Senator Wendy Davis filibusters in an effort to kill an abortion bill in Austin, on June 25, 2013.
Polling on late-term abortion is actually pretty consistent. (“One of the clearest messages from Gallup trends is that Americans oppose late-term abortion.”) But you wouldn’t know that from the media, which suggested that if everyone but Texas Republican legislators pretty much #StoodWithWendy.
Not that we talked about what exactly she stood for, such as the right to kill unborn children who had reached five months’ gestation. Usually we use euphemisms to talk about this brand of dehumanizing violence, but this time around we didn’t even get that far. We just talked about shoes.
So today the Washington Post is out with a poll that is unsurprising to those familiar with Americans views on late-term abortion but has media people buzzing:
Majority of Americans favor restricting abortion at 20 weeks, according to new Post-ABC poll…
Who knew?
By a margin of 56 to 27 percent, more Americans say they’d prefer to impose limits on abortions after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy…
If you add in the percentage of people who volunteered that they think abortion should either always or never be legal, the margin is actually 64-28 percent.
I’ve heard it said that the big delusion that liberals and conservatives share is the idea that conservatism doesn’t hold sway with voters. I know it must be difficult in a media environment that tends more to propaganda than journalism on this topic, but sometimes I get the feeling that there is a similar delusion among activists for or against abortion.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a columnist for Christianity Today and contributor to GetReligion.org. Her writing on religion, economics and baseball has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Federal Times, Radio & Records and Modern Reformation. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Washington with her husband and two children. The views expressed are solely her own. This article was published in partnership with Ricochet, a site that provides right-of-center podcasts, content and conversation for conservatives and libertarians.