Readers split over abortion restrictions, legality

As state legislatures take up various new abortion restrictions, what’s your view?

Since the Supreme Court’s 1970s Roe v. Wade decision enshrining women’s privacy rights around the decision to abort a fetus, the political furies around the subject have been a hallmark of American life. Following the lifetime appointment of a second conservative justice in as many years to the court last fall, Republican Party-dominated states around the country have dug into the issue, passing laws that restrict or, in the case of Alabama, outlaw the practice of abortion. The Alabama law, notably, did not even include exceptions for pregnancies that were the result of rape or incest.

One in five Overdrive readers, according to results of polling conducted in late May, favor such an approach to the practice.

State legislatures’ recent moves toward restrictive abortion laws are calculated in fairly obvious ways to get the issue into the courts. Anti-abortion partisans among them hope to send the issue ultimately to the Supreme Court, now with its slight conservative tilt.

Though evenly divided on the broad question of legality, most readers were generally more nuanced in their views around the issue. And more than a third favored the status quo as it stands in most states with Roe as precedent, with abortion in the domain of a woman’s private health-care decision-making.