The Culture War’s Quiet Front: Abortion Opinion in 2024

All that rhetoric, all those court cases. Very little has changed.

I can’t write a newsletter about religion and politics without including a semi-regular update on how the public feels about the topic of abortion. Looking back on the 2024 election, I think the Democrats believed it was going to be a prominent issue. In 2022, the Supreme Court had overturned almost fifty years of precedent in their Dobbs decision and basically handed the issue of abortion regulation to the states. In the early days of the campaign, President Biden made it well known that one of his priorities in his second term would be to reinstate Roe v Wade as the law of the land.

Vice President Harris was certainly on board with elevating abortion access as a centerpiece of the 2024 race. I mean, in January of 2024, she gave a speech in front of a backdrop that only had two words on it in huge letters, “RESTORE ROE.” Meanwhile, Trump tried to distance himself from the pro-life cause as much as possible. When pressed on it in April of 2024, he said it’s an issue that should be left to the states. When he was asked about how he personally voted on the Florida ballot initiative to expand abortion access, he refused to answer. I think we can pretty easily infer what that means.

My read is that Trump tried to downplay his role in the Dobbs decision, while Harris tried to get voters whipped into a frenzy over the issue and get to the polls. I don’t think either strategy was particularly effective or ineffective. But, this does seem like a good time to just explain the current state of public opinion around abortion.

The Cooperative Election Study has asked a variety of questions about abortion for the last decade. Let’s start by tracking the answers to six of them.

The ‘headline’ question about abortion - allowing access if a woman wants one for any reason - is in the top left. In 2014, 57% of Americans agreed with that position. In 2024, the share who would allow abortion on demand had risen marginally to 60%. All that upheaval, all those court cases, all that campaign rhetoric, only to barely move the needle. And when it comes to a complete ban, that number held steady around 20% for a long time until it noticeably dropped to 13% in the 2024 survey. That’s the lowest level on record. Abortion opinion in the United States seems impossible to really shift in a meaningful way.

What about the edge cases, though? A ban on late term abortions was supported by the vast majority of Americans in 2014 (69%). But that’s trending downward over time. Now just a simple majority (54%) would support a 20 week abortion ban. There’s also been an erosion in support for the idea that your employer can refuse to cover abortion in their medical plan (49% to 41%). In 2014, half of the country thought that federal funds should cover abortion - that’s now slipped to 44%. So, you can see that the general trend appears to favor abortion access. But, I just don’t see Dobbs being some type of punctuated equilibrium.

Let’s examine those two questions (abortion for any reason and a complete ban on abortion) and track how the parties feel about them over the last decade. I think this visualization is really helpful in understanding the contours of abortion opinion in the United States.

I think you can quickly ascertain that the Democratic party has ‘purified’ on the issue of abortion over the last ten years. In 2014, 76% of Democrats supported abortion on demand, while 13% said it should be completely illegal. In 2024, 89% of Democrats favor abortion for any reason and 6% think it should be illegal. In other words, it would be nearly impossible to win an elected office as a Democrat if your stated position was that abortion should be banned.

In contrast, the Republican party is often perceived as being the ‘pro-life’ alternative. That’s not at all supported by the data. In fact, it’s hard to really make a broad statement about how GOP voters think about abortion. In 2015, 32% of Republicans thought abortion should be allowed for any reason, while 25% supported a full ban. That illustrates how divided the GOP is when it comes to abortion. Over time, each number has gone up and down just a little bit but I think it’s fair to say that the party is probably more moderate today on abortion than it was ten years ago. About 29% support complete abortion access, while 19% support abolition. That means that half don’t fit clearly in the ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-choice’ camp. This helps us to understand Trump’s tiptoeing around the issue.

Okay, now let’s look through the lens of religious traditions. I’m comparing the 2016 data to the 2024 data on the same two abortion questions.

You know what really jumps out to me on this graph? How very little opinion has shifted on abortion. On the question of support for abortion for any reason, the average religious group has moved less than 3 percentage points (in either direction). Which is, for all intents and purposes, no move at all. The only group that I can clearly say moved in the pro-life direction is Orthodox Christians. They went from 61% in favor of abortion in 2016 to 53% in 2024. White Catholics shifted three points to the right on this, but I’m not sure we can have a lot of confidence in that.

In contrast, a handful of groups moved in the pro-choice direction. Latter-day Saints were five points more supportive, so were Muslims. Black Protestants moved five points in the pro-choice direction and nothing in particulars moved six points.

What about support for a complete ban on abortion? There’s not a single group in the sample that became more abolitionist on abortion between 2016 and 2024. Just ponder that for a second. In fact, a whole lot of groups that are traditionally considered ‘pro-life’ moved in the opposite direction. Support for a ban dropped seven points among white evangelicals, and four points among white Catholics. It dropped a whopping nine points for the Latter-day Saints and thirteen points for Muslims.

You just can’t look at the above graph and think that the country has moved right on abortion since Trump first ran for office. That’s empirically false.

The Cooperative Election Study also threw in a few more ‘novel’ abortion questions in the 2024 survey that are worth some analysis.

The first one was the statement, “The United States Constitution does not protect a woman’s right to have an abortion. Roe v. Wade is overruled, and individual states can make their own laws governing abortion, including outlawing abortion.” For the record, 54% of the public agree with that statement. The groups that are above the mean are the usual suspects: evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons. It should come as little surprise that atheists and agnostics are found at the bottom.

What about the possibility of banning abortion pills sent through the mail? That became a hot topic in 2024. Only 42% of the entire sample wanted to ban this practice. What strikes me about this result is how much white evangelicals stand out from the crowd - 70% of them support an end to abortion pills through the mail. A lot of the other traditionally pro-life groups are pretty mixed on this including LDS, Orthodox Christians, white Catholics, and non-white evangelicals. They all land around 55% in favor.

Finally, what about restricting a woman’s ability to leave a state with an abortion ban to travel to another state for an abortion procedure? This idea is incredibly unpopular, for what it’s worth. Just 20% of the public favors such a proposal. Even among white evangelicals, two-thirds think that this is a bad idea and they are the most supportive group of such a piece of legislation. This appears to be a bridge too far even for the most fervently pro-life Americans.

Finally, I wanted to end with a bit of age analysis. The CES included this interesting statement, “Expand access to abortion, including making it more affordable, broadening the types of providers who can offer care, and protecting access to abortion clinics.” This, to me, is a pretty good indication of a general comfort with the idea of abortion. I broke this down into 16 traditions and four age groups.

First, I have to admit that I was pretty disappointed at how little age mattered in this analysis. There’s clearly not some type of generational divide on abortion once you control for religion. Among atheists, they are all fine with abortion access - young and old. That’s also true among Jews and agnostics, too. Lots of Christian groups don’t have a ton of age variation, either. White Catholics just hover around 50% in favor, and it’s about ten points higher for non-white Catholics. The mainline is clustered around 60%.

But I do identify two interesting trends that emerge here that I want to flag. One is white evangelicals. Among those who are 18-35, 33% favor expanded access to abortion. But that slowly drops as one moves up the age categories. Among retired white evangelicals, only 26% are supportive. So, it does look like younger white evangelicals are slightly more open to the idea of abortion than older ones. Among Black Protestants, it’s exactly the opposite. Older individuals are significantly more comfortable with abortion access (83%) compared to younger ones (63%). To me, that’s a potential problem for Democrats in the future.

What do I make of all of this? I think that abortion is an issue that is really just fading into the background of American life. When the Dobbs decision came down, it felt like this would be a turning point on abortion access. It didn’t even seem to register on public opinion polling. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s barely mentioned in the 2026 midterms at this point.

Maybe, in some ways, this long simmering point of conflict in the culture war is cooling off.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.