President's Message: Abortion Choice Questioned

Polls! Polls! Polls! We are inundated with them—everything from California politics to the economy or our favorite football team. But missing from the media's deep interest in poll results are some of the latest polls measuring public sentiment on abortion.

Is this lack of reporting due to the results? Do these polls contradict the opinions and biases of many of those in the media? Do these polls demonstrate that Americans are having second thoughts on abortion as "merely a matter of a woman's choice."

Some of the polling results that you may not have seen in your local newspaper or heard on the tv news programs:

• a June 2003 poll by the Center for Advancement of Women, an advocacy group that supports abortion, found that 51 percent of the 1000 women surveyed took a prolife stance. This was an increase of 6 percent since their 2001 poll. Of the 12 top priorities listed in this June poll, keeping abortion legal was second to last. The president of this organization is Faye Wattleton, former head of Planned Parenthood.

• a new poll this summer by The Polling Company found that 54 percent of female voters indicated they opposed all or almost all abortions. Only 39 percent supported abortion. This firm also polled in 2001 and found an 11 percent prolife shift in the 2003 data. Another encouraging fact is that the most prolife age group is the 18-24 year olds polling at 63 percent prolife.

• in a June 2003 Newsweek poll 48 percent identified themselves as prolife and 47 percent pro-choice. But among women the prolife numbers jumped to 50 percent with 45 percent indicating they were prochoice.

• a January 2003 Gallup poll found 70 percent favoring a ban on partial birth abortions; 61 percent saying abortion should be illegal if the reason was that the woman or family couldn't afford to raise the child.

I know that for prolifers we don't measure our commitment or dedication based upon polling numbers. But these polling numbers do point out that the prolife position is the majority position and is the growing position. Because of the everyday work of countless prolife volunteers our message of Life is breaking through the proabortion slogans and rhetoric.

We are a movement that will never stop exposing the reality of this failed public policy of abortion on demand. As Rev. Richard John Neuhaus wrote:

"According to most social scientists and analysts of culture, there should never have been a pro-life movement—never mind a movement persistent and strong enough to keep abortion at the center of public life. They did not understand that those who signed up with the movement were less enlisting than enlisted, less choosing than chosen."

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