65% Want Restrictions on Abortion But So What?
A recent Battleground Poll indicates that most people believe there should be restrictions on abortion. Here’s the question and the responses:
What is your personal feeling about abortion? (1) It should be permitted in all cases. (2) It should be permitted, but subject to greater restrictions than it is now. (3) It should be permitted only in cases such as rape, incest and to save the woman’s life. OR, (4) It should only be permitted to save the woman’s life?
N=608 100%
Permitted in all cases 162 26.6%
Permitted, but with greater restrictions 100 16.5%
Permitted only in cases such as rape, incest, to save the woman’s life 166 27.2%
Only permitted to save the woman’s life 97 15.9%
Never 31 5.1%
Don’t know/refused 53 8.7%
So it’s clearly a large majority who wants to put restrictions on abortion. Yet, if you ask people the question about overturning Roe V. Wade you get a much worse response because people don’t understand that to restrict abortion in any meaningful way you first have to overturn Roe V. Wade. Roe which made abortion a right so the legislature could not act meaningfully against it.
I think a lot of educating needs to be done so that people understand overturning Roe doesn’t make abortion illegal but it makes it possible for the people just to vote on restrictions. That’s something we need to make people understand. It will take a lot of money and effort to make any headway in that education process.
It’s ironic that an issue which inspire so much passion has left people so uneducated. I was speaking to a person at a party recently who is a pro-life Catholic and they were shocked when I told them that abortion was perfectly legal for all nine months of pregnancy. In fact, they didn’t believe me at all. They said they were going to go home to look it up on the Internet.
And here’s the other thing. Our conversation was forcibly stopped by people who, when they heard we were talking about abortion, jumped in and said we weren’t allowed to continue talking about religion or politics. I said we were speaking about neither but they didn’t care. I was given the look that says, “We don’t discuss abortion in public.”
The media won’t talk about it even though it is the biggest political issue of our time. They’ll never show pictures of it. Discussing it is forbidden and yet so many people don’t understand it. This leaves us in a bit of a ditch. We have a lot of work to do on this but I ask you to not allow yourself to be silenced. Keep discussing it. Keep making people think about it.