Did Dobbs Have A Noticeable Impact on Abortion Opinion?
Does a major change in abortion policy shift the public's view?
I remember teaching undergraduates about abortion opinion for the first time way back when I was teaching assistant at Southern Illinois University - Carbondale. The point of the class meeting was pretty simple — there’s not been a substantive change in how the public views abortion politics since the Roe v Wade decision was handed down in 1973. It was a fun discussion because the undergraduates could speculate as to why that was the case and what events could actually upset that sense of stasis.
Well, we got it. Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. I am in no sense a legal scholar but I know the upshot from the SCOTUS decision: The ability to restrict abortion will be left to the states. If a state wants to ban abortion in every circumstance, that’s their right. If they want to allow abortion, that’s also in their purview. In essence, it splintered the abortion conversation into fifty smaller debates across the United States. The Kaiser Family Foundation has assembled a tremendous website that catalogues all the abortion related amendments at the state level.
But here’s what I am thinking about a lot right now. If anything can shift abortion opinion in the general public, it has to be Dobbs, right? It is, without a doubt, the biggest change in policy regarding abortion in the last fifty years. In fact, the last example I can think of a time when the government has taken away rights that were already granted was Prohibition. And, we all know how that turned out.
I wanted to take the two edge cases that are offered by the Cooperative Election Study - make abortion illegal in all circumstances and allow a woman to obtain an abortion for any reason and just see how the public has shifted over the last couple of years.
Let’s start with the complete end to abortion first. The statement is, “Make abortion illegal in all circumstance.” I broke it down by partisanship.
Dobbs was announced in June of 2022, which was after the 2021 data collection but before the survey was fielded in the Fall of 2022. That’s noted by the vertical dashed line. For the Democrats, I don’t think we can come to any grand conclusion. Support for a ban was 12% before Dobbs, then dropped to 10% right after. But then it rose to 14% in 2023. Which just seems odd. I am going to just say I don’t see any discernible change here. Or at least not yet.
Now for Independents, there was a big drop right after Dobbs. Support for a total ban went from 20% to 16%. But then it shot back up to 19% in the 2023 data. That 19% statistic was pretty much the average over the years before Dobbs was decided. Maybe there was an initial drop in support among Independents but then it returned to equilibrium.
For Republicans, I think the result is pretty clear here. Support for a ban on abortion was increasing between 2017 and 2020. It was solidly at 30% before Dobbs. Then, it dropped by five points and stayed at 25% the last two years. I feel reasonably confident in saying that some Republicans responded to the SCOTUS decision by backing off from an abortion ban. Not a ton, but it’s way outside the margin of error, too. And it repeats in two surveys.
What about if I break it down by religious group?
The only two groups where I see a clear drop off that sticks is (surprisingly) among evangelicals. That’s actually something that popped up in the post about Southern Baptists last week. Their support for a ban on abortion dropped noticeably after Dobbs and that seems to be the case among evangelicals more generally (both white and non-white).
There are some other instances where support dropped in 2022, but then it rebounded back to pre-Dobbs levels in 2023. That’s true for mainline Protestants, and Catholics (both white and non-white). I don’t really know if I feel like there’s much that jumps out to me here beyond that evangelical shift. Which is something worth thinking about in terms of policy implications.
What about birth cohorts, though? I broke the sample into five year buckets based on birth year. I also combined the two years right before Dobbs (2020+2021) and then the two years right after Dobbs (2022+2023), so I would have a really large sample to work with before and after the SCOTUS decision. For reference, the average bar you see below represents a sample of about 7,000 respondents. So, this is a very robust sample size.
The upshot from this is the support for a ban on abortion dropped a small (but significant) amount for most birth cohorts. For many cohorts, support for a ban dropped by 3-4 points (even folks from the Boomer generation). In fact, the only two cohorts where support for a ban didn’t really shift post Dobbs were among Millennials. I would have never guessed that. What’s also worth pointing out is that older Americans are consistently less supportive of a ban than younger ones. For instance, in the top row of birth cohorts, just 16% were in favor of a ban. In the bottom row, it’s closer to 20%.
Older people tend to be more moderate on abortion than many would guess. I have looked at lots of data that comes to that same conclusion now - age tends to temper passion about the topic. Maybe it’s something about people being in their childbearing years that changes the thought process, but I can’t say that for sure.
What about the other end of the spectrum - support for allowing a woman to obtain an abortion if she wants one for any reason.
I don’t know that I can tell a really compelling empirical story when I break this down by partisanship. It looks like Democrats support for abortion without restriction was around 85% before and after Dobbs. Nothing to write home about there. For Independents, there may have been a marginal increase for the support of abortion rights. In 2020, 56% were in favor. It was 61% in 2023. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
For Republicans, I don’t know what to make of this result. Three in ten Republicans favored abortion without restriction before Dobbs. It was the exact same share in late 2022, after SCOTUS had made its decision. But then it jumped to 34% in the 2023 data. I don’t know if that’s an aberration or not, honestly. I need to see one more wave to get a pretty decent grasp of any real trends.
What about when I break it down by religious tradition? I don’t know if I have any takeaways from this graph. It doesn’t look like there’s any religious tradition that moved more in favor (or in opposition) to abortion access after Dobbs. In fact, if I wouldn’t have put the line in this graph I don’t know if anyone could have picked up when Dobbs was announced just by looking at the height of the bars.
I just don’t know if Dobbs pushed a significant number of any group (religious or political) to move more strongly in the direction of abortion access. If they did it certainly isn’t showing up in consistent and measurable way in the last two graphs. It’s frustrating when you find nothing, but that’s part of this process.
How about I break it down into birth cohorts instead. That should maybe reveal some kind of change, right?
Argh. Hm. Well, okay. Across the top row, there’s almost nothing to report. It may be the case that support for abortion access increased by two whole percentage points among those born in the late 1950s. The second row of birth cohorts is a bit more revealing. Support for abortion access jumped by three points among those who were born in the late 1960s and it was five points among those born in the early 1970s.
But over the next couple of cohorts, there’s just no discernible change. A single percentage point increase in support in a bunch of them. But that’s not substantively significant. There was, however, a big increase among the youngest cohort included. Among those born between 1995 and 2000, support for abortion access was 66% before Dobbs and 70% after the decision.
Taken together, here’s what I think we can conclude from the impact of Dobbs on opinion about abortion. I think it’s fair to say that it pushed some people to be slightly less likely to favor a total ban on abortion. That’s the case among Republicans, primarily and evangelicals more specifically. There’s also some evidence that older birth cohorts became less hard line on an abortion ban after Dobbs was handed down.
But that did not translate to large numbers of people becoming much more permissive toward abortion access. If I could summarize the last three graphs about the question of abortion without restriction it would be a shrug of the shoulders. I am not entirely sure if Dobbs pushed a chunk of the public toward a more expansive view of abortion access.
In short, Dobbs may have made some people a bit less willing to support a ban on abortion. However, it doesn’t look like it made many folks more willing to expand access to abortion services, either.
Code for this post can be found here.