A Hartwick College professor has coauthored a book examining public opinion related to abortion following the 2022 Supreme Court decision that eliminated the federal right to abortion access.
The book, titled “Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America,” will be published on May 8 by Temple University Press. Laurel Elder, professor of political science, coauthored the book with Steven Greene, professor of political science at North Carolina State University, and Mary-Kate Lizotte, professor of political science at Augusta University.
Elder said Friday, April 24 that she and her coauthors have studied public opinion and gender for most of their careers. Focusing on abortion felt like a natural extension of this research, as it is a “high profile and politically consequential gender issue,” Elder said.
In 2022, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision, in a 6-3 ruling, overturned Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the nation in 1973.
“Our book talks about how public opinion has shifted in the wake of that really landmark decision, and why these shifts are politically consequential,” Elder said.
The authors began doing research on public opinion and abortion before the Roe v. Wade decision was overturned. Public opinion on abortion was very stable for the almost 50 years between the Roe v. Wade decision and the Dobbs decision that reversed it, Elder said.
Most Americans were conflicted about abortion, supporting legal access in some cases but not all, she added. Despite the debate on a national level, this public opinion was very stable. After the Dobbs decision was made, it disrupted this consistent view among many Americans.
“Those changes appear to have been sustained,” Elder said.
The book offers a “much more comprehensive take” of how public opinion has changed “across the board,” she said. Elder said she found that people, including her students, often assume women lean toward pro-choice beliefs and are more supportive of legal abortion access than men. She added that this was not always the case, as women and men were equally likely to hold pro-life attitudes and pro-choice attitudes.
“In the wake of Dobbs, that has shifted, and we see a pretty sizable gender gap emerge for the first time ever on the issue of abortion, with women moving in a much more pro-choice direction and supporting access to abortion in most circumstances,” Elder said.
There has been another shift post Dobbs in the “prioritization of abortion as an issue,” she continued. People who identified as pro-life and Republicans used to be more likely to prioritize abortion as a political issue, and now, Democrats and those who identify as pro-choice prioritize abortion access more highly.
Elder said she and her fellow researchers used national data sets that have posed questions about abortion and other issues for more than 50 years. She added that they conducted some of their own survey research to get more detail about factors like state-level policy. Elder said they used the survey vendor Lucid Theorem in 2023, asking respondents to evaluate a politician advocating or opposing a six-week ban or a 12-week ban, “often framed as a more moderate alternative.”
Elder said she found that after the Dobbs decision, the public was largely not in favor of one ban over another, and abortions bans as a whole were not very popular.
“The Dobbs decision really pushed more people to say I just want the government out of regulating legal access to abortion across the board,” Elder said.
Through her own teaching, Elder said, she found that many of her students, during the 2022 midterm election season, were “super enraged by the Dobbs decision.” She and her coauthors wrote an op-ed piece published in The Guardian ahead of the 2022 election addressing the impact of the Dobbs decision on young people. Elder said it was “pretty clear that abortion mobilized people, especially pro-choice people, especially young women to vote.”
Academic books tend to be geared toward other academics, Elder said, adding that, however, she and her coauthors worked to ensure the book was accessible so that undergraduates and other members of the general public could read and understand it too.
“I really think if someone is interested in the Dobbs decision or the politics of abortion or just gender and political parties and the electoral landscape in America, I think it could be a great book for anyone,” Elder said.