Yesterday on Meet the Press, Democratic Vice Presidential pick Tim Kaine, attempted to make his pitch to Millennials by saying that they agree with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform on the big issues. One of the big issues is obviously abortion.
Part of what he said was: “Do you believe women should be able to make their own health care decisions, or don’t you? Millennials do, Hillary Clinton and I do, Donald Trump doesn’t.”
First of all, Kaine was using the typical lingo of the abortion movement. He means “abortion” when he talks about women making their own health decisions.
Secondly, he’s wrong that Millennials support the extreme positions on abortion that Clinton and her party do.
The Democratic Party platform is merely a reflection of Clinton’s pro-abortion views. She believes abortion should be legal for any reason whatsoever up until the moment of birth. She believes that the Hyde Amendment should be repealed and that taxpayers should directly pay for abortion.
The Institute for Pro-Life Advancement released polling over the summer that showed a mere 17% of Millennials agree with Clinton’s radical abortion position. The same poll showed that 52% of Millennials believed abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances. A Knights of Columbus poll confirmed the IPA data and showed 53% of Millennials held the same view.
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So then why does Politifact say that Kaine is kind of right on this?
“…when Gallup surveyed abortion attitudes in 2015, it found that 53 percent of people age 18 to 34 identified themselves as ‘pro choice,’ versus 52 percent of 35- to 55-year-olds and 47 percent of people over 55…Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin subsequently directed us to a Fox News survey taken last week that found 61 percent of registered voters under age 35 reported being pro-choice.”
Easy answer to this is that the pro-life label is tainted. At Students for Life of America, we never ask students on campus if they are pro-life or pro-choice. We ask them how far along in a pregnancy do they think abortion is ok.
While the IPA data showed 53% of millennials agree that abortion should be illegal in all or most circumstances, only 36% of the millennials polled consider themselves pro-life all or some of the time. That’s a huge gap between those who think abortion should be illegal all or most of the time and those who identify as pro-life.
In regards to the Gallup poll from 2015 that Politifact referenced, it’s not what it seems at first glance. The questions that tell bigger story are the ones that ask about legality of abortion in each trimester or ask about legality past a certain week.
In that Gallup poll, 19 percent of respondents said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances and 36 percent said it should be legal in only a few circumstances. Those two groups of respondents are 55 percent total, while people that said abortion should be legal in all and most circumstances amounted to 42 percent.
Just this month, CNN ran a story with a headline that screamed “Millennials more conservative than you think.” While the story didn’t address abortion, the connection to the pro-life position can be implied.
The end result is that Millennials are more pro-life than generations before them. We see this daily on campuses across the country and we are more energized and hopeful than ever that this is the generation that will make abortion unthinkable. So, sorry Tim Kaine, but you’re not even close on this one.
LifeNews Note: Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America.
