Americans are profoundly ambivalent about abortion. A majority ofvoters accept the formulation of the pro-choice movement that abortion should belegal, safe, and rare. Yet most Americans consider the procedure distasteful andwill accept an array of restrictions on it, particularly if they see abortion asundertaken lightly or irresponsibly. The public's very ambivalence gives theanti-abortion forces a tactical advantage.
The so-called pro-life movement has been able to parlay this advantage intoeffective stealth campaigns against abortion rights at the state level and in thecourts. According to the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), women'sreproductive rights today are more restricted than they were in 1973 when theSupreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. As their data show, abortion would beflatly illegal in 11 states if Roe v. Wade were overturned. Only six statesand the District of Columbia are fully pro-choice. Sixteen states require waitingperiods, and 21 states mandate "informed consent," which requires abortionproviders to give women specific materials about abortion and its risks, benefits,and alternatives before performing an abortion. Currently, 32 states require theinvolvement of an adult before a minor can obtain an abortion, and in 20 statesit is an offense for a nonparent to take a minor across states lines to get anabortion.
The Supreme Court has upheld these restrictions in a number ofdecisions over the past 15 years, the most infamous being Webster v. ReproductiveHealth Services (1989) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v.Casey (1992). Under these decisions, states can regulate access to abortionby requiring waiting periods, mandatory counseling, and parental consent. At thefederal level, Congress has repeatedly passed legislation outlawing"partial-birth abortion" [see "The Partial-Birth Fraud" on page A2] and this yearpassed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which makes it a federal crime to harma fetus. One of George W. Bush's first acts was to reinstate a "global gag rule"that prevents international groups that receive U.S. funding from providingabortion services [see "The Sound of Silence" on page A21]. Bush is also expectedto appoint anti-Roe Supreme Court justices.
The paradox of the anti-abortion lobby's tactical advantage is that there isno real mass movement on either side of the debate and that the majority ofAmericans, at their core, do not want to outlaw abortion outright. But to theextent that the anti-abortion side has been able to shift the framing of debateaway from widely shared American values such as privacy, choice, andself-determination to a rhetoric of behavior, responsibility, and sexuality, theymaintain the political upper hand. In a climate that favors the political rightin the "culture wars," abortion has come to symbolize the perceived excesses of1960s liberalism. Abortion in this context represents not women's control oftheir own reproductive capacities or right to privacy, as the pro-choice sidesees it, but sexual permissiveness and irresponsibility--a potent symbol in ourcurrent political culture.
What Voters Really Believe
Most polls show that if the issue is reduced to simple labels, a slimmajority of the public will call itself "pro-choice" rather than "pro-life." Onaverage, in 2001, the Gallup organization finds that 50 percent of the publicdescribe themselves as "pro-choice," compared with 40 percent who call themselves"pro-life." But these self-descriptions are deceiving--only about one-fifth toone-quarter of the public support abortion under any circumstance. A similarnumber would make abortion illegal under all circumstances. The majority of thepublic favor some level of restriction on legal abortion. But pollingorganizations pose their questions differently, and there is considerablevariation in their assessment of the magnitude of these restrictions. Accordingto a June 2001 ABC News/Beliefnet poll, for instance, 31 percent of the Americanpublic would make abortion "legal in most cases," while 23 percent would makeabortion "illegal in most cases." According to Gallup's data for the monthbefore, however, 15 percent of the public would make "abortion legal under mostcircumstances," while 41 percent would make abortion "legal in only a fewcircumstances." Regardless, the overarching point is that a majority of thepublic support at least minor restrictions on the legal right to an abortion anda significant minority support serious restrictions on the legal right to anabortion.
When those restrictions are specified, the challenge for the pro-choice campbecomes more evident. Polls show that three-quarters of the public support legalabortion when a woman's life is endangered by pregnancy or the pregnancy is theresult of rape or incest. But support drops dramatically when the justificationsseem frivolous or an unplanned pregnancy is the result of perceived carelessnessor irresponsibility. According to a 1998 CBS News/New York Times poll, 70percent of the public oppose a woman seeking abortion because a child orpregnancy conflicts with her career. A Gallup poll conducted last year found that62 percent of the public would make abortion illegal in the case of a woman orfamily who cannot afford to raise a child. An ABC News/Washington Post pollfrom this year showed that 55 percent of the public would make abortion illegalwhen the woman is not married and does not want the baby. And in a 1998 CBSNews/New York Times poll, 78 percent of the public favored requiring parentalconsent before allowing girls under 18 to abort a pregnancy.
The anti-abortion tactical advantage does not stem from anydramatic change in public opinion. The public has not become significantly moreanti-choice since Roe, despite steady legal and extra-legal infringements.According to Gallup data dating back to 1975, the proportion of Americans whowould make abortion illegal in all circumstances has ranged between 12 percentand 19 percent, while the proportion who would impose some restrictions hasfluctuated between 48 percent and 58 percent. There is no discernible pattern tothis variation over time.
Since 1995, Gallup has found a slight decrease (from 56 percent to 50percent) in the number of Americans who label themselves "pro-choice" and aslight increase (from 33 percent to 40 percent) in the number who call themselves"pro-life." But again, these changes are not dramatic and probably reflect theever-shifting fortunes of the two sides rather than a fundamental alteration inhow people think about moral dilemmas associated with abortion.
So we are left with a public that will call itself "pro-choice" yet support anumber of restrictions on the legal right to an abortion. These sorts ofrestrictions are precisely what the anti-abortion groups pursue to gain ground inthe courts and state legislatures. Rather than fighting abortion at theextremes--such as by pushing hard and publicly for a constitutional amendmentbanning abortion--"pro-life" groups pursue a strategy of quiet encroachment atthe state level by delaying access through mandated waiting periods, denying useof public facilities except to save a woman's life, restricting access to minors,and imposing informed-consent requirements, public-funding bans, andpost-viability prohibitions.
Abortion, Class, and Feminism
If public opinion about abortion has remained stable over time, whyhave the anti-abortion forces made these incursions? Part of the explanationreflects changes in the abortion debate over the last 30 years. Prior to Roe v.Wade, abortion was a medical procedure procured discreetly by affluent womenfrom their doctors but performed illegally and expensively, often under hazardousmedical conditions, for poor women. Unplanned and unwanted pregnancies werehidden from view, while the medical community controlled access to abortion.
As sociologist Kristin Luker argues, the drive to criminalize abortion in thelate nineteenth century came from individual doctors and the American MedicalAssociation, who were eager to wrest control from midwives and homeopaths. At thebeginning of the twentieth century, abortion was illegal in every state, thoughdoctors retained great latitude to perform "therapeutic" abortions for a varietyof physical and psychological reasons. The 1873 Comstock Law also limitedabortion by outlawing possession of information about "unlawful" abortions andbirth control.
Before Roe, some states liberalized abortion laws while the CatholicChurch stepped up efforts to keep abortion illegal. But Roe v. Wade putabortion on the political map in a way that it had not been before. Certainly,there had been a number of important events--such as thalidomide babies and theadvent of the birth-control pill--that changed the attitudes and practicessurrounding reproduction prior to the decision. But shortly after the ruling,abortion came to symbolize the political controversies over the changing statusof women in society and the liberalization of sexual mores. For feminists andpro-choice activists, values such as control, choice, and privacy werefundamental to women's ability to pursue educational and career opportunitiesfully and, consequently, to achieve equality more generally. The ability of womento control their reproductive capabilities meant that women had the potential toemerge in the workplace and advance on equal footing with men.
For the "pro-life" side, anti-abortion activity became tied to a broaderbacklash against the changes wrought by the women's movement. The mobilizationaround opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, for example,explicitly made the link between legal abortion and women's place in family andsociety. Phyllis Schlafly's stop ERA coalition actively promoted the idea that theERA would lead to an increase in abortions, despite the fact that the amendmentdid not contain any language to suggest such an interpretation. As Donald Mathewsand Jane Sherron De Hart explain in Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: "ERAwas an attempt to remove sex as a classification in law, a way of separatingindividual women from their sex. Abortion was a way for women to avoid thenatural process associated with their sexuality. Thus both undermined the familyby separating familial responsibilities from women. Both ERA and abortion,therefore, were seen as ways through which women could be released fromtraditional roles and responsibilities." For anti-ERA activists, abortionrepresented the liberalization of sexuality, the perceived rejection ofmotherhood, and the movement of women into the workplace, which threatened theirdecision to choose full-time motherhood or other traditional roles.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the public assimilated and accepted manyof the tenets of liberal feminism, particularly equality before the law and theright of women to pursue careers and be treated equally in the workplace (forexample, to receive equal pay for equal work). In public-opinion polls today, itis difficult to find anyone who objects to women's participation in the workplaceor supports a return to traditional roles. For example, in a 1997 study by thePew Research Center, 71 percent of the respondents disagreed that "women shouldreturn to their traditional roles in society." While two-thirds of the publicsaid in one survey that it would be ideal for mothers to stay home with theirchildren if it is financially feasible, an equal number of parents in another saidthat "mothers who work outside the home are just as loving and committed to theirchildren as those who stay at home" (Kaiser Family Foundation/ WashingtonPost/Harvard University, 2000; Public Agenda, 2000). Eighty-six percent of thepublic objected to the notion that husbands should have final say over financialmatters (Kaiser/Post/Harvard, 1997).
In this climate, abortion, while continuing to provoke debates about when lifebegins and the moral status of the fetus, maintains its salience politically aspart of the "family values" agenda rather than as a symbol of the flight of womenfrom their traditional place in the home. Anti-abortion forces lose traction whenthey seem to be challenging women's rights; they gain it when they successfullylink abortion to a larger narrative about "moral decline" stemming from thelibertine practices of 1960s social movements. In this narrative, abortionrepresents sexual irresponsibility, which is part of a larger set of social illsthat includes juvenile crime, welfare dependency, family breakup, and civicmalaise. The construct offers a compelling story to the American electorate, evenif there is little evidence of causal connections among these phenomena. Theparties have become polarized precisely along these lines.
Anti-Abortion as a Movement
The "pro-life" side also gains ground because of its organizationalstrength. Until the Roe decision, anti-abortion activity was limited to asmall band of Catholic activists and conservative doctors who lobbied forcriminalization of the procedure in state legislatures. After Roe,anti-abortion activists were able to build a movement from an extensivenational network of conservative organizations, such as Schlafly's Eagle Forum.More recently, the anti-abortion lobby has benefited from a vast organizationalnetwork of evangelical and Catholic churches, which opposes abortion both on thegrounds of the sanctity of life and because of the challenges it poses totraditional gender roles. Much like the nineteenth-century social movements formoral reform and temperance that found their constituents in religiouscommunities, "pro-life" groups build their support from the ground up in localchurches. After the Roe decision, for example, the U.S. Conference ofCatholic Bishops immediately began organizing against abortion at the parishlevel, even allowing the National Right to Life Committee to take collectionsafter mass on Sunday. Concerned Women for America, an anti-feminist organizationboasting 500,000 members, organizes from the bottom up with nearly 500"prayer/action chapters" based in local churches and a membership fee of $20 peryear.
Christian-right organizations such as Focus on the Family advertise theiractivities through churches. One can find missives from its founder, Dr. JamesDobson, inserted in church bulletins and in the anti-abortion pamphlets thatabound in the back of church halls. Events such as the "Evangelical Day of Life"or "Walks for Life" are routinely announced in church bulletins, sermons, andBible-study and prayer groups. Evangelical ministers and Catholic priestsencourage the dissemination of this information; according to a 1996 Pew ResearchCenter survey, 60 percent of regular churchgoers hear about abortion in weeklysermons.
Evangelical churches built a massive communications infrastructure during the1960s and 1970s, both on radio and on television. Their efforts were bolstered inthe mid-1960s when the Federal Communications Commission started permittingbroadcasters to sell their airtime to religious groups to fulfill theirpublic-service obligations. Conservative groups such as Pat Robertson's 700 Clubwere quite willing to pay for the airtime--an opportunity that progressive andliberal religious groups mostly shunned. As a result, evangelical churches andorganizations still dominate religious television. Currently, 1,500 radiostations provide 15 hours of religious programming a week to an audience that anAnnenberg/Gallup study in the mid-1980s put at 13 million people.
There is, of course, a well-organized pro-choice community that plays acentral role in the abortion debate at the state and the national level. TheNational Organization for Women (NOW), NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the FeministMajority, and a host of other national organizations can rally grass-rootsopposition to anti-abortion efforts in state legislatures, the courts, and inCongress. NOW and NARAL maintain local chapters and Planned Parenthood is builton a network of local clinics. Other organizations devoted to electoral activismhave been effective at helping to elect pro-choice legislators. Emily's List, thelargest political-action committee in the Democratic camp, devotes its campaigncontributions to pro-choice Democratic women candidates.
Nevertheless, these organizations lack the extensive institutional andcommunications networks of the anti-abortion forces. Nor is there an equivalentto the natural constituency that the anti-abortion forces find in Catholic andevangelical churches. Moreover, the pro-choice side lacks the allies that couldmobilize a comparable level of single-issue grass-roots support. Within theDemocratic tent, many of the leading groups that have extensive membershipinfrastructure support abortion rights, but they do not consider the issue a highpolitical priority. It is hard to imagine the AFL-CIO mobilizing its locals toleaflet for abortion rights and featuring pro-choice articles in its publicationswith the same vigor that the Catholic Church applies in its campaign againstabortion.
The Electoral Consequences
While the anti-abortion side is encroaching on the effective right tochoose and is gaining rhetorical ground, the electoral story is more complicated.The majority of the country occupies the middle ground on this issue, andabortion tends not to determine their voting decisions. Moreover, contrary toconventional wisdom--which holds that the gender gap between Republicans andDemocrats is driven by women's support for abortion rights--women lean Democraticlargely because they favor the party's priorities on health care, education, andretirement security. There are few differences between men and women in theirviews toward abortion. For instance, in a Los Angeles Times poll conductedlast year, 42 percent of men and 44 percent of women said that abortion shouldalways be legal, compared with 47 percent of men and 44 percent of women who saidthat abortion should be made illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or to savethe mother. Gallup data from 2000 show a similar pattern--35 percent of men saidthat abortion should be legal under any or most circumstances, compared with 41percent of women.
There simply is not a mass base of women mobilized around abortion rights:Abortion divides, rather than unites, women. Consider the effect of education onwomen's views about abortion. According to data collected for the NationalElection Study (NES) by the University of Michigan in 1998, 58 percent ofcollege-educated women believe that by law women should always be able to obtainan abortion as a matter of personal choice, compared with 41 percent of womenwith some post-high-school education and 29 percent of women with a high-schooleducation or less. Looking at a "feeling thermometer" to measure attitudes towardpro-life or anti-abortion groups, 47 percent of college-educated women ratedanti-abortion groups lower than 50 on a scale from 0 to 100, compared with 39percent of non-college-educated women. Among white college-educated women, themain constituents of the women's movement, only 35 percent are warm towardpro-life or antiabortion groups (Democracy Corps, 2001).
Not surprisingly, as the major political parties have staked out oppositepositions on abortion rights, feminism, women's rights, and other "family values"issues, these differences have emerged in women's voting behavior. Since the1970s, the parties have been polarized over cultural issues such as abortion,feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, school prayer, school curriculum, sexeducation, and homosexuality. Democrats are clearly associated in the public'smind with liberal positions on these issues, while the Republican Party remainsthe guardian of "family values." These issues divide women: Generally, highlyeducated and secular women adopt more feminist and pro-choice views, whileless-educated and more-religious women are more socially conservative.
These differences had an impact on women's voting behavior in the 1990s asPresident Clinton's impeachment and other scandals heightened sensitivities tovalues and morals in electoral politics. Since the early 1990s, Democraticcandidates have enjoyed increased support among college-educated women whilelosing ground with high-school-educated women. Al Gore won 57 percent ofcollege-educated women (21 percent of the electorate), 50 percent of women withsome college education (18 percent of the electorate), and 52 percent of womenwith a high-school education (12 percent of the electorate). This represents a4-point increase among college-educated women and a 4-point decline amonghigh-school-educated women since 1996 for the Democrats. Between the 1996 and1998 elections, their share of the congressional vote fell from 58 percent to 52percent among high-school-educated women, while it rose among college-educatedwomen by 3 points.
Postelection surveys from the 2000 presidential race clearly demonstrate thatdespite Democratic candidate Al Gore's advantage over Republican George W. Bushon matters of social policy, values played a central role in non-college-educatedwomen's voting decisions. In a survey conducted for Campaign for America's Future(CAF) and Democracy Corps that compared Gore's populist message with Bush'svalues message, white non-college-educated women were nearly twice as likely aswhite college-educated women to agree strongly with Bush's notion of respectingthe values of middle-class families, including "more personal responsibility,which means more accountability in education, fewer abortions, and respecting therights of gun owners." Overall, 31 percent of white non-college-educated womencited Bush's position on family values as a reason to support him, compared with22 percent of white college-educated women.
In last year's election, despite the candidates' reluctance to engage in adebate about abortion and despite the relatively low salience of the issuegenerally, choice did weigh heavily in the voting preferences of certain womenvoters. In the CAF/Democracy Corps survey, for example, 40 percent of whitecollege-educated women cited Gore's support for "a woman's right to choose" astheir top reason for supporting his candidacy, while only 28 percent of whitenon-college-educated women took this position. Twenty-five percent ofnon-college-educated white women cited Bush's efforts to reduce abortions asreasons for supporting his candidacy, and 20 percent of white college-educatedwomen.
The Future of Reproductive Rights
The public's views on abortion rights are irresolute and oftencontradictory. In collusion with the Republican Party, "pro-life" forceseffectively link abortion to the broader "family values" agenda. This gives themdisproportionate electoral power even as abortion does not solely determinepeople's voting decisions.
Paradoxically, the continuing availability of legal abortion has blunted thepower of the pro-choice camp. Young women and men recently coming of agepolitically simply have not had the same set of experiences as the activists oneither side of the debate. Generations X and Y have no memory of illegal,back-alley abortions or the struggle to achieve abortion rights. At the sametime, younger generations cannot conceive of women's equal participation in theworkplace as controversial or the two-income family as a challenge to traditionalgender roles. So we should not assume that young people's views aboutreproductive rights are driven by sixties-era conflicts over women's rights.
The challenge for the pro-choice movement is how to take back the abortiondebate when for young people, including young women, the language of women'srights--like "the personal is political" or "the right to control your ownbody"--seems remote. There is little evidence that young people are any moresupportive of abortion rights than their elders. In fact, the limited data thatdo exist suggest that young people are less emphatically pro-choice in theirviews than is the boomer generation that experienced the women's movement. Afrequently cited national study of incoming freshmen that is conducted annuallyby UCLA shows that students who entered college in 2000 were less likely to agreethat "abortion should be legal" than were students who entered college in 1990.According to 1998 nes data, voters under 30 are more likely to agree that "underthe law, abortion should never be permitted" than are all other voters exceptsenior citizens.
But if public opinion on abortion rights is ambivalent, it is alsomalleable--as a recent battle of dueling TV spots demonstrated. The religiousright has long run anti-abortion ads. Beginning in 1998, NARAL's Choice forAmerica campaign aired a series of TV ads with themes that emphasize a woman'sright to control her own body and to make her own choices. In one of the ads, amother is watching her young daughter master a sled. The mother's voice says: "Iwant every good thing in the world for you.... Sure, you'll hit a few bumps alongthe way, but you'll learn...that it's your body, your life, your responsibility.Never give up your freedom to choose. Your dreams are tied to it." In another ad,a young woman is being examined in a doctor's office. The voice-over says: "I'mthe one who must live with these choices. Shouldn't I be the one to make them?"
What's the message? That people who believe in a woman's right to choose anabortion (or not) are also loving parents, responsible citizens, and committed towomen's freedoms generally. Though the data are proprietary, polls conducted byHarrison Hickman, NARAL's pollster, suggest that these and similar ads movedpublic opinion dramatically when they aired in several swing states during lastyear's presidential-election campaign. The Choice for America campaign alsoemploys grass-roots organizing to complement the ad campaign, which generated asubstantial base of supporters who can be activated through the Internet.
This work suggests that threats to reproductive choice can be pushed back whenactivists' efforts are targeted, supported by grass-roots organizing, anddesigned to strike a popular chord. In the twenty-first century, few Americanswould challenge women's basic rights in general. For the pro-choice camp, thechallenge is to connect a right that is now under siege to broader rights thatare taken for granted.
