Why Texas's Abortion Law May Go Too Far For Most Americans
In a matter of days, a novel abortion law in Texas has made it virtually impossible for women to access the procedure in the state — although the constitutional right to abortion is still intact, for now. The Texas law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected, usually about six weeks into a pregnancy. Eight other states have attempted to pass similar bans, but the ban in Texas is the first to go into effect, after the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 order saying that while it was not ruling one way or the other on the constitutionality of the law, it also wouldn’t pause the law while legal disputes unfolded in the lower courts because of the law’s unique structure.
As a result, women in Texas still theoretically have a right to an abortion — but almost none will be able to get one. According to lawyers for Texas clinics, 85 to 90 percent of the abortions in the state happen after six weeks. Clinics across the state are in chaos, with overflowing waiting rooms and patients turned away in tears. At this point, it seems very likely that the law will remain in place until the legal battles are resolved, which could take months or years, making Texas into a bizarre test case — how will Americans respond when abortion is abruptly cut off in one of the nation’s most populous states?
According to the polling we have now, the answer is far from clear. On the one hand, a majority of Americans have consistently said that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that established a constitutional right to abortion, should not be overturned. But many also support a wide range of specific restrictions on abortion, some of which contradict the Supreme Court’s standards for when and how states can regulate the procedure. That said, public opinion hasn’t really shifted on the issue even though abortion access has steadily eroded in wide swaths of the country over the past 10 years. But the fact that the Texas law directly attacks abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy — when the procedure is both most supported and most common — could galvanize public outrage in a way that past restrictions have not.
For decades, Americans have broadly opposed overturning Roe v. Wade — despite escalating attempts by anti-abortion advocates to turn public opinion against legal abortion. As the chart below shows, 58 percent of Americans were against overturning Roe when Gallup last asked the question in May, the same share who wanted to keep the case on the books back in 1989.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-texass-abortion-law-may-go-too-far-for-most-americans/