July 10, 2019

ABC News Poll Shows Support for Abortion Rights Ticking Up

Hey, we have yet another abortion poll today. According to the latest ABC News poll, support for legal abortion is at an all-time high:

Intellectual honesty forces me to invoke Kevin’s Law here, just as I did for the recent Gallup poll that was slightly favorable toward the anti-abortion view. In the long-term, nothing has changed. The numbers for 2019 are identical to those in 1995, with some moderate bouncing around in between.

On the other hand, there has been a steady upward trend in “always legal” since 2010, and a surprisingly strong spike upward since 2013. It’s possible this represents a backlash to the recent spate of draconian abortion laws passed in a bunch of red states. To the extent that it seems like access to abortion might really be in danger—rather than just the subject of the usual jabber from conservatives—perhaps people with mushy opinions suddenly decide that they support abortion rights after all.

UPDATE: A Twitter follower points out that the ABC News chart is misleading because it doesn’t put the various polls on a proper timeline. Polls that are a month apart look the same as polls that are five years apart. Here’s a proper rendering of the data:

In reality, there’s no sharp spike in 2019. There’s just a steady increase in support for legal abortion since about 2010.

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