More Democrat voters ranked “protecting abortion rights” as a high-priority government issue in a new Associated Press poll published this week.
The Hill reports the poll found 13 percent of Democrats mentioned abortion or reproductive rights as one of the top five issues that they want the government to address, a 10-percent increase from 2020 polling.
While abortion was not Democrat voters’ top priority – the economy, health care and gun control ranked the highest – the increase is significant.
Jennifer Benz, deputy director of the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, said polls typically show stronger interest in the abortion issue from pro-life Republican voters.
Benz pointed to polls going back to the 1980s that “regularly found that opponents of abortion had greater strength of attitudes and considered the issue important to them personally more than pro-choice people.”
Follow LifeNews on the MeWe social media network for the latest pro-life news free from Facebook’s censorship!
One possible reason for the shift is that the abortion issue has been in the news more lately because of the Texas heartbeat law and the U.S. Supreme Court considering a major challenge to Roe v. Wade out of Mississippi. The mainstream media, including traditionally balanced news outlets like the Associated Press, also have become even more biased and openly pro-abortion in their reports, referring to the killing of unborn babies in abortions as “abortion care” and casting doubt on the fact that an unborn baby has a detectable heartbeat by about six weeks of pregnancy.
Some abortion activists view the new poll as a sign of hope amid dismal predictions and low polling for pro-abortion Democrats ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
However, even Planned Parenthood admitted that most Americans still are not on board with its radical pro-abortion agenda.
“I think what we have seen is absolutely an increase in awareness, an increase in urgency, an increase in the need to fight back,” Sam Lau, a spokesman for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told the AP in response to the poll. “But I still actually think that huge swaths of this population still don’t quite believe that the access to abortion and the 50-year precedent that is Roe v. Wade is really hanging in the balance.”
Some voters who support abortion may lack motivation, but many others likely are turned off by the billion-dollar abortion chain’s and the Democratic Party’s radical pro-abortion agenda. These two allies are pushing to keep late-term abortions legal and to get rid of the Hyde Amendment and force taxpayers to fund elective abortions. Polls consistently show that a strong majority of Americans oppose both.
In recent years, many pro-life voters have left the Democratic Party to become independents or Republicans because of its increasingly radical stance on abortion. These include Texas state Rep. Ryan Guillen, New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew, West Virginia House Del. Mick Bates, North Las Vegas, Nevada Mayor John Lee, Quincy, Massachusetts Mayor Thomas P. Koch, a Louisiana state representative, a Philadelphia political activist and a pro-life leader.
Late last year, even a few Democrats in Congress warned their party that its radical abortion stance is turning off voters in an interview with Politico. One lawmaker, despite being pro-abortion, said the party is losing voters in swing districts because it is “bashing” pro-lifers.
Increasingly, the message from Democrat party leaders and top candidates has been that pro-lifers are not welcome in the party anymore.
