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AMERICANS ARE PROFOUNDLY AMBIVALENT ABOUT abortion

Will Choice be Aborted?

by ANNA GREENBERG

The New Battle for Public Opinion

AMERICANS ARE PROFOUNDLY AMBIVALENT ABOUT abortion. A majority of voters accept the formulation of the pro-choice movement that abortion should be legal, safe, and rare. Yet most Americans consider the procedure distasteful and will accept an array of restrictions on it, particularly if they see abortion as undertaken lightly or irresponsibly. The public's very ambivalence gives the anti-abortion forces a tactical advantage.

The so-called pro-life movement has been able to parlay this advantage into effective stealth campaigns against abortion rights at the state level and in the courts. According to the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), women's reproductive rights today are more restricted than they were in 1973 when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. As their data show, abortion would be flatly illegal in 11 states if Roe v. Wade were overturned. Only six states and the District of Columbia are fully pro-choice. Sixteen states require waiting periods, and 21 states mandate "informed consent," which requires abortion providers to give women specific materials about abortion and its risks, benefits, and alternatives before performing an abortion. Currently, 32 states require the involvement of an adult before a minor can obtain an abortion, and in 20 states it is an offense for a nonparent to take a minor across states lines to get an abortion.

The Supreme Court has upheld these restrictions in a number of decisions over the past 15 years, the most infamous being Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, (1992). Under these decisions, states can regulate access to abortion by requiring waiting periods, mandatory counseling, and parental consent. At the federal level, Congress has repeatedly passed legislation outlawing "partial-birth abortion" [see "The Partial-Birth Fraud" on page A2] and this year passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which makes it a federal crime to harm a fetus. One of George W. Bush's first acts was to reinstate a "global gag rule" that prevents international groups that receive U.S. funding from providing abortion services [see "The Sound of Silence" on page A21]. Bush is also expected to appoint anti-Roe Supreme Court justices.

The paradox of the anti-abortion lobby's tactical advantage is that there is no real mass movement on either side of the debate and that the majority of Americans, at their core, do not want to outlaw abortion outright. But to the extent that the anti-abortion side has been able to shift the framing of debate away from widely shared American values such as privacy, choice, and self-determination to a rhetoric of behavior, responsibility, and sexuality, they maintain the political upper hand. In a climate that favors the political right in the "culture wars," abortion has come to symbolize the perceived excesses of 1960s liberalism. Abortion in this context represents not women's control of their own reproductive capacities or right to privacy, as the pro-choice side sees it, but sexual permissiveness and irresponsibility--a potent symbol in our current political culture.

WHAT VOTERS REALLY BELIEVE

Most polls show that if the issue is reduced to simple labels, a slim majority of the public will call itself "pro-choice" rather than "pro-life." On average, in 2001, the Gallup organization finds that 50 percent of the public describe themselves as "pro-choice," compared with 40 percent who call themselves "pro-life." But these self-descriptions are deceiving--only about one-fifth to one-quarter of the public support abortion under any circumstance. A similar number would make abortion illegal under all circumstances. The majority of the public favor some level of restriction on legal abortion. But polling organizations pose their questions differently, and there is considerable variation in their assessment of the magnitude of these restrictions. According to a June 2001 ABC News/Beliefnet poll, for instance, 31 percent of the American public would make abortion "legal in most cases," while 23 percent would make abortion "illegal in most cases." According to Gallup's data for the month before, however, 15 percent of the public would make "abortion legal under most circumstances," while 41 percent would make abortion "legal in only a few circumstances." Regardless, the overarching point is that a majority of the public support at least minor restrictions on the legal right to an abortion and a significant minority support serious restrictions on the legal right to an abortion.

When those restrictions are specified, the challenge for the pro-choice camp becomes more evident. Polls show that three-quarters of the public support legal abortion when a woman's life is endangered by pregnancy or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. But support drops dramatically when the justifications seem frivolous or an unplanned pregnancy is the result of perceived carelessness or irresponsibility. According to a 1998 CBS News/New York Times poll, 70 percent of the public oppose a woman seeking abortion because a child or pregnancy conflicts with her career. A Gallup poll conducted last year found that 62 percent of the public would make abortion illegal in the case of a woman or family who cannot afford to raise a child. An ABC News/ Washington Postpoll from this year showed that 55 percent of the public would make abortion illegal when the woman is not married and does not want the baby. And in a 1998 CBS News/New York Times poll, 78 percent of the public favored requiring parental consent before allowing girls under 18 to abort a pregnancy.

THE ANTI-ABORTION TACTICAL ADVANTAGE DOES NOT stem from any dramatic change in public opinion. The public has not become significantly more anti-choice since Roe, despite steady legal and extra-legal infringements. According to Gallup data dating back to 1975, the proportion of Americans who would make abortion illegal in all circumstances has ranged between 12 percent and 19 percent, while the proportion who would impose some restrictions has fluctuated between 48 percent and 58 percent. There is no discernible pattern to this variation over time.

Since 1995, Gallup has found a slight decrease (from 56 percent to 50 percent) in the number of Americans who label themselves "pro-choice" and a slight increase (from 33 percent to 40 percent) in the number who call themselves "pro-life." But again, these changes are not dramatic and probably reflect the ever-shifting fortunes of the two sides rather than a fundamental alteration in how people think about moral dilemmas associated with abortion.

So we are left with a public that will call itself "pro-choice" yet support a number of restrictions on the legal right to an abortion. These sorts of restrictions are precisely what the anti-abortion groups pursue to gain ground in the courts and state legislatures. Rather than fighting abortion at the extremes--such as by pushing hard and publicly for a constitutional amendment banning abortion--"pro-life" groups pursue a strategy of quiet encroachment at the state level by delaying access through mandated waiting periods, denying use of public facilities except to save a woman's life, restricting access to minors, and imposing informed-consent requirements, public-funding bans, and post-viability prohibitions.

ABORTION, CLASS, AND FEMINISM

If public opinion about abortion has remained stable over time, why have the anti-abortion forces made these incursions? Part of the explanation reflects changes in the abortion debate over the last 30 years. Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was a medical procedure procured discreetly by affluent women from their doctors but performed illegally and expensively, often under hazardous medical conditions, for poor women. Unplanned and unwanted pregnancies were hidden from view, while the medical community controlled access to abortion.

As sociologist Kristin Luker argues, the drive to criminalize abortion in the late nineteenth century came from individual doctors and the American Medical Association, who were eager to wrest control from midwives and homeopaths. At the beginning of the twentieth century, abortion was illegal in every state, though doctors retained great latitude to perform "therapeutic" abortions for a variety of physical and psychological reasons. The 1873 Comstock Law also limited abortion by outlawing possession of information about "unlawful" abortions and birth control.

Before Roe, some states liberalized abortion laws while the Catholic Church stepped up efforts to keep abortion illegal. But Roe v. Wade put abortion on the political map in a way that it had not been before. Certainly, there had been a number of important events--such as thalidomide babies and the advent of the birth-control pill--that changed the attitudes and practices surrounding reproduction prior to the decision. But shortly after the ruling, abortion came to symbolize the political controversies over the changing status of women in society and the liberalization of sexual mores. For feminists and pro-choice activists, values such as control, choice, and privacy were fundamental to women's ability to pursue educational and career opportunities fully and, consequently, to achieve equality more generally. The ability of women to control their reproductive capabilities meant that women had the potential to emerge in the workplace and advance on equal footing with men.

For the "pro-life" side, anti-abortion activity became tied to a broader backlash against the changes wrought by the women's movement. The mobilization around opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, for example, explicitly made the link between legal abortion and women's place in family and society. Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA coalition actively promoted the idea that the ERA would lead to an increase in abortions, despite the fact that the amendment did not contain any language to suggest such an interpretation. As Donald Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart explain in Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: "ERA was an attempt to remove sex as a classification in law, a way of separating individual women from their sex. Abortion was a way for women to avoid the natural process associated with their sexuality. Thus both undermined the family by separating familial responsibilities from women. Both ERA and abortion, therefore, were seen as ways through which women could be released from traditional roles and responsibilities." For anti-ERA activists, abortion represented the liberalization of sexuality, the perceived rejection of motherhood, and the movement of women into the workplace, which threatened their decision to choose full-time motherhood or other traditional roles.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the public assimilated and accepted many of the tenets of liberal feminism, particularly equality before the law and the right of women to pursue careers and be treated equally in the workplace (for example, to receive equal pay for equal work). In public-opinion polls today, it is difficult to find anyone who objects to women's participation in the workplace or supports a return to traditional roles. For example, in a 1997 study by the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of the respondents disagreed that "women should return to their traditional roles in society." While two-thirds of the public said in one survey that it would be ideal for mothers to stay home with their children if it is financially feasible, an equal number of parents in another said that "mothers who work outside the home are just as loving and committed to their children as those who stay at home" (Kaiser Family Foundation/ Washington Post/Harvard University, 2000; Public Agenda, 2000). Eighty-six percent of the public objected to the notion that husbands should have final say over financial matters (Kaiser/Post/Harvard, 1997).

In this climate, abortion, while continuing to provoke debates about when life begins and the moral status of the fetus, maintains its salience politically as part of the "family values" agenda rather than as a symbol of the flight of women from their traditional place in the home. Anti-abortion forces lose traction when they seem to be challenging women's rights; they gain it when they successfully link abortion to a larger narrative about "moral decline" stemming from the libertine practices of 1960s social movements. In this narrative, abortion represents sexual irresponsibility, which is part of a larger set of social ills that includes juvenile crime, welfare dependency, family breakup, and civic malaise. The construct offers a compelling story to the American electorate, even if there is little evidence of causal connections among these phenomena. The parties have become polarized precisely along these lines.

ANTI-ABORTION AS A MOVEMENT

The "pro-life" side also gains ground because of its organizational strength. Until the Roe decision, anti-abortion activity was limited to a small band of Catholic activists and conservative doctors who lobbied for criminalization of the procedure in state legislatures. After Roe, anti-abortion activists were able to build a movement from an extensive national network of conservative organizations, such as Schlafly's Eagle Forum. More recently, the anti-abortion lobby has benefited from a vast organizational network of evangelical and Catholic churches, which opposes abortion both on the grounds of the sanctity of life and because of the challenges it poses to traditional gender roles. Much like the nineteenth-century social movements for moral reform and temperance that found their constituents in religious communities, "pro-life" groups build their support from the ground up in local churches. After the Roe decision, for example, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops immediately began organizing against abortion at the parish level, even allowing the National Right to Life Committee to take collections after mass on Sunday. Concerned Women for America, an anti-feminist organization boasting 500,000 members, organizes from the bottom up with nearly 500 "prayer/action chapters" based in local churches and a membership fee of $20 per year.

Christian-right organizations such as Focus on the Family advertise their activities through churches. One can find missives from its founder, Dr. James Dobson, inserted in church bulletins and in the anti-abortion pamphlets that abound in the back of church halls. Events such as the "Evangelical Day of Life" or "Walks for Life" are routinely announced in church bulletins, sermons, and Bible-study and prayer groups. Evangelical ministers and Catholic priests encourage the dissemination of this information; according to a 1996 Pew Research Center survey, 60 percent of regular churchgoers hear about abortion in weekly sermons.

Evangelical churches built a massive communications infrastructure during the 1960s and 1970s, both on radio and on television. Their efforts were bolstered in the mid-1960s when the Federal Communications Commission started permitting broadcasters to sell their airtime to religious groups to fulfill their public-service obligations. Conservative groups such as Pat Robertson's 700 Club were quite willing to pay for the airtime--an opportunity that progressive and liberal religious groups mostly shunned. As a result, evangelical churches and organizations still dominate religious television. Currently, 1,500 radio stations provide 15 hours of religious programming a week to an audience that an Annenberg/Gallup study in the mid-1980s put at 13 million people.

There is, of course, a well-organized pro-choice community that plays a central role in the abortion debate at the state and the national level. The National Organization for Women (NOW), NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the Feminist Majority, and a host of other national organizations can rally grass-roots opposition to antiabortion efforts in state legislatures, the courts, and in Congress. NOW and NARAL maintain local chapters and Planned Parenthood is built on a network of local clinics. Other organizations devoted to electoral activism have been effective at helping to elect pro-choice legislators. Emily's List, the largest political-action committee in the Democratic camp, devotes its campaign contributions to pro-choice Democratic women candidates.

Nevertheless, these organizations lack the extensive institutional and communications networks of the anti-abortion forces. Nor is there an equivalent to the natural constituency that the anti-abortion forces find in Catholic and evangelical churches. Moreover, the pro-choice side lacks the allies that could mobilize a comparable level of single-issue grass-roots support. Within the Democratic tent, many of the leading groups that have extensive membership infrastructure support abortion rights, but they do not consider the issue a high political priority. It is hard to imagine the AFL-CIO mobilizing its locals to leaflet for abortion rights and featuring pro-choice articles in its publications with the same vigor that the Catholic Church applies in its campaign against abortion.

THE ELECTORAL CONSEQUENCES

While the anti-abortion side is encroaching on the effective right to choose and is gaining rhetorical ground, the electoral story is more complicated. The majority of the country occupies the middle ground on this issue, and abortion tends not to determine their voting decisions. Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom which holds that the gender gap between Republicans and Democrats is driven by women's support for abortion rights--women lean Democratic largely because they favor the party's priorities on health care, education, and retirement security. There are few differences between men and women in their views toward abortion. For instance, in a Los Angeles Times poll conducted last year, 42 percent of men and 44 percent of women said that abortion should always be legal, compared with 47 percent of men and 44 percent of women who said that abortion should be made illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the mother. Gallup data from 2000 show a similar pattern--35 percent of men said that abortion should be legal under any or most circumstances, compared with 41 percent of women.

There simply is not a mass base of women mobilized around abortion rights: Abortion divides, rather than unites, women. Consider the effect of education on women's views about abortion. According to data collected for the National Election Study (NES) by the University of Michigan in 1998, 58 percent of college-educated women believe that by law women should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice, compared with 41 percent of women with some post-high-school education and 29 percent of women with a high-school education or less. Looking at a "feeling thermometer" to measure attitudes toward pro-life or antiabortion groups, 47 percent of college-educated women rated antiabortion groups lower than 50 on a scale from 0 to 100, compared with 39 percent of non-college-educated women. Among white college-educated women, the main constituents of the women's movement, only 35 percent are warm toward pro-life or antiabortion groups (Democracy Corps, 200l).

Not surprisingly, as the major political parties have staked out opposite positions on abortion rights, feminism, women's rights, and other "family values" issues, these differences have emerged in women's voting behavior. Since the 1970s, the parties have been polarized over cultural issues such as abortion, feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, school prayer, school curriculum, sex education, and homosexuality. Democrats are clearly associated in the public's mind with liberal positions on these issues, while the Republican Party remains the guardian of "family values." These issues divide women: Generally, highly educated and secular women adopt more feminist and pro-choice views, while less-educated and more-religious women are more socially conservative.

These differences had an impact on women's voting behavior in the 1990s as President Clinton's impeachment and other scandals heightened sensitivities to values and morals in electoral politics. Since the early 1990s, Democratic candidates have enjoyed increased support among college-educated women while losing ground with high-school-educated women. Al Gore won 57 percent of college-educated women (21 percent of the electorate), 50 percent of women with some college education (18 percent of the electorate), and 52 percent of women with a high-school education (12 percent of the electorate). This represents a 4-point increase among college-educated women and a 4-point decline among high-school-educated women since 1996 for the Democrats. Between the 1996 and 1998 elections, their share of the congressional vote fell from 58 percent to 52 percent among high-school-educated women, while it rose among college-educated women by 3 points.

Postelection surveys from the 2000 presidential race clearly demonstrate that despite Democratic candidate Al Gore's advantage over Republican George W. Bush on matters of social policy, values played a central role in non-college-educated women's voting decisions. In a survey conducted for Campaign for America's Future (CAF) and Democracy Corps that compared Gore's populist message with Bush's values message, white non-college-educated women were nearly twice as likely as white college-educated women to agree strongly with Bush's notion of respecting the values of middle-class families, including "more personal responsibility, which means more accountability in education, fewer abortions, and respecting the rights of gun owners." Overall, 31 percent of white non-college-educated women cited Bush's position on family, values as a reason to support him, compared with 22 percent of white college-educated women.

In last year's election, despite the candidates' reluctance to engage in a debate about abortion and despite the relatively low salience of the issue generally, choice did weigh heavily in the voting preferences of certain women voters. In the CAF/Democracy Corps survey, for example, 40 percent of white college-educated women cited Gore's support for "a woman's right to choose" as their top reason for supporting his candidacy, while only 28 percent of white non-college-educated women took this position. Twenty-five percent of non-college-educated white women cited Bush's efforts to reduce abortions as reasons for supporting his candidacy, and 20 percent of white college-educated women.

THE FUTURE OF REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

The public's views on abortion fights are irresolute and often contradictory. In collusion with the Republican Party, "pro-life" forces effectively link abortion to the broader "family values" agenda. This gives them disproportionate electoral power even as abortion does not solely determine people's voting decisions.

Paradoxically, the continuing availability of legal abortion has blunted the power of the pro-choice camp. Young women and men recently coming of age politically simply have not had the same set of experiences as the activists on either side of the debate. Generations X and Y have no memory of illegal, back-alley abortions or the struggle to achieve abortion rights. At the same time, younger generations cannot conceive of women's equal participation in the workplace as controversial or the two-income family as a challenge to traditional gender roles. So we should not assume that young people's views about reproductive rights are driven by sixties-era conflicts over women's rights.

The challenge for the pro-choice movement is how to take back the abortion debate when for young people, including young women, the language of women's rights--like "the personal is political" or "the right to control your own body"--seems remote. There is little evidence that young people are any more supportive of abortion rights than their elders. In fact, the limited data that do exist suggest that young people are less emphatically pro-choice in their views than is the boomer generation that experienced the women's movement. A frequently cited national study of incoming freshmen that is conducted annually by UCLA shows that students who entered college in 2000 were less likely to agree that "abortion should be legal" than were students who entered college in 1990. According to 1998 NES data, voters under 30 are more likely to agree that "under the law, abortion should never be permitted" than are all other voters except senior citizens.

But if public opinion on abortion rights is ambivalent, it is also malleable--as a recent battle of dueling TV spots demonstrated. The religious right has long run anti-abortion ads. Beginning in 1998, NARAL'S Choice for America campaign aired a series of TV ads with themes that emphasize a woman's right to control her own body and to make her own choices. In one of the ads, a mother is watching her young daughter master a sled. The mother's voice says: "I want every good thing in the world for you.... Sure, you'll hit a few bumps along the way, but you'll learn ... that it's your body, your life, your responsibility. Never give up your freedom to choose. Your dreams are tied to it." In another ad, a young woman is being examined in a doctor's office. The voice-over says: "I'm the one who must live with these choices. Shouldn't I be the one to make them?"

What's the message? That people who believe in a woman's right to choose an abortion (or not) are also loving parents, responsible citizens, and committed to women's freedoms generally. Though the data are proprietary, polls conducted by Harrison Hickman, NARAL's pollster, suggest that these and similar ads moved public opinion dramatically when they aired in several swing states during last year's presidential-election campaign. The Choice for America campaign also employs grass-roots organizing to complement the ad campaign, which generated a substantial base of supporters who can be activated through the Internet.

This work suggests that threats to reproductive choice can be pushed back when activists' efforts are targeted, supported by grass-roots organizing, and designed to strike a popular chord. In the twenty-first century, few Americans would challenge women's basic rights in general. For the pro-choice camp, the challenge is to connect a right that is now under siege to broader rights that are taken for granted.

ANNA GREENBERG is vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.

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