Prior to the POLITICO report of a leaked draft opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade, a national survey that was completed last week through an ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that 58% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
54% of Americans in the poll also believed that the Supreme Court should uphold the Roe decision, while 28% think that the 1973 ruling should be overturned.
By reversing the Roe decision, the Supreme Court would side with a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks.
According to the poll, 57% of Americans oppose a ban on abortion after 15 weeks. Although, compared to the same poll in November 2021, there was 6% less support for upholding the Roe decision, but more people this time, 18%, said that they don't have an opinion.
The survey asked a number of questions from different angles, such as specific situations that would make it acceptable in a person's eyes to have an abortion.
When presented with the situation, "The woman cannot afford to have a child," the results were close -- 48% said it should be legal and 45% said it should be illegal.
There were overwhelming results when the poll said, "there's evidence of serious birth deffects," as 67% said the abortion should be legal. Support was even higher when the poll posed the situation as, "the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest," with 79% saying it should be legal.
The situation with the highest amount of support was, "the woman's physical health in endangered," as 82% of people in the poll said that the abortion should be legal then.
70% of people said the "decision whether a woman can have an abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor," while there were 24% of people who said the decision "should be regulated by law."
Breaking down the poll's result by gender still showed overall American support of abortion. 62% of women believe it should be legal in all or most cases, while 55% of men agree.
82% of those who identify as liberal support legal abortion, as do 80% of those without a religious preference and 79% of Democrats. Only 33% of Republicans think abortion should be legal, while the groups that have the lowest amount of support for legal abortion were strong conservatives (20%) and evangelical Protestants (28%).
Over about three dozen ABC News/Washington Post polls since 1995, the average support of legal abortion has been 56%, and has ranged between 49% to 60%. On average, 21% have said it should be legal in all cases, and that number has now increased to 26%.
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