Back in January, a Washington Post blogger claimed that public support for abortion was rising: “The trend line is clear.” His main piece of evidence was an NBC/WSJ poll that found 54 percent of the public believing that abortion should be mostly or always legal.
I cautioned that other data did not show rising support for abortion and that we should wait for more data to see if that result was a blip.
There’s a new NBC/WSJ poll out now, and it shows that 52 percent of the public thinks that abortion should either be illegal with no exceptions or illegal with exceptions for the small percentage of abortions sought because of rape, incest, and threats to the mother’s life.