With the talk of pro-life U.S. Supreme Court nominees and Roe v. Wade potentially being overturned, it is important to actually know what the landmark abortion case is about.
And there are strong indications that many do not.
A Democratic pollster recently pointed out that most millennials do not know what Roe v. Wade is about, or when abortion was legalized.
“Millennials think that Roe v. Wade happened right after the American Revolution,” Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research, said on a Friday episode of “What America’s Thinking,” a show on Hill.TV about polls and public opinion.
Furthermore, a 2013 study by the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of polled adults aged 18 to 29 did not know that the 1973 case dealt with abortion. Despite their lack of knowledge regarding this seemingly important “right,” it appears some millennials still fight for this ruling despite not knowing what it did.
When Roe v. Wade was handed down, many abortion supporters stated that abortion would be “safe, legal, and rare.” That has proved itself to not be the case. Even some abortion advocates say the poorly-written case has no constitutional basis, and its loose language has opened the door to widespread abortions.
Because of Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the United States is one of only seven countries in the world that permits elective abortions past 20 weeks — a fact confirmed by the Washington Post fact checker.
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Roe v. Wade opened the doors to 60 million abortions in America. The case, along with Doe v. Bolton, forced states to allow abortions for almost any reason up to birth. The two decisions took away states’ power to regulate abortions and protect unborn babies. More recent Supreme Court rulings have allowed for modest abortion regulations and restrictions, but abortions remain widely unregulated in the first and second trimester of pregnancy.
Regardless of what many younger voters may or may not know about America’s abortion laws, many citizens still want to see change. A Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans want all or most abortions to be made illegal. A Knights of Columbus poll from January found that 76 percent of Americans support significant abortion restrictions.
In light of today’s Supreme Court nomination, it is important that citizens follow the news and see who the president’s pick is for the court. And people who are worried about the future of their own freedoms and rights should first understand where the so-called “right” to abort an unborn baby came from and how truly radical that court ruling was.
