The Emerging Pro-Choice Majority

[SpartanDem]

Abbortion rights, we’re told, are our Great Divider. America is cleaved in two. Fifty unremitting percent on either side. There is no United States of America, only pro and anti choice America.

But what if that’s not true? Or, more precisely, what if that won’t be true for much longer?
The 2012 election has been touted as a watershed moment for the Democratic Party, but it may have been one for the pro-choice cause as well. And it’s not because the would-be rape caucus was defeated or that pro-choice candidates won big, though those help. Rather, it’s that there’s good reasons to believe the coalition Obama has built is not only durable, but also staunchly pro-choice. If that’s true, it could signify the start of a major shift on what had previously been thought to have been a fundamental fault line in American politics

Let’s start with the exit polling. The 2012 electorate was overwhelmingly pro-choice; 59 percent said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while only 36 percent said the reverse. The critical swing states followed the pattern, with some like Virginia falling to the left of the national average. Exit polls should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but these numbers undeniably suggest American voters are more pro-choice than previously thought, especially in the states up for grabs in Presidential and Senatorial elections.

The best news for pro-choicers, however, is yet to come. As these groups become more solidly Democratic over time, they’re also likely to increasingly support abortion rights. Two political scientists, Thomas Carsey and Geoffrey Layman, measured changes in opinion on abortion from 1980-2000 to see how they were related to party identification. They found that while people with strongly held views on abortion tended to pick their party on those grounds, those who give it lesser priority “solve conflicts between their party affiliations and abortion attitudes by changing their views on the issue.” Democrats who vote Democratic for reasons unrelated to abortion tend to simply become pro-choice by default.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/11/12/1175741/viewpoint-the-emerging-pro-choice-majority/

[Dubster]

1. Spam deleted by gkhouston (MIR Team)

[Marsala]

2. The argument over exceptions for rape and incest could be key to convincing people

If abortion is murder, then there is no justification for an exception due to rape. So if you accept an exception for rape, then you must accept that abortion is not murder... and so there is no reason to ban it, at least before the later stages of pregnancy.