Preparing for a Post-Roe Future
With two and a half years of a pandemic under our belts along with skyrocketing gas prices, inflation, a teetering stock market, and devastating mass shootings, the news has felt like one gut punch after another for most of us. May 3, 2022 was another kick to the shins for a majority of Americans, as it was the day Politico leaked the draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, declaring that the ruling established in the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade is set to be overturned. This was just a draft, but it seems unlikely that the final decision later this year would be much different.
For many, this draft was not a shock; however, startling that initial headline was. The issue of abortion has a tenuous history in the United States, and goes back long before Roe v. Wade. In 1821, Connecticut was the first state to pass legislation banning abortions. By 1868, 30 of the 37 states followed suit, which was then followed by the Catholic Church prohibiting abortion at any time and for any reason in 1869. However, abortion was not always a hotly-debated political issue in the public sphere until President Ronald Reagan began to use it as a way to energize Catholic and evangelical voters. Since then, it has been a front and center issue in more political campaigns than we can count. As discussed time and time again, both Republicans and Democrats have taken very different approaches in either trying to overturn or protect abortion access, respectively.
Now that all signs point to the end of constitutionally protected elective abortion, it is critical to look to how American voters are reacting. This is merely the beginning of a new era of the status of abortion access in the US, for this is not the first, and certainly not the last, development over legalized abortion.
Though this has been a highly contested issue for years, the leak pulled it into the center of debate once again. It is important to note that most national surveys show (and have shown for years) that a majority of Americans support the right for women to have access to abortion care in most if not all cases.
Since early 2021, we have been asking registered voters in our national panel what issues they are putting their focus on when it comes to their vote in 2022. Instead of the typical approach of asking that they rank which issue is most important to them, we ask panelists to allocate how much of their vote is going to be based on the issues listed in the chart below. The current results are from about one week after the draft was leaked, while the pre-leak includes data from before May 3rd.
As the chart shows, gas prices and inflation remained to be the biggest issue for registered voters, but the average allocation for the overturning of Roe saw the biggest increase, jumping five points overall. This moved the overturn of Roe from the 5th most important issue to 2nd among voters. Unsurprisingly, Democrats showed a bigger jump than Republicans (10 points vs. 1 point). The division we see across party lines is not surprising, as the debate about abortion access has been a key point of difference between Democrats and Republicans for several decades. Indeed, Republican candidates have moved towards stronger opposition and has become a popular campaign sentiment among Republican candidates, as the base of the party moves further to the right on the issue.
Partisanship aside, this decision is complicated, and to reduce it to a mere talking point of campaigns to score party points wouldn’t do justice to the magnitude of the decision, nor to the vast range of American opinions on abortion.
There is an obvious division between men and women when it comes to this decision, as various groups of women make up the majority of the opposition to overturning Roe. Looking at the above graph, women 45 to 64 have the lowest concentration of support for the SCOTUS draft. They have an average allocation of 34, using a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 means you completely oppose the SCOTUS draft and 100 means you completely support the draft. Women over 65 are not far behind in their opposition, and while women under 45 share the likelihood to oppose the decision, their opposition trails several points behind those of older women and is much closer to the overall average allocation.
Worth noting as well is that the only group of men to edge their way into more likely to oppose camp were men over 65. On its own, this is interesting. But coupled with similar findings in other questions, it is indicative of a pattern.
Looking at the question of abortion access from a slightly different angle, we asked Americans about their concern for lower-income women in light of the leaked decision. Concern among men over 65 for this group was three points higher than the national average and five points higher than women under 45.
Why might this be? It contradicts the widely-held assumption that most people become more conservative as they age. Based on this theory, young women should be the group that most strongly opposes the repeal of the Roe decision. However, this is clearly not the case.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 (49 years ago for those who don’t care to do the mental math) and women under 45 have no memory or experience with a pre-Roe America. Many Gen Z women may not even have a parent who was alive before legalized abortion access. The strength of opposition coming from older women and some older men suggests that this variable of memory, of first-person recall of America before and after Roe v. Wade was decided, is a strong indicator of opposition to ending legalized abortion amongst Americans.
Equally as important as examining findings on the leaked draft decision itself is taking a look at what ripple effects that it may cause and what concerns Americans the most. As we have seen more and more women’s clinics shutter their doors in the past few years in light of tightening regulations as well as the pandemic, concern over this pattern is quite high and transcends concern over the overturning of Roe itself.
At the baseline, the vast majority of Americans share some level of concern about women’s access to gynecological healthcare as we move forward in a likely post-Roe nation. Indeed, 91% of our respondents indicated that they have a non-zero level of concern, and almost two-thirds indicated a majority level of concern.
This data offers interesting insight into the assumption that stronger support for the ruling would equate to less concern about access to healthcare. However, this is not what our data showed. In fact, those who lean towards supporting the draft decision showed a high level of concern about healthcare access.
Given that opinions on the issue of access to abortion care are not monolithic, it is not surprising to see these varied responses as we move forward in a post-Roe world. In the above graph, we asked how much focus should be put on state laws, and how much on programs to help the women most affected by the likely ruling, and found a near equal division of where the focus should be. Overall, there is a desire for a balanced approach to moving forward. Just 30 percent feel that the focus should be on just one of the three options given (focus on laws, focus on programs, or do neither).
That being said, among Americans who strongly oppose the draft ruling, a plurality are looking for a bigger focus on laws (42%) versus focusing on programs (20%), while about a third (31%) are looking for an equal balance between the two.
Interestingly, when we look at women who strongly oppose the draft ruling, the lean towards focusing on laws is much stronger. College educated women, women making more than $80k, and urban women (there is a good deal of overlap in these groups) are looking for a majority of focus on laws, while non-college women are mostly looking for balance, and black women are looking for a bigger focus on programs.
Further complicating the issue of abortion in the US is the idea of codifying the Roe ruling into national law. When asked about this proposition, respondents showed a very distributed set of views. Overall, voters are just slightly on the side of supporting a national law, with about one-third of Americans strongly supporting the idea. On the opposite side, we find just under 3 in 10 people strongly opposing the idea, leaving 4 in 10 people somewhere between slightly opposing to slightly supporting.
Similar to the results discussed above, women over the age of 65 are in strong support of national law (average score of 76), as are women who voted for Biden (average score of 75) and suburban women (70). Notably, views on state and federal laws tend to be more demographic-based, as opposed to state-based. The chart below shows that while there are certainly differences in opinion when we compare states that skew red, blue, or purple, the differences are not as great as one may expect.
All this being said, other approaches to minimize the effects of overturning Roe become much more political in nature. When asked about their support for a national maternity leave policy and support for programs focused on low-income women, we find a slightly higher average support for the maternity leave policy (52.66) compared to programmatic funding (47.92).
However, the support levels are much more ideologically predictable when we look at the results by who they supported in the last presidential election.
As we see above, the majority of female Biden voters support both a national maternity policy and more funding for programs focused on low-income women. A plurality of men who voted for Biden (46%) also support this view point. On the flipside, a majority of men and women who voted for Trump oppose both ideas, while roughly 1 in 5 support both ideas.
The official SCOTUS ruling should be out soon. Given the fact that the draft opinion was leaked, we are unlikely to see major movement in the numbers without a completely unexpected official ruling. If Roe is overturned as expected, we will quickly move from dealing with an issue that has generally broad support to a state-by-state and policy-by-policy fight where nuance rules the day. This is very likely to deepen our divisions even further and create a very unequal distribution of healthcare access and vast differences in state policies that deal with abortion and related women’s health issues. Needless to say, we will continue to collect data on public opinion about abortion access and determine how opinions are changing as events unfold.