HANNAH FINGERHUT
Thu, June 30, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new poll finds a growing percentage of Americans calling out abortion or women’s rights as priorities for the government in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, especially among Democrats and those who support abortion access.
With midterm elections looming, President Joe Biden and Democrats will seek to capitalize on that shift.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in remarks immediately after the decision that “reproductive freedom is on the ballot in November.” But with pervasive pessimism and a myriad of crises facing the nation, it’s not clear whether the ruling will break through to motivate those voters — or just disappoint them.
“It does feel like a major setback,” said 26-year-old Lauren Nelson of San Diego, who has been worrying about the environment her young niece will grow up in. She doesn’t think the midterms will change the course that states are on. “You can’t help but feel kind of helpless, as though there’s not much that can be done.”
Twenty-two percent of U.S. adults name abortion or women’s rights in an open-ended question as one of up to five problems they want the government to work on, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s more than doubled since December, when an AP-NORC poll found a notable uptick in mentions of abortion from years before, likely in anticipation of the Dobbs ruling on abortion.
The new poll, which included interviews conducted before and after the Supreme Court’s ruling, finds prioritization of the issues grew sharply following the decision.
The Dobbs ruling kicks decision-making on abortion back to states, and in the last week, Republican governors and legislatures have moved to introduce or advance legislation that bans or curtails abortions.
Polling conducted before the decision showed it was unpopular with a majority of Americans, who wanted to see the court leave Roe as is. A majority of Americans support abortion access in general, though many say there should be restrictions. About a third say abortion should be legal in all cases, roughly another third legal in most cases, about a quarter illegal in most cases. About 1 in 10 say it should be illegal in all cases.
Mentions of abortion specifically are not limited to Americans who support abortion rights; instead, the poll shows abortion is named as a priority by roughly a quarter of adults with hardline opinions on both sides of the issue — those who think abortion should be legal in all cases and those who think abortion should be illegal in all cases.
Earnestine Smith, a 68-year-old resident of Waukegan, Illinois, said the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe represents progress. The issue is one of her highest priorities right now.
“We want abortion abolished and done away with,” she said. “We got to stand up and say no.”
Still, it’s significant that those with the most liberal views on abortion and those with the most conservative views are about equally likely to prioritize the issue; historically, research has shown opponents of abortion have been more likely to consider the issue important to them than those supporting abortion access.
And the new poll finds mentions of women’s rights are almost exclusively by those who think abortion should be legal.
According to the poll, the percentage of women prioritizing abortion or women's rights was already higher in interviews conducted before the ruling than six months ago, 21% vs. 9% in December; it swelled to 37% in the days after. Mentions grew sharply among men, too, but the growth was concentrated in the wake of the ruling, from 6% in interviews conducted before to 21% after.
Lyle Gist said he wouldn’t have thought of abortion as a top priority a few years ago. The court decision to overturn Roe, though unsurprising, makes it a major issue.
“I think the ramifications of this are substantial,” said 36-year-old Gist of Los Angeles. Gist thinks that there will be ripple effects, including a “mass exodus” of people moving out of states with abortion bans.
In a small town in Louisiana in 1968, when abortion was illegal, Anne Jones carried a pregnancy to term and gave her daughter up for adoption. Jones, now 74 in Plano, Texas, worries about what the Republican Party might go after next -- like birth control -- and thinks it’s hypocritical that lawmakers like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott want to “hold the woman accountable for the child that she may not be able to afford to keep” even as they limit health and social services for women and children.
“Politics in Texas has taken a wrong turn,” she said. She wants to see abortion access made national law but remains skeptical that Biden and Democrats can do so.
The poll shows these issues have been increasingly important to Democrats, growing from just 3% in 2020 to 13% in 2021 and now 33%. In interviews before the ruling, 18% of Democrats mentioned abortion or women’s rights; that was 42% after.
Among Republicans, 11% identify abortion or women's rights as a priority in the new poll, a modest increase from 5% who said that in December.
Steven Lefemine, who protests outside the Planned Parenthood in Columbia, South Carolina, called Roe’s reversal a “major benchmark” but said lawmakers needed to do much more, including pursuing a constitutional amendment to protect unborn children.
“I’d like to see legislation that lives up to God’s word,” he said.
Biden and Democrats have vowed to fight for abortion access, but they’ve struggled with how to act given crippling opposition from Republicans in a sharply divided Senate. Biden said to reporters on Thursday that he would support an exception to the filibuster rule to codify Roe into law.
Roderick Hinton, who voted for Biden, wants to see the president move on court reform, saying the court’s decisions “are not matching today’s time.” He was angry after the court overturned Roe -- that the older generation is “putting the screws” to younger Americans, including his two daughters.
Biden commissioned a review of the Supreme Court after promising to do so on the campaign trail, a response to rhetoric within the Democratic Party about expanding the court following former President Donald Trump’s three conservative appointments. The report released last year exercised caution about proposals to expand the court or set term limits.
“Their lifetime position is really crazy,” Hinton said. “As neutral as the courts were, it’s now becoming political. Their personal beliefs are being put in place.”
___
Associated Press/Report for America reporter Claire Savage in Chicago and AP writer Matt Sedensky in New York contributed to this report.
___
The poll of 1,053 adults was conducted June 23-27 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
A ‘sucker punch’: Some women fear setback to hard-won rights
A mother and child walk past reporters, clinic defenders and anti-abortion activists standing outside the Jackson Women's Health Organization clinic in Jackson, Miss., June 25, 2022. The clinic is the only facility that performs abortions in the state. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)More
JOCELYN NOVECK
Sun, June 26, 2022
At 88, Gloria Steinem has long been the nation’s most visible feminist and advocate for women’s rights. But at 22, she was a frightened American in London getting an illegal abortion of a pregnancy so unwanted, she actually tried to throw herself down the stairs to end it.
Her response to the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade is succinct: “Obviously,” she wrote in an email message, “without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.”
Steinem’s blunt remark cuts to the heart of the despair some opponents are feeling about Friday's historic rollback of the 1973 case legalizing abortion. If a right so central to the overall fight for women’s equality can be revoked, they ask, what does it mean for the progress women have made in public life in the intervening 50 years?
“One of the things that I keep hearing from women is, ‘My daughter’s going to have fewer rights than I did. And how can that be?’” says Debbie Walsh, of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “If this goes, what else can go? It makes everything feel precarious.”
Reproductive freedom was not the only demand of second-wave feminism, as the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s is known, but it was surely one of the most galvanizing issues, along with workplace equality.
The women who fought for those rights recall an astonishing decade of progress from about 1963 to 1973 including the right to equal pay, the right to use birth control, and Title IX in 1972 which bans discrimination in education. Capping it off was Roe v. Wade a year later, granting a constitutional right to abortion.
Many of the women who identified as feminists at the time had an illegal abortion or knew someone who did. Steinem, in fact, credits a “speak-out” meeting she attended on abortion in her 30s as the moment she pivoted from journalism to activism — and finally felt enabled to speak about her own secret abortion.
“Abortion is so tied to the women’s movement in this country,” says Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco medical school who studies and teaches the history of abortion. “Along with improved birth control, what legal abortion meant was that women who were heterosexually active could still take part in public life. It enabled the huge change we’ve seen in women’s status over the last 50 years.” Joffe says many women, like her, now feel that the right to contraception could be at risk — something she calls “unthinkable.”
One of them is Heather Booth. When she was 20 and a student in Chicago, a male friend asked if she could help his sister obtain an abortion. It was 1965, and through contacts in the civil rights movement, she found a way to connect the young woman, nearly suicidal at the prospect of being pregnant, to a doctor willing to help. She thought it would be a one-off, but Booth ended up co-founding the Jane Collective, an underground group of women who provided safe abortions to those in need. In all, the group performed some 11,000 abortions over about seven years — a story recounted in the new documentary “The Janes.”
Booth, now 76, sees the Roe v. Wade upheaval as a chilling challenge to the triumphs of the women’s movement.
“I think we are on a knife’s edge,” she says. “On the one hand, there’s been 50 years of a change in women’s condition in this society,” she adds, recalling that when she was growing up, women could only respond to employment ads in the “women’s section,” to list just one example.
“So there’s been an advance toward greater equality, but … if you ask about where we stand, I think we are on a knife’s edge in a contest really between democracy and freedom, and tyranny, a dismantling of freedoms that have been long fought for.”
Of course, not every woman feels that abortion is a right worth preserving.
Linda Sloan, who has volunteered the last five years, along with her husband, for the anti-abortion organization A Moment of Hope in Columbia, South Carolina, says she values women’s rights.
“I strongly believe and support women being treated as equals to men … (in) job opportunities, salary, respect, and many other areas,” she says. She says she has tried to instill those values in her two daughters and two sons, and upholds them with her work at two women's shelters, trying to empower women to make the right choices.
But when it comes to Roe v. Wade, she says, “I believe that the rights of the child in the mother’s womb are equally important. To quote Psalm 139, I believe that God ‘formed my inner parts’ and ‘knitted me together in my mother’s womb.’”
Elizabeth Kilmartin, like Sloan, volunteers at A Moment of Hope and is deeply pleased by the court's decision.
In her younger years she considered herself a feminist and studied women's history in college. Then, over the years she came to deeply oppose abortion, and no longer considers herself a feminist because she believes the word has been co-opted by those on the left. “No women’s rights have been harmed in the decision to stop killing babies in the womb,” Kilmartin says. “We have all kinds of women in power. Women aren't being oppressed in the workplace anymore. We have a woman vice president ... It’s just ridiculous to think that we’re so oppressed."
Cheryl Lambert falls squarely in the opposing camp. The former Wall Street executive, now 65, immediately thought back to the gains she made earlier in her banking career, becoming the first woman to be named an officer at the institution she worked for. She calls the court decision “a sucker punch.”
“My thought was, what era are we living in?” Lambert says. “We are moving backwards. I’m just furious on behalf of our children and our grandchildren.”
Lambert herself needed an abortion as a young mother when the fetus was found to carry a genetic disease. “I thought it would get easier, not harder, to have an abortion in this country,” she says.
Now, she and many other women fear a return to dangerous, illegal abortions of the past — and a disproportionate impact on women without the means to travel to abortion-friendly states. Still, many are trying to see a positive side: that as bleak as the moment may seem, change could come via new energy at the ballot box.
“We're in it for the long haul,” says Carol Tracy, of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia.
Steinem, too, issued a note of resolve.
“Women have always taken power over our own bodies, and we will keep right on,” she wrote in her email message. “An unjust court can’t stop abortion, but it guarantees civil disobedience and disrespect for the court.”
___
AP Reporter Maryclaire Dale contributed to this report.
___
For AP’s full coverage of the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, go to https://apnews.com/hub/abortion.
A mother and child walk past reporters, clinic defenders and anti-abortion activists standing outside the Jackson Women's Health Organization clinic in Jackson, Miss., June 25, 2022. The clinic is the only facility that performs abortions in the state. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)More
JOCELYN NOVECK
Sun, June 26, 2022
At 88, Gloria Steinem has long been the nation’s most visible feminist and advocate for women’s rights. But at 22, she was a frightened American in London getting an illegal abortion of a pregnancy so unwanted, she actually tried to throw herself down the stairs to end it.
Her response to the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade is succinct: “Obviously,” she wrote in an email message, “without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.”
Steinem’s blunt remark cuts to the heart of the despair some opponents are feeling about Friday's historic rollback of the 1973 case legalizing abortion. If a right so central to the overall fight for women’s equality can be revoked, they ask, what does it mean for the progress women have made in public life in the intervening 50 years?
“One of the things that I keep hearing from women is, ‘My daughter’s going to have fewer rights than I did. And how can that be?’” says Debbie Walsh, of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “If this goes, what else can go? It makes everything feel precarious.”
Reproductive freedom was not the only demand of second-wave feminism, as the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s is known, but it was surely one of the most galvanizing issues, along with workplace equality.
The women who fought for those rights recall an astonishing decade of progress from about 1963 to 1973 including the right to equal pay, the right to use birth control, and Title IX in 1972 which bans discrimination in education. Capping it off was Roe v. Wade a year later, granting a constitutional right to abortion.
Many of the women who identified as feminists at the time had an illegal abortion or knew someone who did. Steinem, in fact, credits a “speak-out” meeting she attended on abortion in her 30s as the moment she pivoted from journalism to activism — and finally felt enabled to speak about her own secret abortion.
“Abortion is so tied to the women’s movement in this country,” says Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco medical school who studies and teaches the history of abortion. “Along with improved birth control, what legal abortion meant was that women who were heterosexually active could still take part in public life. It enabled the huge change we’ve seen in women’s status over the last 50 years.” Joffe says many women, like her, now feel that the right to contraception could be at risk — something she calls “unthinkable.”
One of them is Heather Booth. When she was 20 and a student in Chicago, a male friend asked if she could help his sister obtain an abortion. It was 1965, and through contacts in the civil rights movement, she found a way to connect the young woman, nearly suicidal at the prospect of being pregnant, to a doctor willing to help. She thought it would be a one-off, but Booth ended up co-founding the Jane Collective, an underground group of women who provided safe abortions to those in need. In all, the group performed some 11,000 abortions over about seven years — a story recounted in the new documentary “The Janes.”
Booth, now 76, sees the Roe v. Wade upheaval as a chilling challenge to the triumphs of the women’s movement.
“I think we are on a knife’s edge,” she says. “On the one hand, there’s been 50 years of a change in women’s condition in this society,” she adds, recalling that when she was growing up, women could only respond to employment ads in the “women’s section,” to list just one example.
“So there’s been an advance toward greater equality, but … if you ask about where we stand, I think we are on a knife’s edge in a contest really between democracy and freedom, and tyranny, a dismantling of freedoms that have been long fought for.”
Of course, not every woman feels that abortion is a right worth preserving.
Linda Sloan, who has volunteered the last five years, along with her husband, for the anti-abortion organization A Moment of Hope in Columbia, South Carolina, says she values women’s rights.
“I strongly believe and support women being treated as equals to men … (in) job opportunities, salary, respect, and many other areas,” she says. She says she has tried to instill those values in her two daughters and two sons, and upholds them with her work at two women's shelters, trying to empower women to make the right choices.
But when it comes to Roe v. Wade, she says, “I believe that the rights of the child in the mother’s womb are equally important. To quote Psalm 139, I believe that God ‘formed my inner parts’ and ‘knitted me together in my mother’s womb.’”
Elizabeth Kilmartin, like Sloan, volunteers at A Moment of Hope and is deeply pleased by the court's decision.
In her younger years she considered herself a feminist and studied women's history in college. Then, over the years she came to deeply oppose abortion, and no longer considers herself a feminist because she believes the word has been co-opted by those on the left. “No women’s rights have been harmed in the decision to stop killing babies in the womb,” Kilmartin says. “We have all kinds of women in power. Women aren't being oppressed in the workplace anymore. We have a woman vice president ... It’s just ridiculous to think that we’re so oppressed."
Cheryl Lambert falls squarely in the opposing camp. The former Wall Street executive, now 65, immediately thought back to the gains she made earlier in her banking career, becoming the first woman to be named an officer at the institution she worked for. She calls the court decision “a sucker punch.”
“My thought was, what era are we living in?” Lambert says. “We are moving backwards. I’m just furious on behalf of our children and our grandchildren.”
Lambert herself needed an abortion as a young mother when the fetus was found to carry a genetic disease. “I thought it would get easier, not harder, to have an abortion in this country,” she says.
Now, she and many other women fear a return to dangerous, illegal abortions of the past — and a disproportionate impact on women without the means to travel to abortion-friendly states. Still, many are trying to see a positive side: that as bleak as the moment may seem, change could come via new energy at the ballot box.
“We're in it for the long haul,” says Carol Tracy, of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia.
Steinem, too, issued a note of resolve.
“Women have always taken power over our own bodies, and we will keep right on,” she wrote in her email message. “An unjust court can’t stop abortion, but it guarantees civil disobedience and disrespect for the court.”
___
AP Reporter Maryclaire Dale contributed to this report.
___
For AP’s full coverage of the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, go to https://apnews.com/hub/abortion.
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