How a year without Roe shifted American views on abortion

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : In the year since, polling shows that what had been considered stable ground has begun to shift: For the first time, a majority of Americans say abortion is "morally acceptable."
49% : And when the question was divided into whether abortion should be legal in the first, second or third trimester, the share of Americans who say it should be legal in each was the highest it has been since Gallup first asked in 1996.
48% : One survey in the weeks after the court's decision last June found that 92% of people had heard news coverage of abortion and 73% had one or more conversations about it.
47% : Her evolution to supporting abortion rights started two years ago when she had a miscarriage that required emergency dilation and curettage; only when she saw her chart later did she realize the term was the technical name for abortion.
46% : The biggest change in polls has been the swing in who votes on abortion.
45% : For decades, Americans had settled around an uneasy truce on abortion.
45% : She wrote about her experience and joined other Catholic women, largely writers and professors, in publicizing an open letter to the Catholic church, declaring that "pro-life" policies centered on opposition to abortion "often hurt women."
44% : The New York Times reviewed polls from groups that have been asking Americans about abortion for decades, including Gallup, Public Religion Research Institute, Pew Research, Ipsos, KFF and other nonpartisan polling organizations.
44% : Pollsters say the biggest change was in political action around abortion, not necessarily in people's core views.
44% : Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the percentage of Hispanic Catholics saying abortion should be legal in all cases doubled between March and December of last year, from 16% to 31%.
44% : High proportions of women ages 18 to 49, and especially Democrats, say they will vote only for candidates who support their views on abortion.
43% : Wilson O'Reilly now believes decisions on abortion should be up to women and their doctors, not governments.
43% : In the most recent example, Gallup found that in 2020 roughly 25% of Democrats and Republicans alike had said they would vote only for a candidate who shared their view on abortion.
43% : "If they got away with this and they feel that nobody cares, it's more rights they are going to proceed to take away -- civil rights, voting rights, abortion, birth control, it's all part of that one big package.
42% : But the Supreme Court's decision last summer overturning Roe v. Wade set off a seismic change, in one swoop striking down a federal right to abortion that had existed for 50 years, long enough that women of reproductive age had never lived in a world without it.
42% : "When people have the idea that abortion equals killing babies, it's very easy to say, 'Of course I'm against that,'" she said.
42% :A Pew poll in April concluded that views on abortion law increasingly depend on where people live: The percentage of those saying abortion should be "easier to get" rose sharply last year in states where bans have been enacted or are on hold because of court disputes.
42% : She called herself "pro-choice," she said, but did not think about how that collided with the party's opposition to abortion, even though she considered herself an informed voter, and her family talked politics regularly.
41% : And polls on abortion suggest political dynamics may be shifting.
40% : Many found their views on abortion more complex and more nuanced than they realized.
40% : Polls regarding whether abortion should be legal or illegal in most or all cases -- long the most widely-used metric -- have remained relatively stable, with the percentage of voters saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases slowly ticking up over the past five years to somewhere between 60% and 70%.
40% :A coalition of Republicans and evangelicals has waged a four-decade campaign to end abortion, but the number of Americans identifying as evangelical has declined sharply.
40% : Starting with the leak and ending after the midterm elections last year, Undem conducted three surveys that tracked engagement with the issue by how many ads people saw, conversations they had and what concerns they raised about abortion.
39% : And generally, most Americans believe abortion should be limited, especially in the second and third trimesters -- not unlike the framework established by Roe.
39% : Fourteen states enacted near-total bans on abortion as a result of the court's decision.
39% : Still, she doesn't call herself a "pro-choice Catholic": "I think you can hold the view that a developing life is sacred and still not feel that it is appropriate or necessary to outlaw abortion."
39% : Republicans, she said, have to paint Democratic candidates as the extremists on abortion: "If they don't, they may very well lose."
39% :Asked in polls to name their biggest concern, most people still don't say abortion.
37% :"Does it mean that suddenly Republicans will change their minds about abortion?
36% : Even if most people weren't happy with the status quo, public opinion about the legality and morality of abortion remained relatively static.
36% : And more voters than ever say they will vote only for a candidate who shares their views on abortion, with a twist: While Republicans and those identifying as "pro-life" have historically been most likely to see abortion as a litmus test, now they are less motivated by it, while Democrats and those identifying as "pro-choice" are far more so.
36% : "If you start seeing how reproductive health care is necessary to women, you start to see that if you're supporting these policies that ban abortion, you're going to end up killing women."
36% : In San Antonio, Sergio Mata, a 31-year-old artist, said he was shocked when Texas passed a ban on abortion in 2021, and by how much anti-abortion sentiment he suddenly heard around him.
33% : In South Carolina, which recently banned abortion at six weeks of pregnancy, Jill Hartle, a 36-year-old hairdresser, had only ever voted Republican.
33% : Groups that oppose abortion rights emphasize that most Americans want restrictions on abortion -- and indeed, just 22% of Americans in Gallup's poll said abortion should be legal in the third trimester.
33% : The Public Religion Research Institute found that the share of Republicans who think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases and who said they would vote only for a candidate whose view matched their own had dropped significantly, to 30% last December from 42% in December 2020.
32% : And the share of voters saying abortion should be illegal in all cases dropped significantly in several polls.
28% : "You could say, 'I think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances,' if you didn't really have to think about what it would mean for that to happen."Raised in the church and still active in her parish, Wilson O'Reilly, 42, embraced its teachings that abortion was equivalent to murder, as part of a broader church doctrine on the protection of life that also opposes capital punishment and mistreatment of migrants.
27% : "It's not enough anymore to ask what people think about abortion, because to them abortion is part of a larger set of concerns about the country," said Tresa Undem, whose firm conducts polls for businesses as well as for Democratic-leaning groups.

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