(ANALYSIS) I remember teaching undergraduates about abortion opinion for the first time way back when I was teaching assistant at Southern Illinois University — Carbondale. The point of the class meeting was pretty simple — there’s not been a substantive change in how the public views abortion politics since the Roe v Wade decision was handed down in 1973. It was a fun discussion because the undergraduates could speculate as to why that was the case and what events could actually upset that sense of stasis.

Well, we got it. Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. I am in no sense a legal scholar, but I know the upshot from the SCOTUS decision: The ability to restrict abortion will be left to the states. If a state wants to ban abortion in every circumstance, that’s its right. If it wants to allow abortion, that’s also in its purview. In essence, it splintered the abortion conversation into 50 smaller debates across the United States. The Kaiser Family Foundation has assembled a tremendous website that catalogues all the abortion-related amendments at the state level.

But here’s what I am thinking about a lot right now. If anything can shift abortion opinion in the general public, it has to be Dobbs, right? It is, without a doubt, the biggest change in policy regarding abortion in the last 50 years. In fact, the last example I can think of a time when the government has taken away rights that were already granted was Prohibition. And we all know how that turned out.

I wanted to take the two edge cases that are offered by the Cooperative Election Study — make abortion illegal in all circumstances and allow a woman to obtain an abortion for any reason — and just see how the public has shifted over the last couple of years.

Let’s start with the complete end to abortion first. The statement is, “Make abortion illegal in all circumstance.” I broke it down by partisanship.

Dobbs was announced in June of 2022, which was after the 2021 data collection but before the survey was fielded in the fall of 2022. That’s noted by the vertical dashed line. For the Democrats, I don’t think we can come to any grand conclusion. Support for a ban was 12% before Dobbs, then dropped to 10% right after. But then it rose to 14% in 2023, which just seems odd. I am going to just say I don’t see any discernible change here. Or at least not yet.

Now for independents, there was a big drop right after Dobbs. Support for a total ban went from 20% to 16%. But then it shot back up to 19% in the 2023 data. That 19% statistic was pretty much the average over the years before Dobbs was decided. Maybe there was an initial drop in support among independents but then it returned to equilibrium.

For Republicans, I think the result is pretty clear here. Support for a ban on abortion was increasing between 2017 and 2020. It was solidly at 30% before Dobbs. Then, it dropped by 5 points and stayed at 25% the last two years. I feel reasonably confident in saying that some Republicans responded to the SCOTUS decision by backing off from an abortion ban. Not a ton, but it’s way outside the margin of error, too. And it repeats in two surveys.

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Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.