Women Still Don't Approve of Legal Abortion More Than Men
The 2024 General Social Survey was recently released.
Introduction
The 2024 data for the General Social Survey were recently released, though they have yet to be included in the GSS Data Explorer. Therefore, I had to download the cross-sectional file and merge it with the data from my previous analysis.
This is a quick update of my article on trends in attitudes toward abortion1 in the United States to extend the analysis to include the 2024 data.
For background, you may have seen chatter in the mass media about support for legalized abortion-on-demand being especially popular among women. However, women were actually more likely than men to oppose the legalization of abortion-on-demand in the run-up to Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton back in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Furthermore, when I went to find out when support by gender flipped, I was surprised. It never did. Women have never supported legalized abortion-on-demand at a higher rate than men.
The General Social Survey is a big project that lags behind telephone and Internet polling. I hypothesized that this alleged phenomenon would take longer to appear in the GSS data, so I waited for it to appear to analyze it. (Telephone and Internet polls typically do not release public use data files like the GSS.)
With that, let us dive into the new data.
New Data
Reviewing Figure 1, opposition to the legalization of abortion-on-demand was the majority viewpoint in the United States up until 2016. Sometime around 2018, this reversed. From 2021 on, support for legal abortion-on-demand has been the majority viewpoint.
The 2024 data continue the status quo. If you look at those approving of legal abortion-on-demand, the proportion is about the same as in 2022. If you look at those disapproving of legal abortion-on-demand, this appears to decrease in 2024 to just under 40%.
This happened because more respondents answered “don’t know” or didn’t answer the question in 2024.
This is all well within sampling error. Thus, we won’t know if the increasing-approval/decreasing-disapproval trend is continuing or if viewpoints have stayed roughly the same between 2022 and 2024 until we’ve seen a few more iterations of the GSS.
The gap in viewpoints by party lean appears to have narrowed a bit between 2022 and 2024, with a decrease in approval among Democrat-leaners and an increase in approval among Republican-leaners. However, this is again well within sampling error and may be nothing, so I caution against interpreting this as an actual change.
Much to my chagrin, the proportion of women approving of legal abortion-on-demand remained lower than the proportion of men approving of legal abortion-on-demand in 2024 as in 2022. I fit a logistic regression model to this result. The gender difference was within sampling error. Thus, either the proportions of men and women who approve of legal abortion-on-demand are the same, or approval is slightly lower among women and the GSS does not have enough power to detect the difference.
At this point, I think the supposed gap in which women approve of legal abortion-on-demand at a higher rate than men does not exist. If the gap did exist, we would have seen it on the GSS by now. At the very least, the estimate of the rate of approval would be higher for women than for men, instead of the reverse.
As I have written previously, the other polls that supposedly find such a gap are methodologically inferior to the GSS. The GSS has been asking the same questions since 1965.2 These questions are about specific policies and not vague “a lot,” “somewhat,” or “a little” type questions. Furthermore, the GSS uses an address-based sampling frame with probability-based sampling to generate a representative sample of the United States. These other polls you see — whether the telephone polling done by Gallup or the one-offs you see reported in the media — are just not as robust.
Ramifications
The cultural hegemony of the professional-managerial class (PMC) likely hurt itself in 2024 by believing its own false narratives.3
The Democratic Party was once dominant among the working class. Now it’s squarely the party of the PMC. The 2024 Democratic presidential campaign centered on support for legal abortion-on-demand, a core PMC position. Indeed, the 2024 Harris-Walz campaign often struggled to speak concretely about any issue except abortion.
However, Harris-Walz actually did worse in 2024 among women than did the Democratic ticket in 2020. Democrats running for President have generally done better among women voters than Republicans, but that advantage actually narrowed between 2020 and 2024, rather than increasing. Shortly after the election, reporting in The Hill noted:
The CNN exit poll indicated Harris’s advantage with women was 8 points, rather than Biden’s 15 points in 2020. The AP/Fox survey found a 7 point edge for Harris rather than Biden’s 12 point advantage.
This shouldn’t be surprising given what we know from the GSS data. Women do not support legal abortion-on-demand more than do men (Figure 3). Furthermore, given the polarization by party in viewpoints on abortion (Figure 2), most people who would change their voting preference based on abortion have already done so.
Furthermore, support for legal abortion-on-demand is ~55% vs. ~40% in the United States. (Figure 1) This is far less of a difference in viewpoints than there are for other issues, for instance, transgender athletes in women’s sports, which is opposed by ~79% vs. ~18% of Americans.
Abortion is a rally-the-base get-out-the-vote issue for Democrats, not an issue with which they can win persuadable voters—or, indeed, Presidential elections.
Unless otherwise noted, in this article, the word “abortion” is used to mean induced abortion of pregnancy.
Technically, the word “abortion” is a generic term. Any process that is aborted before it comes to completion can, in theory, be labeled “abortion.” However, because of its association with abortion of pregnancy and the emotional weight of such an occurrence, the word “abortion” is usually used to mean abortion of pregnancy.
Furthermore, even if we just consider “abortion” to mean abortion of pregnancy, there is ambiguity because in the medical literature, the word “abortion” is used to mean two different things: spontaneous abortion, which is commonly called “miscarriage” in the vernacular, occurs when a pregnancy terminates without anyone’s intervention; induced abortion occurs when a pregnancy is terminated on purpose. When “abortion” is used in the vernacular, it is commonly used to mean induced abortion.
This ambiguity can lead to misinterpretation. For instance, if a study were to report on abortions in a given population, it could include both spontaneous and induced abortions if it were using the medical literature definition, but it could exclude what are commonly called “miscarriages” if it were using the common definition.
The question about abortion-on-demand specifically was added in 1977, but as I have discussed, trends in answers to it track with trends in answers to other elective abortion questions.