Friday, March 29, 2024

New Poll: Most Americans — Even Democrats! — Oppose Federal Funding of Abortion

Photo credit: Anna Levinzon via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Photo credit: Anna Levinzon via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

In a new YouGov poll, a majority of Americans said that they oppose federal funding for abortions.

According to the pollsters:

YouGov’s latest research shows that most Americans (55%) support the federal law which prohibits taxpayers’ money from going to fund abortions. Even Democrats, who largely support personal abortion rights, are divided on the issue. 44% of Democrats oppose the ban on federal funding of abortion, but 41% support it. Most independents (56%) and a large majority of Republicans (73%) also support the ban.

A closer examination of the poll’s crosstabs show that even a vast majority of women — supposedly the demographic most enthusiastic about abortion — oppose lifting restrictions on federally-funding abortions.

Of course, this is hardly a new development. Other polling firms get similar, if not more dramatic, results. Americans consistently voice their support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortion.

The Democrats, however, are running on a platform which explicitly names federal funding of abortion as one of the top priorities of the party.

According to their platform, Democrats “will continue to stand up to Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood health centers” and “will continue to oppose — and seek to overturn — federal and state laws and policies that impede a woman’s access to abortion, including by repealing the Hyde Amendment.”

But federally funding abortion is not the only radical stance the Democrats take that is out-of-touch with the American people. For instance, 84 percent of Americans support a ban on abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy, but the Democratic Party opposes such a ban.

The Democratic Party has become so enraptured by abortion ideologues that their convention became, essentially, a celebration of the 60 million murders committed since 1973.

In a recent essay for Public Discourse, historian Miles Smith argued that leftists have begun to consider abortion a positive good, like Southern defenders of slavery saw their “peculiar institution.”

“The actions of abortion advocates at the 2016 DNC,” Smith wrote, “demonstrate how much has changed since then. Far from viewing the terminating of unborn lives as a tragedy, Democratic partisans now enthusiastically embrace the brutal vision of ‘reproductive rights’ put forth by NARAL and Planned Parenthood.”

Even life-long Democrats are shocked at the hard-left turn their party has taken. Prominent Democrats like Joe Manchin and millions of rank-and-file pro-life Democrats have been essentially disenfranchised and cast into political exile.

The new polling data from YouGov goes to show that a large swath of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike — are alienated by the abortion radicalism of Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, and the far-left faction in American politics.

Conservatives have an obligation to give a voice to the millions of Americans the left has silenced, both those disenfranchised by their radical stances and those whose lives were callously sacrificed on the altar of abortion ideology.

Michael Lucchese works for the American Principles Project.

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