WASHINGTON – For all the recent tumult over abortion, one thing has remained surprisingly stable: Americans have proved extremely consistent in their beliefs about the procedure – and extremely conflicted in their views.
“Rock solid in its absolutely contradictory opinions” is how public opinion expert Karlyn Bowman describes the nation’s mind-set.
An AP-Ipsos poll finds that most Americans are ensconced in what one policy analyst calls the “big mushy middle” on this issue.
In this latest poll, 19 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in all cases; 16 percent said it should never be legal; 6 percent did not know. That left nearly three-fifths somewhere in between, believing abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances.
Dicing the same data a different way, 52 percent of those surveyed thought abortion should be legal in most or all cases; 43 percent said it should be illegal most or all of the time.
Two-thirds of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while two-thirds of Republicans say that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
Two-thirds of white evangelicals say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, while 54 percent of Protestants felt that way. Half of Catholics said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
People are about evenly split when asked whether the federal government should decide whether abortion is legal or not, or state governments should decide, the poll found. People with a high school education or less were most likely, 56 percent, to say state government should decide, while those with a college education were most likely, 57 percent, to say the federal government should decide.
Those results highlight some public confusion over how abortion laws work, because most people oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion.
The survey was taken Feb. 28-March 2.
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