On abortion, these are the states to watch
Roe vs. Wade, for or against? Experts say voters have a nuanced view, even in conservative areas.
WASHINGTON — For decades, abortion has provided a near-perfect issue for Republicans: Hard-line rhetoric mobilized strongly antiabortion voters, but hard-line legislation got blocked by courts before it could alienate the rest of the electorate.
That’s about to change dramatically.
A leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion this week showed that a five-justice majority plans to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. If that majority holds, states will have full authority to write their own abortion legislation for the first time in nearly half a century. Proposals that until now have been drills will suddenly become live-fire exercises.
That could affect the lives of millions of women. In a handful of states, it could also upend politics.
Most Americans support abortion rights — up to a point.
A major new survey of 10,441 Americans by the Pew Research Center, conducted in March and released Friday, found that 61% of Americans said abortion should be legal all (19%) or most (42%) of the time.
On the other side, just 8% said abortion should be illegal in all cases, while an additional 29% said it should be illegal in most cases or with only a few exceptions. Those results are consistent with a host of other surveys regarding abortion.
A lot of Americans are pulled in different directions on abortion and hold views that are nuanced or, in some cases, contradictory, the survey found.
“People don’t want to think hard about abortion. It’s a really sticky subject” that “gets into a lot of complicated feelings,” said Natalie Jackson, director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute, which has done extensive polling on the subject, including a widely cited state-by-state survey in 2018.
Until now, that complex debate has largely boiled down to a simple binary: Roe vs. Wade, for it or against it. But in the coming months that will change as the argument shifts to state capitals, where newly empowered lawmakers will be grappling with writing actual laws.
Democrats in recent days have tried to align themselves with voters in the middle. From President Biden on down, they repeatedly used the word “extreme” to describe Republican proposals on abortion and talked about their opposition to outright bans.
Republicans will have a harder time matching any move to the center. They can’t afford to alienate their party’s large antiabortion faction. Indeed, many conservative states have moved aggressively in the other direction, enacting laws that ban all abortions, including those that result from rapes.
Lawmakers in some states have proposed going further.
In Louisiana this week, a legislative committee passed a measure to classify abortion as homicide and subject women to prosecution if they terminate pregnancies at any point after conception. The proposal may not make it into law, but it illustrates how the push for restrictions has grown more radical.
Efforts like that could help spur Democratic turnout, and not just in the states where the measures are under consideration, said Democratic pollster and strategist Anna Greenberg.
“What happens in other states is relevant in all states,” Greenberg said, noting that voters in focus groups around the country this year have mentioned the Texas law that bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.
“These elections are nationalized,” she said.
Nationwide, according to Pew’s survey, about 14% of Americans favor jailing women who obtained abortions.
The survey also found, however, that many Americans do not support measures pushed by abortion rights advocates. Though a majority opposed a ban at six weeks, support was significantly stronger for a ban after 14 weeks, similar to the Mississippi law being challenged in the Supreme Court.
Only 22% of Americans said abortions should always be legal at 24 weeks, roughly the point of viability, which Roe vs. Wade set as the point at which states could regulate abortions. An additional 31% said the procedures should be legal at that point sometimes, including when the mother’s life is endangered or the fetus has severe disabilities.
One illustration of the complex feelings around abortion: Forty-eight percent of Americans said in some cases abortion is morally wrong but should be legal anyway. Twenty-two percent said that whenever abortion is morally wrong it should be illegal, and 28% said abortion is always morally acceptable or is not a moral issue.
Men and women hold similar views on the issue. But opinions vary strongly by ideology and religion, with conservatives and white evangelical Protestants being the most opposed to abortion, while liberals and those who don’t follow any religion most strongly support abortion rights.
That translates into a sharp regional division.
In about 14 states along the West Coast and in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, support for abortion rights runs strong, and the direct effect of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade probably will be minimal.
In some of those strongly Democratic states, including California, lawmakers plan to push measures to bolster abortion rights. The proposals under discussion would have mostly symbolic effects in those states, which already allow abortions in most circumstances.
At the other end of the spectrum, another 14 states, mostly in the South and the interior West, have so-called trigger laws that would ban or severely restrict abortions as soon as Roe is struck down and have Republican-led governments that plan to enforce those bans.
The issue in those states will be whether Republican lawmakers, under pressure from the ardently antiabortion wing of their party, will go beyond what voters — even in conservative areas — will tolerate.
Even in the most conservative states, “the share of people who think abortion should be illegal all the time maxes out at around 25%,” Jackson said.
The states where the debate over abortion probably will rage the hottest — and where the political effect likely will be greatest — are in the middle, especially a handful of states where political circumstances all but guarantee conflict on the issue.
The list will sound familiar because it’s the same states that have swung the last few presidential elections and that have elections this year that probably will determine control of the U.S. Senate: Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Georgia.
Wisconsin and Michigan, for example, both have antiabortion laws passed generations ago that are likely to go back into effect if Roe is overturned.
Wisconsin’s law dates to 1849, Michigan’s to 1931. Republican legislative majorities in both states probably will oppose moves to liberalize those laws. Democratic Govs. Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan quickly pledged this week to defend abortion rights and seem likely to make that issue a theme of their reelection bids.
That could boost them in a year that seems otherwise grim for their party, although there’s no way to know how many voters will decide that abortion outweighs issues that Republicans will campaign on, such as inflation and crime.
In Wisconsin, the most recent Marquette University Law School poll found 61% of the state’s voters said abortion should be legal in all (23%) or most (38%) cases, compared with 34% who said it should be illegal all (11%) or most (23%) of the time.
“The issue has not been front and center in recent elections, but it certainly will be in these circumstances,” said Charles Franklin, who directs the poll.
“Democrats have been looking for a new issue, both here and nationally. From a Democrat’s point of view, anything is better than talking about inflation,” he said.
Support for abortion rights is similarly strong in Pennsylvania, said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College poll.
Only about 15% of the state’s voters say all abortions should be banned, the poll shows. “The general pattern is that Pennsylvania voters support abortion rights,” Yost said.
The state allows abortions through 24 weeks, and the issue now seems likely to be a big one in the race for governor. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, this week vowed to veto any antiabortion bills that the Republican-majority Legislature might pass.
On the other side, a recent debate found all the Republican hopefuls opposed to abortion. Doug Mastriano, who has a small lead in recent polls, touted his support for a ban after six weeks, with no exceptions for cases of rape, incest or a danger to a pregnant patient’s life.
Republicans espouse such proposals “at their peril,” Greenberg said. “People are very nuanced about this,” she said. “What’s happening is not nuanced.”