Polls Have Been Misleading You About What Americans Actually Believe About Abortion

Polls Have Been Misleading You About What Americans Actually Believe About Abortion - ThinkProgress

Do you know where most Americans stand on abortion? Thanks to the way that we’ve been polling on the issue for the past several decades, probably not.

Most media coverage on the subject would lead you to believe that abortion evenly splits the nation. According to pollsters, the country has barely budged on this issue since the procedure was first legalized in 1973. The leading polling organizations often refer to Americans’ views on abortion as “closely divided” and say this finding has been “stable” for decades. “The trend lines look about as flat as they can be,” Daniel Cox, the research director at the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, said on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Tresa Undem, who has more than a decade of experience conducting public opinion research for nonprofits, doesn’t think that’s true.

In partnership with Vox, Undem recently conducted an detailed poll on the subject that tells a quite different story than the one you typically see reflected in the headlines. On many topics related to abortion, Americans agree more than you might expect. “We, as pollsters, need to rethink how we measure public opinion on this issue,” Undem wrote in an op-ed accompanying her findings.

The problem stems from the way that we’ve been writing polls about abortion. For years, researchers have been asking Americans the wrong questions.

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/04/20/3648051/abortion-polling-issues/