Churchill: Now, the fight over abortion really begins

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% : Blasch, who is now 64, was opposed to abortion before the crash, but she also believes it gave her a unique perspective on the value of life.
50% : I profiled Blasch three years ago, when, in those days before COVID-19 shuttered the building, she spent hours each week standing outside the Assembly Chamber in the Capitol, silently surrounded by signs and posters decrying abortion.
44% : An example is the plan by Attorney General Letitia James to pay for women who live where abortion is restricted to travel to New York for the procedure.
43% : While Blasch is opposed to abortion in all circumstances, polls show that's a position held by a relatively small percentage of Americans -- 19 percent, according to the most recent Gallup poll on the issue, which, like other surveys, also found that a majority opposed overturning Roe.
42% : As David Leonhardt of The New York Times noted, the country immediately after a Roe overturn is likely to "split between blue states with greater access to abortion than most Americans favor and red states with substantially less access than most Americans favor."
40% : Support for abortion falls sharply after the first trimester, and if there's any sort of consensus to be found, polls suggest the comfortable spot for many Americans would be to keep abortion legal but under laws more restrictive than Roe has allowed.
33% :Millions of people see abortion from a different perspective, of course, emphasizing the right of women to control their own bodies and lives without government interference.
17% : Put it this way: A vulnerable Kathy Hochul will benefit if she can make the campaign less about crime, the economy and taxes and more about the generally anti-abortion positions held by presumptive Republican nominee Lee Zeldin.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.