In what’s likely more bad news for Republicans, American support for abortion rights has grown in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in June to jettison Roe v. Wade, a new Wall Street Journal poll has found.
And more than half of voters surveyed said the issue made them more likely to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, the newspaper reported Saturday.
A clear majority oppose abortion restrictions, such as bans at certain points of pregnancy or barring women from traveling to get a legal abortion, according to the poll, which highlights the importance of the issue in the midterm elections.
According to the survey, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases — up from 55% in March.
Another 29% said it should be illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered — compared with 30% in March, the poll found. Another 6% said it should be illegal in all cases, which is down from 11% in March, the Journal reported.
Since the top court threw out Roe v. Wade, about a dozen states have banned many or almost all abortions.
Before the Supreme Court ruling, “abortion is not an issue that most people … spent a lot of time thinking about,” said Democratic pollster Molly Murphy, whose firm conducted the poll with Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. What the ruling has done is: “One, we’ve had a national conversation about it; two, it has gone from hypothetical to real.”
The poll surveyed 1,313 registered voters between Aug. 17 to 30, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
