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Abortion identity or abortion attitudes

- May 19, 2009

A couple of days ago, John Sides sparked an interesting conversation here at the Monkey Cage by pointing out that the survey results that have "pro-life" outnumbering "pro-choice" for the first time. John’s point — which is absolutely right and absolutely necessary in the coverage of that survey — is that many people who self-identify as pro-choice support some restrictions on abortion, while many who self-identify as pro-life support allowing abortion in some circumstances.

So the raw pro-life/pro-choice question is misleading. Since most people’s abortion position is conditional on some circumstance or another — the who and why of the abortion — we should ask questions about those nuances. And of course we should.

But the question is not entirely misleading. The terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have about as much meaning as a lot of other survey items that we use routinely, such as the ideological and partisan self-identification questions. Those, too, depend on context. But trends in them are interesting, because those terms are political objects, about which voters make decisions.

And abortion is too. If more people are self-identifying as "pro-life," what that means is that more people think that the level of compromise they subscribe to is closer to being "pro-life." That might be because their position moved to the right, or it might be because pro-life activists have succeeded in characterizing the "pro-choice" label as meaning "abortion on demand." So it is possible (although still not clear) that more people simply think they are "pro-life" with a little bit of compromise, rather than "pro-choice" witha little bit of compromise. As those people go to the polls, they may evaluate a candidate who self-identifies as "pro-choice" differently, even if they largely agree on the issue.

What’s more, the direction that most voters are coming from may actually be more important than their specific position on all the messiness. Ordinary voters are not charged with setting abortion policy. Even those who care intensely about the issue do not, in the end, get their way. The people who will have to work out the messy compromise need to know that, as John pointed out, most Americans favor some sort of middle ground. But the political impact of their positions may mostly be felt through the blunt instrument of voting, where the middle ground gives way. That’s especially true if most middle-ground voters feel their own conflictedness on the issue, and so don’t let it determine their vote.

In other words, the whole mess is very complicated, and we should make use of every question — including the potentially misleading ones. Trends in pro-life self-identity (even very tiny trends — because of course it is a tiny trend) are still worthy of attention.

The calls for more nuanced questions call to mind Obama’s speech at Notre Dame Sunday. Obama acknowledged both the complexity that survey questions obscure, but also that there are two poles, and that compromise is hard.

Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.

Exactly.