August 1, 2003

FREE TO CHOOSE THE OPPOSITE

A Moral Majority: Soccer moms are more anti-abortion than you think. (Mark Stricherz, 08/04/2003, Weekly Standard)
FAYE WATTLETON, former president of Planned Parenthood, announced some "alarming" news in late June. Her organization, the Center for the Advancement of Women, had commissioned Princeton Survey Research Associates to do a major study on contemporary feminism. The result was "Progress and Perils: A New Agenda for Women," a 140-page report on women's views on a range of issues, including abortion. The central finding: Far from wanting abortion as readily available as botox or tattoos (1.3 million abortions took place in 2000), most women oppose the procedure. As Wattleton wrote in the introduction, "There is significant and growing support for severe restrictions on abortion rights." [...]

But "Progress and Perils" doesn't just confirm that most women are pro-life. It undermines three political myths about women's views on abortion. Indeed, if you read the whole report, the study makes plain that Republicans enjoy an advantage on the abortion issue among women. And if conservatives decide to use it, they may have Faye Wattleton to thank.

The first myth the study exposes is that soccer moms are pro-choice. Ever since Clinton pollster Mark Penn coined the term, the mainstream press has depicted them as such. Fortunately, "Progress and Perils" doesn't take such generalizations for granted. The report classifies women into six groups, based on their attitudes toward women's roles and social status. [...]

The second myth "Progress and Perils" undermines is that Republicans will lose if they openly oppose abortion. Of the six groups profiled in "Progress and Perils," four heavily favor greater curbs on the procedure. And it's not only the traditionalists (69 percent), most of whom are evangelical, and family-firsts (70 percent), most of whom are working class and live in small towns, who feel this way. So do the separate-but-equals and the center-left modern feminists (67 percent), many of whom are black and Hispanic and poor. [...]

The third myth the study calls into doubt is that most women support Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. This belief was recently conveyed in the Washington Post by David von Drehle in an article about the Supreme Court's decisions on abortion and civil liberties: "Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans have little appetite for reversing the court's path on social issues."

Which polls is von Drehle referring to? It certainly wasn't the poll Wattleton's organization, then called the Center for Gender Equality, took four years ago, which found that 53 percent of women favored outlawing abortion or restricting it to the hard cases--a pre-Roe standard. Nor could von Drehle be referring to the current study, in which 51 percent of women felt the same way.

Nothing in life has ever been more certain than that the opinion of women towards abortion would reverse itself over time.


MORE:
-REVIEW: of Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes by Laurence Tribe (Brothers Judd) Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2003 11:25 PM
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