Steve at the Southern Appeal blog notes an AP poll that purports to show that a majority of Americans back Roe v. Wade. He draws some conclusions that I think are generally valid, including that abortion lets men and woman avoid taking responsibility for their actions and that selfish personal fulfillment has now outstripped the obligation to others.
But I also have to wonder about the poll in the first place. At Catholic World News, we ran a story today about another poll that shows that most Americans think abortion hurts women. Sixty-one percent said that abortion is almost always a bad thing for a woman. So how do we reconcile this with the AP poll that said 59 percent of Americans want Bush to choose for the next Supreme Court justice someone who will uphold Roe? For one thing, the methodology has been called into question.
The AP pollsters evidently told those being surveyed that Roe only legalized abortion in the first three months, instead of allowing abortion on demand for almost any reason throughout the nine months of pregnancy.
This is why you must always take polls with a grain of salt unless you can actually see how the questions were worded. A good pollster can make any result he wants just by the way he asks the questions.
Present a film of a 4D image of an unborn child and then ask the question if that’s a human being. That’s how I would conduct the poll.