Life

Majority Of Americans Want To Elect Candidates Who Support Abortion Restrictions, Poll Shows

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A majority of Americans want to elect candidates who support restrictions on abortions, a January poll shows.

A Marist poll conducted in conjunction with the Knights of Columbus released on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, two days before the annual March for Life, found that 65% of Americans want to elect candidates who support abortion restrictions. Forty-one percent of pro-choice Americans also said they are more likely to vote for candidates who support abortion restrictions.

“Most Americans want the court to reinterpret Roe either by stopping legalized abortion or by returning the issue to the states,” Knights of Columbus CEO Carl Anderson said in a statement.

“The fact that such large numbers of Americans who identify as pro-choice nevertheless support restrictions and the revisiting of Roe v. Wade shows how misleading it is to conflate the term ‘pro-choice’ with support for radically pro-abortion position that calls for unrestricted abortion,” said Anderson.

The poll also found that 7 in 10 Americans wish to limit abortion to the first three months of pregnancy at the most — numbers that match a previous NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll conducted in summer 2019, according to the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization.

“While most Democratic candidates for president have embraced extreme abortion positions, the majority of Americans haven’t,” Anderson wrote in a Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed. “There is a broad national consensus that the current abortion system is wrong and must be rolled back.”

Anderson warned that Democratic leaders are “leaving their voters behind” to chase progressive viewpoints on abortion regardless of voter’s more moderate opinions on abortion.

“The party faithful are now waiting for a candidate who represents their views on this matter, something they haven’t had in decades,” Anderson wrote. “It would be better for the party, and the country, if Democrats fielded one.”

The Marist-Knights of Columbus poll surveyed 1,237 adults 18 years and older between Jan. 7-12 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.