Opinion

OPINION: Suburban Women Don’t Love Abortion

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Brenna Lewis and Matt Lamb Staff Writer and Director of Communications, Students for Life of America
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Stop me if you’ve heard this before: suburban women are motivated by their support for abortion to vote. In fact, after driving their kids to soccer practice and going to yoga, voting for pro-choice candidates is their favorite thing to do!

Spoiler alert: it’s a myth.

NARAL recently trumpeted a poll done by Democrat polling firm GBA Strategies that found that “suburban women in battleground districts support abortion rights.”

We are shocked. NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, partnered with a Democrat (party platform: abortion legal, for any reason, through all nine months. Oh, and taxpayers should pay for it, too) to inform us that abortion is super popular? Gasp!

Sure, pro-choice suburban women exist — but is abortion this entire demographic’s self-declared number one issue? NARAL didn’t even limit their findings to pro-choice women, instead proposing that women across party lines felt this way (“soft partisans,” they called them).

If suburban women were single-issue voters where abortion is concerned, 2016 would’ve been their year, right? Which is to say, hypothetically, if there were a pro-choice female presidential candidate who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, who herself loved yoga so much she sent 30,000 e-mails about it, she would’ve won, or at least won a substantial majority of suburban women, right?

But the fact is, none of this is true. On the contrary, Republican and independent suburban women voted for pro-life Donald Trump.

The New York Times noted that these voters were “most worried about immigration, terrorism and the impact of trade on jobs. They thought Obamacare went too far, and the government was too intrusive.” The New York Times also profiled three suburban women, a mom and her two daughters, who cited the economy and national security as key to their votes for Trump.

Okay, but at the Senate level, suburban women must have helped pushed pro-choice candidates over the edge, right? In the 2016 election, that does not seem to have been true.

In Missouri, where outspoken pro-life Senator Roy Blunt won re-election with just under 50 percent of the vote, suburban women voted for him at a higher rate, of 54 percent.

This was similar to New York, where Schumer won suburban women, 60 percent to 40 percent to Wendy Long, but underperformed with suburban women, relative to the 72 percent of the overall vote he won.

If abortion truly was a “make it or break it” issue for suburban female voters, they would always vote for the pro-choice candidate.

Abortion, when juxtaposed with every major political issue such as the economy, has never been the top issue of importance for American voters in general. Economical issues win out every time. BUT it’s interesting that over the past 15 years, pro-life Americans have been more likely to only vote for candidates who have matching views than pro-choice Americans.

Even so, the percentages of single-issue abortion voters were 23 percent pro-life and 19 percent pro-choice in 2015.

To assert that abortion is a pivotal issue for any single demographic is simply not backed by any sort of evidence not gathered by a vehemently pro-choice polling entity.

In fact, suburban women, like most voters, have a wide range of views, and while social issues may sometimes be very important to them, it’s more likely that the day-to-day issues they feel affect them the most, taxes, national security, education policy, are more important motivating factors.

Brenna Lewis is staff writer with Students for Life of America and Matt Lamb is director of communications with Students for Life of America. 


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.