Democrats and their allies in the corporate media like to pretend that abortion polling offers a larger commentary on the state of the pro-life movement and the laws that ban ending life in the womb. In reality, those polls are often twisted by these same institutions to skew public opinion and obscure just how radical their abortion beliefs are.
Take this Gallup abortion poll, conducted in May and released on Thursday, for example.
You wouldn’t know it from the headline, which boasts “Broader Support for Abortion Rights Continues Post-Dobbs,” but only 37 percent of U.S. adults believe abortion should be allowed during the second trimester.
Despite Democrats’ incessant attempts to normalize their belief that taxpayers should fund abortions up until birth, only 22 percent of those polled said they supported ending life in the womb in the third trimester.
Overall, a majority of Americans, 55 percent, think ending life in the womb in the second trimester should be “generally illegal.” An even bigger number, 70 percent, think abortion in the third trimester should be outlawed.
“Democrats are the only group saying it should generally be legal in the second trimester,” the poll noted.
Corporate media, Democrats, and even some Republicans make a point to smear heartbeat laws and European-esque first-trimester limits as unpopular and ineffective. Yet, even Gallup’s poll accurately reflects that most Americans support a 15-week abortion ban like the one Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced last year, not Democrats’ abortion extremism.
“Most Americans oppose abortion later in pregnancy,” Gallup admits.
The pollster tried to couch this finding with reassurance that “within this broad framework, Americans have shifted toward more acceptance of abortion,” but even that isn’t completely accurate.
It’s true that 69 percent of Americans reportedly think abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, which is up two percentage points after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision was leaked to the press. The biggest increase, however, happened within those who identify as “pro-life.”
In 2022, Gallup found that 39 percent of Americans identified as pro-life. Now, 44 percent do. Similarly, 38 percent of U.S. adults told Gallup last year that they believed abortion was “morally wrong.” This year, after nearly one year of post-Dobbs momentum, 41 percent of Americans say ending life in the womb is morally unacceptable.
It’s important to remember that polling, especially on abortion, is far from perfect. As Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi once succinctly put it, “Abortion polls are garbage.”
Questions about popular heartbeat bills are sold by pollsters as near-total bans on a woman’s so-called right to choose. When that framing is stripped, American opinions, specifically among Democrats, shift drastically toward the kinds of abortion limits Republican states and European countries have — the limits Democrats like President Joe Biden despise.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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