The Culture War Over Abortion Will Never End

Even if “never” is too strong, pro-choice victory laps are very premature

An abortion rights protester Walter Masterson, center, pours flour on himself next to praying anti-abortion activists across from the Planned Parenthood clinic and office August 6, 2022 in downtown Manhattan, New York City. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

I haven’t written much about abortion since the week or so following the Dobbs decision. But the issue is back in the news because Republicans have taken over the House with a narrow majority, and that raises the possibility of legislation addressing abortion rights at the national level.

That nothing comparable to what passes the House will make it through the Democrat-controlled Senate or get signed by Democratic President Joe Biden doesn’t matter. The House GOP will be passing messaging bills. As I explained in a recent post, a messaging bill

is a piece of legislation that has no realistic chance of becoming law but that serves as a means of declaring what a party would pass if it held the other chamber of Congress and/or the White House. Such bills are useful for keeping ideologically aligned activists excited and donor money flowing into coffers ahead of the next election coming down the pike.

Republicans want to convey to their party’s voters, activists, and donors that they intend to impose lots of new federal restrictions on abortion as soon as they win enough votes to do so.

But is that wise? Lots of Democrats are inclined to doubt it. Pleased with having prevented a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, many liberals and progressives think Republicans paid a painful price for Dobbs and several draconian GOP-authored state laws restricting the procedure. This conviction certainly informs Linda Greenhouse’s recent New York Times op-ed, which suggests nothing less than that the threat of having abortion access blocked has made possible a near-term future in which the pro-choice side of the debate will have “won the culture war.”

The State of Opinion

A new Marist poll indicates that both sides of this argument are wrong. If you ask Americans at large whether they are pro-choice or pro-life, the pro-choice side wins handily, 61 percent to 39 percent. As recently as January 2021, the same poll showed a 10-point gap instead of a 22-point one, so the pro-choice side has indeed benefitted as a result of recent events. But additional questions in the poll clarify that the finding about overarching labels is at least somewhat misleading.

(In case anyone is tempted to dismiss the poll because it was sponsored [though not conducted] by the Knights of Columbus, a strongly pro-life Catholic organization, I shared those concerns when I first saw the results reported in right-of-center news outlets. But the sample size [1,025] is good, the margin of error [+/- 3.5 percentage points] is reasonable, most of the question wording seems unbiased to me, and the poll has a long track record [back to May 2009 on at least one of the questions]. In a word, I think we can trust it—at least as much as we can trust any single professionally conducted poll in 2023.)

When respondents were asked to say whether and when abortion should be restricted, the results show a deeply conflicted electorate.

• Twenty-one percent say the procedure should be available to women at any time during pregnancy.

• Ten percent think it should be restricted after the first six months.

• Twenty-five percent think it should be available only during the first trimester.

• Twenty-six percent think it should be permitted only in cases of rape, incest, or the save the life of the mother.

• Ten percent would limit abortion to cases when the life of the mother is at stake.

• And 8 percent think abortion should be illegal in all cases.

If we define pro-life to mean thinking abortion should be banned in all but rare, exceptional cases—and that being pro-choice is supporting making it available to women at least through the first trimester—then we end up with 56 percent of the country being pro-choice and 44 percent being pro-life. That’s similar to, but slightly less pro-choice/slightly more pro-life, than results from the question about self-applied labels.

Yet it’s also the case that when most Democratic officeholders—let alone pro-choice activists—talk about supporting abortion rights, they don’t mean the procedure being legal for the first three months of pregnancy but firmly restricted thereafter. (This is the status of abortion access throughout most of Europe.) They mean no restrictions at all—an absolute right to abortion—which is a position favored by just 21 percent of the country. That’s what was in the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022, which passed the Democratic-controlled House last July but later died in the Senate. (The bill allowed restrictions after fetal viability [currently around 24 weeks—or the end of the second trimester] but included exceptions for the “life and health” of the mother. Since those exceptions can include mental health and emotional well-being, they effectively make abortion available for the entirety of pregnancy.)  

The inverse is true for most Republican officeholders, who in their public comments have historically staked out the position that abortion should be banned except for cases of “rape, incest, or life of the mother.” But recent activity in red states has yielded legislation far more restrictive than that, and far more in line with the position supported by many pro-life organizations—in several cases pushing in the direction of an absolute ban. That’s a position favored by just 8 percent of the country. The percentage rises to 18 percent when the ban includes an exception for protecting the life of the mother.

The Best National Abortion “Solution”