Say Anything Blog

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Wall Street Journal (Subscription Only) - U.S. support for Roe v. Wade is at its lowest level in decades, according to a new Harris poll.

For 33 years Harris Interactive has been measuring attitudes toward the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortions legal during the first three months of pregnancy.

The latest telephone survey of 1,016 adults indicates Roe v. Wade is supported by a slim 49% to 47% plurality, compared with 52% who favored the decision in 2005 (see poll) and 57% in 1998.

Despite apparent waning support, a substantial majority (63%) of those polled don't think it is likely that this Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade over the next few years.

This is just one poll, of course, but it is also a poll that has been consistently taken over the course of 33 years. That adds a bit of weight to its results. It also tends to reflect findings from other recent polls as well.

Is America becoming pro-life? I think that's the trend right now, and I think it has a lot to do with two factors:

For one, the hippie, "free love" baby-boomer generation is getting old and beginning to die out and the younger generations replacing them aren't quite buying into the muddled logic behind Roe vs. Wade. The Roe ruling states that women have a "right" to an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. So what happens after that first three months? Does some magical fairy grant the fetus person-hood status between the last day of the first three months and the first day of the last six months? That seems a little ridiculous, doesn't it? And what about cases where a mother purposely kills her unborn child and gets a way with it thanks to her "right" to an abortion, yet the guy who helped her do it is charged with murder? What sense does it make to have the status (person or no) of an unborn child be based solely on the mother's feelings? If she wants the baby it is a human. If she doesn't, it is just a clump of cells.

Well, those things are ridiculous, and a lot of the younger generation aren't willing to look past this sort of confusing logic and take the inherent "rightness" of abortion for granted.

There is also another factor that may be contributing to this trend and it is the fact that pro-choice people are tending to have more abortions. Teenage rebelliousness aside, a lot of kids tend to share the views and values of their parents. With pro-life parents carrying all of their children to term and pro-choice parents aborting them you can see why the younger generations are trending toward being pro-life. There have been over 47,000,000 abortions since Roe was handed down from the Supreme Court in 1973. That's a significant demographic. One that might be advocating a generally pro-choice stance if they hadn't all been murdered in the womb.

As a staunch pro-lifer, I am heartened by this trend. I feel that America may finally be coming to its senses after 33 years of horrific nonsense. This is no time to be triumphant, of course, as the abortion battle is hardly over, but the indications that pro-life views are winning is welcome news.