GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) – Not many North Carolinians are thrilled with the stricter abortion rights that are scheduled to go into effect on July 1, and lawmakers might want to examine the opposition more closely before they think about tightening them further.
Those are the headlines from an Elon University Poll of registered voters, which suggests only 9% “strongly support” the legislature’s move to close the window from elective abortion from 20 weeks to 12.
If you add in “somewhat support,” the backing grows to only 1 in 4, but the opposition is 29% who say they strongly oppose the limits and 16% who somewhat do. That means nearly half of those surveyed oppose the law, and oddly 1 in 3 have no opinion at all.
But it’s the makeup on those voting blocks that might change perspectives about who is for and against what has become our most volatile political argument.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Boggs decision, which said abortion laws were the province of the state, North Carolina had been operating with a 20-week abortion window. Most abortions are now banned in 14 states, and Georgia has a 6-week ban. A similar 6-week limit is under review by the Florida Supreme Court.
Senate Bill 20’s many stipulations about how, when and where a woman legally can terminate a pregnancy would go into effect with the start of the fiscal year, but on Friday medical and rights groups filed a federal lawsuit seeking to slow down its implementation.
About 45% of those polled by Elon say specifically that they don’t like the 12-week window, and more than half (54%) say they support Cooper more than lawmakers when it comes to setting an abortion policy.
When they introduced SB 20, lawmakers had cited their own internal polling that showed 57% of North Carolina voters supported an abortion ban at the end of the first trimester. That poll also showed that most supported access to abortion with various caveats, with 28% saying abortion should be legal in all cases.
A poll by Carolina Forward – a progressive news site – released after SB 20 had passed, showed that most voters don’t support the limitations in that bill, which is consistent with much pre-bill polling on the issue.
Some surprising findings
What separates Elon’s poll is what you find when you look under the hood of this research. Groups you might predict as the backbone of support for tighter restrictions – Republicans specifically, conservatives in general, and even “churchgoers” – are just as split as everyone else.
Michael Bitzer, the political science professor at Catawba College who coauthors the Old North State Politics blog, looked at the crosstabs of the data and found counterintuitive results “if you collapse the ‘strongly/somewhat’ numbers into three categories of support/neither/oppose,” Bitzer wrote in an email to WGHP.
“For age, the strongest opposition comes from either end: 18-24-year-olds at 46% and 65+ at 48%.
“For party identification, the conventional political wisdom is that Republicans would be overwhelming for the reduction from 20 to 12 weeks, while Democrats would be overwhelmingly opposed.
“But only 56% of Republicans support and 60% of Democrats opposed, with nearly three out of ten Republicans opposing the measure and two out of ten Democrats supporting the measure.
“You would think on such a divisive partisan issue, the clear sorting of the two parties would create a bit more clarity in partisan responses, but there seems to be a bit of contrarian cross-over between the two parties on this particular issue at least.”
Elon surveyed 1,268 registered voters during the first week of June, just after the bill was passed, and weighted the results for the usual demographic and affiliation variables, including 2020 voting record. Its “credibility rating” is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Bitzer also looks into the data as sorted by “church attendance” and said, “Yes, the ‘God gap’ seems evident in this issue, but again, 37% of those who attend church once or more each week were opposed to the reduction, while 35% of those who attend church only once a year support. Those seem like healthy minority opinions within each category.”
Bitzer said he “would like to see other polls track opinion on this same issue, but this contrarian/conflicted opinion with both church attendance and party identification seems interesting (to me at least).
“Maybe the public isn’t as ‘sorted’ on this issue as we think they should be.”
Other findings
The Elon poll included a few more tidbits about views of abortion law that showed varying insights:
- About 2 out of 3 respondents said they thought abortions generally were performed in the first trimester, as the new law requires. Another 31% said the second trimester. About 3% said the third trimester, which was marginally allowed under Roe v. Wade. Elon reported those numbers are down from 72% in 2021 who selected the first trimester.
- Some 57% think abortions most commonly are conducted during an office visit/in a medical facility, with the rest choosing at-home medication, such as mifepristone, which has been the subject of a federal suit of its own. About 60% of abortions in North Carolina are via medication, but the state already has more severely restrictive processes about how it is prescribed and administered. A similar poll question in 2021 showed only 1 in 3 thinking medical abortion is more common.
- About 4 in 10 support the additional visits and steps that must take place before an abortion can occur, some of which are part of the federal lawsuit filed on Friday.
- About 56% think childbirth is a higher-risk medical procedure than abortion.
Elon Poll Report by Steven Doyle on Scribd
