“EXTREME” MAKEOVER
Abortion Edition
“I always use the word extreme.”
—Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Shortly after the 2012 presidential election, Guy was chatting with a Democratic pollster, who shall remain nameless, about public opinion trends. The messaging guru raised Republicans’ much-discussed “gender gap” struggles, arguing over and over again that the GOP is out of touch on “women’s health issues” and “birth control.” When Guy explicitly brought the word abortion into the discussion, the pollster put his index finger to his lips, shushing Guy. “Women’s health,” he corrected. “But most women don’t agree that abortion is women’s health,” Guy countered, at which point he was interrupted with another shhhhhh. The pollster, without saying so, was conceding an important point—that the public doesn’t necessarily lump abortion in with the Left’s broader, sanitized category of “women’s health”—the evidence for which we’ll get to shortly.
One of the laziest pieces of political analysis you’ll hear—and we hear it a lot—is that it’s imperative for Republicans to abandon the “social issues” in order to attract more voters. This advice is typically supplied by people who already consider themselves social moderates or liberals (“ditch these issues I don’t care about!”), and who are not referring to gun control, capital punishment, or any number of issues that might fall under the “social” umbrella. Let’s face it, social issues is shorthand for gay marriage and abortion. Unless the GOP moderates significantly on this issue pairing, we’re told, it’ll doom itself with future generations of voters.
This quick-fix solution fails on two levels: First, it glosses over the serious political conundrum of how the party could hypothetically cut loose a massive portion of its core base and still cobble together a victory coalition for national elections, particularly in the short to medium term. Second, and more important, this faulty analysis assumes that the two issues come as a package deal in voters’ minds. They demonstrably do not. We’ll discuss our views on gay rights in a future chapter, but here’s a thumbnail sketch of public polling on the issue: support for same-sex marriage has skyrocketed (an overused term that actually applies in this case) in recent years to a majority stance. Among young voters, including millennial Republicans and Christians, the trend is even more pronounced.
Abortion is a different ball game. While the anti-gay/pro–traditional marriage position is hemorrhaging support, the pro-life cause has made fairly extraordinary gains, bouncing back from its polling nadir in the 1990s. Polling on the issue can be all over the map due to question wording and misperceptions. For example, a majority of Americans say they oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that conjured the “right” to abortion out of whole cloth. But significant majorities also support a raft of abortion restrictions that run afoul of Roe and its radical companion ruling, Doe v. Bolton.
Doe established that the so-called right to abortion applied broadly through all nine months of pregnancy and precluded most meaningful limitations.1
Many people mistakenly believe that overturning Roe would instantly criminalize all abortion, full stop, nationwide. It would not. The fall of Roe (which even some prominent pro-choice legal scholars admit was a poorly decided power grab) would return the difficult policy questions surrounding abortion to the people and their elected representatives. The resulting patchwork of state-by-state legal regimes would feature highly permissive laws in places like California and New York, and more restrictive laws in places like Louisiana and South Dakota. Abortion policy would be determined by the battle over hearts and minds and would often require compromise. It would not be dictated by black-robed lawyers imposing a top-down framework rooted in an invented right.
When Americans are asked what the country’s abortion laws should look like, overwhelming majorities embrace limitations and protections for the unborn. A Marist poll released in early 2014 showed supermajority support for laws that: require that a mother be shown an ultrasound image of her child prior to making a final abortion choice (58 percent support), mandate that abortion procedures be performed by medical doctors only2 (62 percent), implement a one-day waiting period prior to having an abortion (79 percent), and bar minor girls from obtaining an abortion without parental notification (80 percent). On the broader question of abortion’s legality, the national survey found that just 44 percent of Americans embraced one of three pro-choice-leaning positions—including the option of “abortion should be allowed only in the first three months of pregnancy.” Fifty-six percent responded that legal abortion should be restricted to extremely rare circumstances (rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother), or prohibited entirely. A substantial majority (61 percent) of respondents selected the two options closest to the “middle” of the spectrum, if you will: first trimester only, or “rape/incest/life of mother.” These Marist figures aren’t outliers:
An April 2013 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 52 percent of Americans said abortion should be “illegal” with either limited or no exceptions, while 45 percent said it should be legal “always” or “most of the time.”
A May survey from Gallup that same year produced a major prolife advantage, with fully 58 percent opposing legal abortion in “all” or “most circumstances,” (this included 57 percent of women and young voters) with just 39 percent espousing pro-choice opinions.
CNN’s March 2014 poll replicated Gallup’s findings, nearly to the exact percentage breakdown. Fifty-eight percent of respondents selected pro-life responses, with 40 percent leaning the other direction.
Democrats and liberals in the media3 discuss mainstream pro-life sentiment as if it’s a fringe viewpoint, limited to a shrinking segment of the Republican base. The statistics above prove that a wide array of antiabortion policies appeal to Americans far beyond traditional “socially conservative” precincts. Abortion opposition isn’t the exclusive province of rosary-praying Catholics and Bible-thumpin’ Evangelicals, yet that’s the way this issue is routinely covered. Back to that Marist poll. If you add the “legal in the first three months” group to those who embraced one of the pro-life options, you’ve got 84 percent of Americans who at least believe that abortion should be illegal in almost all circumstances in the second and third trimesters. Only an extremist could cast that entire opinion range as “extreme.”
The numbers are even starker on late-term abortion, in the sixth month of pregnancy and beyond. We have quite a lot of polling on that specific question to examine thanks to the news media commissioning a string of surveys on the issue after Texas state senator Wendy Davis (later a failed gubernatorial candidate) launched a filibuster against a 2013 bill to outlaw almost all abortions after the twenty-week mark. Davis was hailed as a hero by the abortion-supporting Left and became an instant media darling.4 Think about that. This woman became famous by blocking a bill to recognize and protect the humanity of babies in the sixth month of gestation. Many in the press thought this was heroic.
Her supporters in Texas stormed the Capitol and disrupted the vote with deafening chants that ground the legislative session to a halt. (That discussion-blocking mob action alone could easily merit its own chapter in this book.) When the bill finally passed in a subsequent special session, pro-choice protesters comported themselves in cartoonishly horrible ways, including chanting “Hail Satan!” to interrupt a pro-life vigil, and holding placards featuring charming messages such as “If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d f*** a Senator!”5 That one was held by a girl who couldn’t have been older than ten, based on a photo that made the rounds at the time. Classy stuff, adults who gave her that sign to hold. These are the people who’d label all pro-lifers extremists.
A Huffington Post poll found that Americans supported the bill by roughly a 30-point margin, while a Quinnipiac survey pegged the gap at 25 points. In the Q-poll, women were far more likely to support the abortion restriction than men (go ahead and reread that, if you’d like), favoring the late-term ban by 35 points. Only one-quarter of American women surveyed opposed this “extreme” abortion restriction.
Let us repeat: abortion and gay marriage are not linked in the public’s mind, except, apparently, among the pundit class. This holds true with younger voters, too. While the millennial generation—born between the early ’80s and ’00s—has swung hard to the left on gay rights, they are just as pro-life, if not more pro-life, than older voters. A 2012 nationwide survey of millennials commissioned by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics asked, “Which of these comes closest to your view on abortion?” The results:
It should be permitted in all cases: |
32% |
It should be permitted, but subject to greater restrictions than it is now: |
14% |
It should be permitted only in cases such as rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life: |
27% |
It should only be permitted to save the woman’s life: |
8% |
It should not be permitted at all: |
15% |
Declined to say: |
5% |
So roughly two-thirds of young Americans support greater restrictions on abortion, with a majority adopting one of the three mainstream pro-life options. Incidentally, the same poll projected that this age group would vote for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 22 points. Obama won by 23, so Harvard wasn’t relying on a fluky, right-leaning sample. Furthermore, in the Quinnipiac survey mentioned earlier, the results were broken down by age group. The cohort with the highest percentage of support for the late-term abortion ban? Young people.
Why the schism between gay rights and abortion? We suspect young people view both issues through a “rights” prism. They are unconvinced that there’s any “victim” in gay marriage, and any theoretical harm to society is not a sufficient justification to prohibit their gay friends and siblings to marry. When it comes to abortion, however, there’s a strong case to be made that the unborn child, whose life is terminated without her input or consent, is the severely wronged party in that moral equation. Republicans may want to pay attention to this dynamic as they plot their next moves on the “social issues.”
We’re not trying to be overly preachy on abortion here. Like many (most?) young people, we’re pro-life—not only because of our faith, but also because of science, ethics, and a sense of fairness. It begins with a straightforward proposition: at some point prior to birth, unborn children become human beings worthy of legal protection. We don’t claim to know precisely where that bright line exists (“viability,” for example, is a shifting standard that has moved earlier and earlier as medical technology improves), so we’d prefer to err on the side of life. We understand that this is a tough issue for a lot of people and acknowledge that outright bans—in the first few months of pregnancy, in particular—could be logistically and politically unworkable. But especially after the first trimester, it’s not really a close call in our minds. Most Americans, most young people, and most women agree with us. That’s our point. The pro-choice side is entitled to its opinion and is welcome to make the case for legalized abortion. But declaring pro-lifers antiwomen extremists isn’t just discussion-ending intimidation…it’s empirically unsupportable.
And since some people can’t resist tossing about charges of extremism on this issue, we might as well point out that the most recent Democratic Party platform abandoned President Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” formulation on the question. The abortion lobby disagrees with the “rare” part—abortion is big business, after all. “Safe” sounds nice, but many Democrats have opposed legislation requiring that abortion clinics meet the same medical and sanitary standards as hospitals—while pushing to allow nondoctors to perform abortions, as we mentioned earlier. And lax oversight of abortion clinics, due to political considerations, led directly to the unspeakable horrors at convicted felon Kermit Gosnell’s murder factory. If you think we’re being hyperbolic with that description, google his trial. It’s ghastly stuff.
One last thing: If you’re through googling Kermit Gosnell and still aren’t sufficiently sickened, punch in “Obama and Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” As a state senator, Barack Obama was the only member of the Illinois legislature to speak against a bill to halt the practice—confirmed by whistle-blowers—of abortionists murdering babies who were accidentally born alive following unsuccessful abortions. He did so three times and has since whitewashed his record through a combination of flat-out misstatements and eye rolling. The latter approach is rather effective because his actual voting record is so genuinely radical that by simply recapitulating the facts, you yourself run the risk of sounding like you’ve opened up one too many of those Obama conspiracy/hoax chain e-mails.6
The rarely discussed de facto Democratic Party position on abortion is that it should be legal throughout pregnancy, for any reason whatsoever (including sex selection), and paid for by taxpayers. Who’s extreme, again?
1 That, well, extreme precedent has been incrementally uprooted by subsequent decisions, including 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
2 California passed a law allowing nondoctors to perform abortions in 2013.
3 Numerous surveys of American journalists conducted since the mid-1980s have consistently found that reporters and editors are much, much more likely to support abortion rights than average Americans. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the media tends to uncritically parrot Democrats’ definition of abortion “extremism.” Elite media opinions on abortion are acutely out of step with public opinion, more so than on most other issues. The Media Research Center has a raft of data to this effect on its website.
4 Our friend and Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack noted that in a fawning interview on ABC News’s This Week, Davis was asked zero questions about late-term abortion, the subject of her protest. She was instead quizzed on the bravery of her filibuster and the pink tennis shoes she wore. Hard-hitting stuff. Anything to avoid the ugliness at the core of her one-woman stand.
5 A woman was thrown off an American Airlines flight for wearing a T-shirt with the same offensive (similarly censored) slogan in 2012. We find her opinion to be repugnant, but do not believe that putting it on a provocative T-shirt should merit booting a paying customer off a flight.
6 Note: Please don’t forward us yours.