Commentary: Measuring public opinion when abortion is a fact of life

By Jennie Bristow, Editor, Abortion Review.

Trends in public opinion on abortion are interesting. On one hand, we know that access to safe, legal abortion is accepted as a necessary feature of modern British society: approximately 200,000 women a year will have an abortion, and anti-abortion protests on the streets tend to be small and muted. On the other hand, we know that nobody actually likes abortion: no woman ever wants to need to terminate her pregnancy, and people generally do not like to think or talk about abortion more than they have to.

In recent months, abortion has been pushed high on the political agenda by Nadine Dorries, Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, who has been doggedly waging a campaign both in Parliament and the media to restrict women’s access to abortion. This MP claims to be representing wider concerns about abortion numbers being too high, and abortion becoming too easy to access; but her critics claim that she is only representing her own objections.

With the election of a (mainly) Conservative government in 2010, there have been concerns that British policy, and public opinion, is veering towards the right; and that moral issues like abortion will become increasingly important political markers, as they are in the USA.

In this context, the Ipsos MORI poll recently commissioned by BPAS reveals some interesting findings. For a start, the proportion of people agreeing with the statement, ‘A woman should not have to continue with her pregnancy if she wants an abortion’ has declined, by 10 percent since 2006, and is now 53%. But this does not represent a shift in opinion against abortion: the same proportion (17%) disagrees with this statement as did 10 years ago.

So public opinion remains, by a majority, in favour of a woman’s right to choose; the shift has been in a growing proportion of people who say they neither agree nor disagree that ‘A woman should not have to continue with her pregnancy if she wants an abortion’. This could indicate, as Rosemary Bennett reported in the Times (London), that ‘most people see abortion as a private matter’.

The finding could also represent a trend that has also been noted in the USA, towards the middle – or, as Kirsten Moore, President and CEO of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project described it in a presentation to the BPAS ‘The Future of Abortion’ conference in 2008, ‘the grey’. Amongst the US public, the abortion issue – as with other questions of morality - appears to have become less polarised, with people less likely to present themselves as being either absolutely ‘for’ abortion rights or absolutely ‘against’ them.

An apparent trend towards non-judgmentalism has implications for the abortion debate. It provides a welcome riposte to those politicians who argue that restricting access to abortion represents the wishes of voters, and who see a Conservative government as an opportunity to promote an anti-choice agenda. While Conservative MPs tend largely (though not exclusively) to be more in favour of restrictive legislation on abortion than Labour MPs, the same cannot be said of their constituents.

One striking finding of this recent poll is that those who intended to vote Conservative were the most likely to agree with the statement, ‘A woman should not have to continue with her pregnancy if she wants an abortion’, and the least likely to disagree (59% and 16% respectively). This was followed closely by Labour voters (58% agreed, and 20% disagreed); while of Liberal Democrat voters, 47% agreed, and 26% neither agreed nor disagreed.

These findings indicate that the public’s support for a woman’s ability to access abortion if she wants to comes from across the political spectrum. Even more striking is the large proportion – 70% - who believes that ‘It is a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion and the government should not interfere’. Only 17% of people thought that the government has a responsibility to reduce the number of abortions. This seems to indicate that, even where people were themselves ambivalent about abortion, they did not believe it was a decision that should be restricted by the government.

A representative poll such as this one can only indicate public opinion; it cannot tell us why people hold the opinions that they do. But we can be confident, on the basis of these findings, that attempts to bring political or legislative barriers to access to abortion cannot be justified on the basis that this is what the public wants. Even though 37% of those questioned agreed with the statement ‘too many women do not think hard enough before having an abortion’, the general sentiment against government interference in abortion decisions indicates that there would be little public support for the policy measures introduced in some US states, which push women into compulsory pre-abortion counselling or force them to have a ‘cooling-off’ period between their abortion consultation and the treatment.

Advocates of reproductive choice will welcome the finding that the British public is generally pro-choice in outlook and supportive of women’s right to make their decisions free from government interference. However, the move towards the ‘middle ground’ on abortion also poses some challenges. Events of the past week indicate that abortion remains a highly political issue, and one through which a number of agendas are played out. Legislative changes that are motivated by the politics of abortion can have a direct practical impact on women’s experience, and their access to abortion.

In this climate, the onus is on pro-choice advocates to keep making the case for legal abortion as early as possible and as late as necessary, and challenging the distortions and myth-making tactics that are too often employed by the anti-abortion lobby.

There are many important debates that can and should be had about the morality of abortion. But for a woman who wants an abortion, there is no ‘middle ground’: abortion is either legal, or it is not; she can either access abortion, or she cannot. Ensuring that women will continue to be able to access the abortions that they need means continuing to argue the case for abortion as a part of a democratic, civilised society.

Also read:

MPs are given poll warning on abortion, by Rosemary Bennett. The Times (London), 5 September 2011

UK: Poll shows backing for a woman’s right to choose abortion free of political interference. Abortion Review, 5 September 2011

Abortion Review topic archive: Abortion counselling

Abortion Review topic archive: Attitudes and beliefs

Source: http://www.abortionreview.org