in this more liberal area.

Steven Greene: The restrictions on IVF and birth control are particularly insane, and speak to the pro-life movement’s frustration and how that is really driving them to untenable places politically. There are also TRAP laws [targeted restrictions on abortion providers] that we hadn’t thought about 20 years ago—these attempts to regulate abortion clinics out of business by requiring super-wide corridors and all of these other ridiculous things. It was smart politically, and it wasn’t on anybody’s radar except the people thinking it up, and so for all we know, there are ideas to further restrict abortion percolating in small corners that will come out in five or ten years. 

But that said, fighting public opinion seems inevitably like fighting an increasingly losing battle. There’s always been a lot of ambivalence about abortion, even from supporters; the attitude has been that as long as you’ve got a good reason, like rape, incest, or health considerations, it should be allowed. But now, people say abortion should be legal regardless of the reason, which is a really noteworthy political change that is probably not going back.