Public opinion is not where I’d like it to be on abortion. Any fairly-worded poll is going to find a lot of people who believe that it should be legal to kill unborn children, especially early in pregnancy. Polls will also find, though, that a majority of Americans believes that abortion should be available only in the minority of cases involving rape, incest, threats to the mother’s life, or severe fetal abnormality.
NARAL Pro-Choice AmericaTM, like a lot of interest groups, wants to paint a picture of public opinion that misleads lawmakers and the media into thinking its positions have more support than they do. Its latest poll, focused on four congressional districts held by Republican freshmen, does it in an especially ham-handed way.
Its first abortion question gives respondents three options: abortion is “acceptable and should be legal,” abortion is wrong for yourself and your family but government should not “prevent a woman from making that decision for herself,” or abortion “is wrong and should be illegal.” So two of the three possible responses are pro-choice ones, the middle option is a pro-choice one, and the middle option is the only one that includes loaded language. (There’s nothing about how “the law should protect unborn life” in the pro-life one.) Some reasonably-worded polls would yield pro-choice majorities, but this finding tells us almost nothing.
The second abortion question says that Congress is holding a vote to ban abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy, and then asks whether this “focus on restricting abortion access for women match[es] what you think Congress should be prioritizing.” The poll again includes language loaded for the pro-choice side: It’s “restricting abortion access for women,” and not, for example, “seeking common ground on an issue where many pro-choicers agree with pro-lifers.” It does not clearly indicate what a “focus” means: Are voters who say it’s not their priority saying they don’t want a vote to be held, or they don’t want Congress to spend the whole session on it? The poll apparently gave no option for people to say they had no opinion on the priority question. And even with these advantages, in three of the four congressional districts NARAL couldn’t get 50 percent of respondents to say they disagreed with the priority.
The third question asks whether Congress “should stop pushing this legislation and trust women to make decisions about their pregnancy options in consultation with their doctors.” In a way, I don’t mind this question. It’s a pure test of a pro-choice talking point. It tells you that this talking point is a powerful one for the pro-choice side, which is worth knowing. But the finding should not be taken to mean more than it does.
The final abortion question reads, “If your Representative [name] votes in favor of this abortion ban, will this make you more likely or less likely to vote for [his/her] reelection?” A few red flags here. There’s no “it wouldn’t affect my vote” option. The question talks about an “abortion ban” without specifying it applies only after week 20. The last reference to this point came quite a bit of verbiage ago, and much of that verbiage was pro-choice messaging.
Bottom line: This poll should not give any of the targeted congressman, or their colleagues, any reason to worry about the political consequences of pro-life votes.