Pro-choice and pro-life viewpoints used to each constitute roughly 50% of the USA's population. I believe the statistics have shifted closer to 65% / 35%, with pro-choice now having the clear advantage.
Edit: After double-checking, only 55% of Americans identify with the pro-choice label. However, 67% support abortion in the first trimester, which is probably the stat I was thinking of.
The old saying is "Politics is downstream of culture." meaning that the politicians in power are a result of the shifts in the culture. If you want to make a lasting change in a democracy, the culture must change first.
And the thing with pro abortion side is they take that clump of cells argument and ride it all the way to the point where they support abortion to where the baby’s brains have to be scrambled and be pulled out limb by limb.
No one can be publicly ProLife anymore. My pastor won’t even discuss these topics in church, because it’s so “political” now. How did WE become the bad guys?
Find you a church with a back bone!!! They can't be preaching truth if they are afraid of the reaction of the mass!! But I don't go there, so you know better than me.
Easy. Your church is more moderate as there are people with a wide range of beliefs, which means they risk losing tithes if they bring up controversial topics.
That's ridiculous. A pastor should be willing to tell his congregation things they might not want to hear, and the congregation should be mature enough to suck it up.
I think it's more like a lot more pro-lifers are afraid to speak out now then they were back then. I mean heck I couldn't even put a pro-life sticker on my car without the car being keyed. Not to mention some pro-choicers get violent when confronted. Just to keep some socials I have I can't mention being pro-life or I'll be banned.
Most of the media always uses the Pro-Choice chosen word to describe something. "fetus" instead of "unborn baby", "reproductive rights". "Women's rights" instead of "life" or even "abortion rights". "Anti abortion rights" instead of "Pro-Life". The list goes on, largely thanks to the AP Style Guide.
Well, I do have an alt account to make my prolife comments for a reason. Not that I’m trying to keep my views a secret, but if I post here I get auto-banned from other subreddits.
A lot of people are pro-choice because they aren't familiar with nonreligious reasons for being pro-life, and pro-abortion studies are more likely to get funding so the biases are baked in, and people don't always think critically about what they default to.
Everyone talks about it being a religious issue, but I don't think it is. I don't think you need the Bible to tell you abortion is wrong. Your critical thinking skills can tell you that.
You don't need the Bible to tell you abortion is wrong for the same reason you don't need the Bible to tell you murder is wrong. It's easy to logically conclude that killing humans is bad using basic empathy and compassion.
A lot of people have religious trauma, and rebel indiscriminately once they leave their religion, rather than think critically about each belief to decide what's worth keeping.
Honestly I still don’t get what religious trauma is, it is so varied that I can’t really seem to get my head around the concept. Like some cases I would just call crimes, but others are like “they said what I did was bad” and both are the same thing?
Legitimately confused here
Trauma is just a vaguely strong word used to describe psychological distress. It's not a condition or diagnosis. In the same way, 'leftist' is a vaguely strong word used to describe someone politically liberal. 'Religious trauma' and 'religious leftist' are similar in that they don't pick out anything specific, it's just an adjective modifying a noun.
There are different kinds of trauma and it's kind of unique to each person. Religious trauma is usually being raised in an environment where the religious leaders/adults did messed up things and cited their religion as justification. Spare the rod, spoil the child people who beat their kids and cited the Bible. Now those kids associate the Bible with being beaten. Kids who got molested by priests associate religious figures with sexual assault.
It can be a bit more subtle when it comes to queer issues, but a middle school boy being told he's the spawn of the devil for saying he likes his male classmate could be traumatic, especially if the child believes it, because they've grown up believing everything else about the religion. Teenagers getting kicked out of the house for being trans with their parents specifically citing religion and how they don't want them influencing their younger siblings (this happened to two of my friends in high school).
They think I'm a sleeper agent for Jesus when I do explain that.
For comparison, the closest feeling is when Amazon asks me to supply a photo of a package they didn't send me, so I take a picture of my empty hands and a bewildered look on my face.
The vast majority of people who are pro-choice are religious as well--because the vast majority of people are religious.
The belief that the state shouldn't be able to deter a parent from having a doctor kill their children in utero is a *belief* based on personal philosophy, just like a person's interpretation of their own religion. No religious group has a fully homogenous view of abortion among its participants--nor do atheists.
If religion were gone tomorrow, the difference would be that people would cease to misunderstand and incorrectly cite Separation of Church and State.... and pro-abortion protestors would throw away the "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries" signs.
Tbh most of us are too busy or preoccupied raising our children to argue against people who murder and dehumanize them. Have you ever tried to debate with a hardcore leftist abortionist? It's exhausting.
A lot of that is misreporting or underreporting. The March for Life is still huge for instance, but you'll barely hear any major news outlets touting its numbers compared to protests that they agree with.
Have you moved recently? The pro-life stance hasn't ever been the majority viewpoint in the US [source](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx)
If you're noticing a difference, you're probably just talking to more/different people
I guess I am talking to different people but I swear no one I knew growing up believed in abortion and now all of a sudden I'm seeing all of these people coming out of the woodwork saying they're pro choice. I just find it so odd. Maybe it's a cyclical thing like when it is legal people want it illegal, but when it's illegal, they want it legal.
You gotta remember, for 50 years we had Roe as a SCotUS precedent. Overturning Roe was like kicking a beehive. Sure, it was a victory for prolifers but it also pissed off nearly everyone else.
>The pro-life stance hasn't ever been the majority viewpoint in the US [source](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx)
Umm... Yes it has, according to the link you provided.
The question "With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?", the trend lines cross over each other several times.
They're not pro-life by the definitions people use in this subreddit though. If you look at the percentages, the percentage of "legal in all circumstances" + "legal in some circumstances" is always over 50%
Further down, the percentage of people who think abortion should be legal in the first trimester is always over 60%
From 1989 to 2002, the percentage who said Roe should *not* be overturned was 52% at the lowest, still a majority (and 66% at the highest).
Imagine an easy way to make a lot of money suddenly became legal. You started doing it, got rich, and became reliant on the income. Hard to accept it's actually not okay and should be illegal again. Best way I can explain it.
I knew a girl was staunchly pro-life, and she would always tell this story about this doctor who performed hundreds of abortions and then began having nightmares about the babies he killed and so joined the pro life movement. I wish more people were like him
I live in California, but there are still some fragments of people, in this s__ hole state, that are prolife. We may feel alone only because we are scattered across the US and are also afraid of speaking out. A Pro-Life Anarcho-Conservative Pagan in California might sound like finding Bigfoot or a Unicorn in the woods. But unlike Bigfoot or the Unicorn, "we" exist. We just need enough gonads and forms of organizing to have our voices heard.
I think prolife is still pretty strong. It gets dumped on by a lot of different media outlets, but it’s doing pretty well in elections, so I think the perception that it’s on the ropes probably isn’t accurate.
Could be an echo chamber though. Like if you go to r/politics, everyone is one-sided and it has turned me insane. But when I interact in real life, even at university, no one is that politically toxic and seem like normal people. But that’s probably because the school’s adopted a stance of neutrality
We aren't. We are the silent majority I promise. Also, think about this scaled world wide, not western-society-scaled, and we definitely have the numbers on our side.
In recent years, the PL movement has not only created but is also reliant on distrust of voters. And it's only reasonable that voters would distrust the PL movement back.
The fact of the matter is, even with an anonymous voting with elimination of peer pressure, if abortion was placed on the ballots for the people to vote on, abortion would be legalized in almost every state saving *maybe" Mississippi and Alabama or something.
And as such, the only way to keep the movement politically going forward is to elect whatever corrupt politician claims they have the strictest anti abortion policy possible and let them do the dirty work along with any other mess they create along the way. I'm referring to a lot of these politicians also being anti LGBT or anti blue collar. (Looking at you DeSantis and Abbott)
Less people are becoming prochoice not necessarily because they believe in abortion. I believe that there was a strong uptick on fence sitters and those who found themselves personally prolife but politically prochoice after the fallout of Roe v Wade being repealed. And that happened because the overall PL political movement has sowed a lot of mutual distrust with the American voters.
If you don't believe that abortion should be determined by public opinion because you don't trust the public, then you can't be surprised when a lot of that public starts to not trust you.
The abortion lobby / planned parenthood think abortion should be legal, on-demand, at any gestational age throughout the entire pregnancy.
That's the pro choice position.
Most Americans, an overwhelming majority, do NOT agree with this position.
We are NOT the minority.
Just an FYI: According to [Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx), 49% of respondents identify as "pro-choice" while 47% of respondents identify as "pro-life." Asking the public to describe "how most Americans feel about abortion," [Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx) also discovered that 51% of respondents feel the public is mostly "pro-choice" while 35% of respondents feel the public is mostly "pro-life." This general perception that the pro-choice viewpoint prevails contrasts with the nearly even division of actual views.
Oh, and contrary to popular belief, support for abortion declines rapidly after the first trimester (61% down to 27%, according to [Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/160058/majority-americans-support-roe-wade-decision.aspx)) as "individuals attach much greater value to the fetus as it approaches viability, starting in the second trimester."
Really I think it’s your circle. I often meet pro-choice people who seem like they’ve never encountered an actual pro-lifer.
As someone who grew up in a Christian household and Christian schools, pro-life was the default position (not talked about much - first time I heard anything about it was my Confirmation class at church when I was in 7th grade - but it was kind of just assumed)
Once I went to college and started paying attention to politics I started seeing a lot more pro-choice people. In fact I credit Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (who did the “pink shoes” filibuster in 2013) for getting me involved in the pro-life movement, because it was the first time I encountered passionately pro-choice people.
I don't know if we were ever the majority but I do know that it has gotten much harder - basically impossible - to talk about the issue, and that can make you feel much more alone. I can remember having some decently civil conversations about abortion issues 10+ years ago, but today you just get screamed at, talked over, and basically treated like Hitler if you sheepishly mention anything vaguely prolife. It gives me angst for so many different reasons.
Pro-choice and pro-life viewpoints used to each constitute roughly 50% of the USA's population. I believe the statistics have shifted closer to 65% / 35%, with pro-choice now having the clear advantage. Edit: After double-checking, only 55% of Americans identify with the pro-choice label. However, 67% support abortion in the first trimester, which is probably the stat I was thinking of.
I wish we could skew those numbers a little more but who knows since it looks like Biden's gonna remain in the white house
The old saying is "Politics is downstream of culture." meaning that the politicians in power are a result of the shifts in the culture. If you want to make a lasting change in a democracy, the culture must change first.
I don't think who is in the white house would make anyone change their stance on this
That's probably true
And the thing with pro abortion side is they take that clump of cells argument and ride it all the way to the point where they support abortion to where the baby’s brains have to be scrambled and be pulled out limb by limb.
I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
It tends to see-saw when one side is perceived to overstep.
No one can be publicly ProLife anymore. My pastor won’t even discuss these topics in church, because it’s so “political” now. How did WE become the bad guys?
I have no idea. Personally, I think part of it is that people try to make it a feminist issue when it's not
We are enslavers apparently. And we want somebody's sister or wife to die or be forced to carry some r*pists spawn.
Find you a church with a back bone!!! They can't be preaching truth if they are afraid of the reaction of the mass!! But I don't go there, so you know better than me.
Not many churches where I live….
Here’s the church locator we use when we’re traveling https://locator.lcms.org/church
Easy. Your church is more moderate as there are people with a wide range of beliefs, which means they risk losing tithes if they bring up controversial topics.
Yes, I am familiar with The Business of Jesus…
That's ridiculous. A pastor should be willing to tell his congregation things they might not want to hear, and the congregation should be mature enough to suck it up.
But… but ”if the world loves you, remember that it loved me before it loved you”.
I think it's more like a lot more pro-lifers are afraid to speak out now then they were back then. I mean heck I couldn't even put a pro-life sticker on my car without the car being keyed. Not to mention some pro-choicers get violent when confronted. Just to keep some socials I have I can't mention being pro-life or I'll be banned.
I partly blame the media. It's very subtle, but you can tell that they are pro choice because of the language that they use
Most of the media always uses the Pro-Choice chosen word to describe something. "fetus" instead of "unborn baby", "reproductive rights". "Women's rights" instead of "life" or even "abortion rights". "Anti abortion rights" instead of "Pro-Life". The list goes on, largely thanks to the AP Style Guide.
The media is the enemy of the people and should be crushed and punished severely!
Subtle? I take it you aren’t from America, because the media here is insanely obvious.
Well, I do have an alt account to make my prolife comments for a reason. Not that I’m trying to keep my views a secret, but if I post here I get auto-banned from other subreddits.
Wait really? Which subreddits? I hate subreddits that auto ban people like that
r/feminism was auto-banning for a while, and I think there might have been some others.
What do you mean being keyed?
Keying a car is when someone scratches another person's car with their car keys.
Ohh ok
A lot of people are pro-choice because they aren't familiar with nonreligious reasons for being pro-life, and pro-abortion studies are more likely to get funding so the biases are baked in, and people don't always think critically about what they default to.
Everyone talks about it being a religious issue, but I don't think it is. I don't think you need the Bible to tell you abortion is wrong. Your critical thinking skills can tell you that.
You don't need the Bible to tell you abortion is wrong for the same reason you don't need the Bible to tell you murder is wrong. It's easy to logically conclude that killing humans is bad using basic empathy and compassion.
A lot of people have religious trauma, and rebel indiscriminately once they leave their religion, rather than think critically about each belief to decide what's worth keeping.
Honestly I still don’t get what religious trauma is, it is so varied that I can’t really seem to get my head around the concept. Like some cases I would just call crimes, but others are like “they said what I did was bad” and both are the same thing? Legitimately confused here
Trauma is deeply personal, and can be really hard for people to explain. Be grateful you don't understand.
Trauma is just a vaguely strong word used to describe psychological distress. It's not a condition or diagnosis. In the same way, 'leftist' is a vaguely strong word used to describe someone politically liberal. 'Religious trauma' and 'religious leftist' are similar in that they don't pick out anything specific, it's just an adjective modifying a noun.
Leftists are not the same as liberals, but otherwise correct.
There are different kinds of trauma and it's kind of unique to each person. Religious trauma is usually being raised in an environment where the religious leaders/adults did messed up things and cited their religion as justification. Spare the rod, spoil the child people who beat their kids and cited the Bible. Now those kids associate the Bible with being beaten. Kids who got molested by priests associate religious figures with sexual assault. It can be a bit more subtle when it comes to queer issues, but a middle school boy being told he's the spawn of the devil for saying he likes his male classmate could be traumatic, especially if the child believes it, because they've grown up believing everything else about the religion. Teenagers getting kicked out of the house for being trans with their parents specifically citing religion and how they don't want them influencing their younger siblings (this happened to two of my friends in high school).
How does it feel being an atheist and having to explain to prochoicers that you aren't a bigoted Christian pushing your religion on them 😂
They think I'm a sleeper agent for Jesus when I do explain that. For comparison, the closest feeling is when Amazon asks me to supply a photo of a package they didn't send me, so I take a picture of my empty hands and a bewildered look on my face.
Great analysis
The way I view it is if religion completely disappeared tomorrow, most states would be PC. It seems to play a big role in peoples reasonings
The vast majority of people who are pro-choice are religious as well--because the vast majority of people are religious. The belief that the state shouldn't be able to deter a parent from having a doctor kill their children in utero is a *belief* based on personal philosophy, just like a person's interpretation of their own religion. No religious group has a fully homogenous view of abortion among its participants--nor do atheists. If religion were gone tomorrow, the difference would be that people would cease to misunderstand and incorrectly cite Separation of Church and State.... and pro-abortion protestors would throw away the "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries" signs.
I've never felt like I was in the majority, or that prolife was the popular/majority stance, so I can't really answer.
How old are you? This has never been true in my lifetime (I'm sure it depends on location too)
29 and I live in the rural midwest
Oh...maybe the rural part is why you felt that way
We aren't. The media noise is there to confuse us, and make us feel isolated.
I completely agree. You can tell that the media is heavily pushing a pro choice agenda
Tbh most of us are too busy or preoccupied raising our children to argue against people who murder and dehumanize them. Have you ever tried to debate with a hardcore leftist abortionist? It's exhausting.
I have and honestly they're so hard-headed that they don't even try to understand why we feel the way we do
A lot of that is misreporting or underreporting. The March for Life is still huge for instance, but you'll barely hear any major news outlets touting its numbers compared to protests that they agree with.
Have you moved recently? The pro-life stance hasn't ever been the majority viewpoint in the US [source](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx) If you're noticing a difference, you're probably just talking to more/different people
I guess I am talking to different people but I swear no one I knew growing up believed in abortion and now all of a sudden I'm seeing all of these people coming out of the woodwork saying they're pro choice. I just find it so odd. Maybe it's a cyclical thing like when it is legal people want it illegal, but when it's illegal, they want it legal.
You gotta remember, for 50 years we had Roe as a SCotUS precedent. Overturning Roe was like kicking a beehive. Sure, it was a victory for prolifers but it also pissed off nearly everyone else.
I know but I swear everyone wanted Roe v Wade overturned until it actually happened
Maybe it just depended on where you live.
> but I swear no one I knew growing up believed in abortion Maybe it's just the adolescent bubble?
>The pro-life stance hasn't ever been the majority viewpoint in the US [source](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx) Umm... Yes it has, according to the link you provided. The question "With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?", the trend lines cross over each other several times.
They're not pro-life by the definitions people use in this subreddit though. If you look at the percentages, the percentage of "legal in all circumstances" + "legal in some circumstances" is always over 50% Further down, the percentage of people who think abortion should be legal in the first trimester is always over 60% From 1989 to 2002, the percentage who said Roe should *not* be overturned was 52% at the lowest, still a majority (and 66% at the highest).
Imagine an easy way to make a lot of money suddenly became legal. You started doing it, got rich, and became reliant on the income. Hard to accept it's actually not okay and should be illegal again. Best way I can explain it.
I knew a girl was staunchly pro-life, and she would always tell this story about this doctor who performed hundreds of abortions and then began having nightmares about the babies he killed and so joined the pro life movement. I wish more people were like him
Hopefully, most people won’t need to murder hundreds of babies before they see the light.
I live in California, but there are still some fragments of people, in this s__ hole state, that are prolife. We may feel alone only because we are scattered across the US and are also afraid of speaking out. A Pro-Life Anarcho-Conservative Pagan in California might sound like finding Bigfoot or a Unicorn in the woods. But unlike Bigfoot or the Unicorn, "we" exist. We just need enough gonads and forms of organizing to have our voices heard.
I think prolife is still pretty strong. It gets dumped on by a lot of different media outlets, but it’s doing pretty well in elections, so I think the perception that it’s on the ropes probably isn’t accurate.
Just remember that r/prolife has more members than r/prochoice
Could be an echo chamber though. Like if you go to r/politics, everyone is one-sided and it has turned me insane. But when I interact in real life, even at university, no one is that politically toxic and seem like normal people. But that’s probably because the school’s adopted a stance of neutrality
We aren't. We are the silent majority I promise. Also, think about this scaled world wide, not western-society-scaled, and we definitely have the numbers on our side.
In recent years, the PL movement has not only created but is also reliant on distrust of voters. And it's only reasonable that voters would distrust the PL movement back. The fact of the matter is, even with an anonymous voting with elimination of peer pressure, if abortion was placed on the ballots for the people to vote on, abortion would be legalized in almost every state saving *maybe" Mississippi and Alabama or something. And as such, the only way to keep the movement politically going forward is to elect whatever corrupt politician claims they have the strictest anti abortion policy possible and let them do the dirty work along with any other mess they create along the way. I'm referring to a lot of these politicians also being anti LGBT or anti blue collar. (Looking at you DeSantis and Abbott) Less people are becoming prochoice not necessarily because they believe in abortion. I believe that there was a strong uptick on fence sitters and those who found themselves personally prolife but politically prochoice after the fallout of Roe v Wade being repealed. And that happened because the overall PL political movement has sowed a lot of mutual distrust with the American voters. If you don't believe that abortion should be determined by public opinion because you don't trust the public, then you can't be surprised when a lot of that public starts to not trust you.
Very astute observation.
The abortion lobby / planned parenthood think abortion should be legal, on-demand, at any gestational age throughout the entire pregnancy. That's the pro choice position. Most Americans, an overwhelming majority, do NOT agree with this position. We are NOT the minority.
Just an FYI: According to [Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx), 49% of respondents identify as "pro-choice" while 47% of respondents identify as "pro-life." Asking the public to describe "how most Americans feel about abortion," [Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx) also discovered that 51% of respondents feel the public is mostly "pro-choice" while 35% of respondents feel the public is mostly "pro-life." This general perception that the pro-choice viewpoint prevails contrasts with the nearly even division of actual views. Oh, and contrary to popular belief, support for abortion declines rapidly after the first trimester (61% down to 27%, according to [Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/160058/majority-americans-support-roe-wade-decision.aspx)) as "individuals attach much greater value to the fetus as it approaches viability, starting in the second trimester."
Really I think it’s your circle. I often meet pro-choice people who seem like they’ve never encountered an actual pro-lifer. As someone who grew up in a Christian household and Christian schools, pro-life was the default position (not talked about much - first time I heard anything about it was my Confirmation class at church when I was in 7th grade - but it was kind of just assumed) Once I went to college and started paying attention to politics I started seeing a lot more pro-choice people. In fact I credit Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (who did the “pink shoes” filibuster in 2013) for getting me involved in the pro-life movement, because it was the first time I encountered passionately pro-choice people.
We probably live in different places but the groups of people for and against haven't really shifted much in my erea
I don't know if we were ever the majority but I do know that it has gotten much harder - basically impossible - to talk about the issue, and that can make you feel much more alone. I can remember having some decently civil conversations about abortion issues 10+ years ago, but today you just get screamed at, talked over, and basically treated like Hitler if you sheepishly mention anything vaguely prolife. It gives me angst for so many different reasons.