A reality of American life under a conservative Supreme Court is the nagging fear that Roe v. Wade may be overturned, and abortion rights upended. As the country awaits Brett Kavanaugh's all-but-certain Supreme Court confirmation, likely providing the fifth vote to reverse the pivotal 1973 ruling, it's worth noting that most Americans support a woman's right to choose: A new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal out this week found that "71 percent of American voters believe that the decision... should not be overturned. Just 23 percent say the ruling should be reversed."
It might be hard to believe, but in the same country where the far-right controls the executive and legislative branches and is stocking the federal judiciary with hand-picked judges, support for abortion rights has hit an all-time high.
While it's unsurprising that 88 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Independents said Roe should remain the law of the land, the poll also found that 52 percent of Republicans supported the landmark decision. Meanwhile, 23 percent of American voters and 39 percent of Republican voters believed it should be overturned. Of course, there's a catch—even though the majority of Republicans supported Roe, only 15 percent of them said they preferred "candidates who advocate for abortion rights."
So what does this mean for the future of the GOP given Republicans' decades-long support of far-right policies that appeal to evangelicals? According to Gallup, in 2001, 82 percent of Americans identified as Protestant, nondenominational Christian, or Catholic; by 2017, that percentage had fallen to 68. Pro-life arguments are often framed at least in part through the lens of hardcore Christianity, and those numbers might imply a softening of evangelicals' grip on one of the country's two major parties. But even as Americans may be becoming less Christian, the Federalist Society and other conservative institutions that favor "originalist" judges inclined to oppose Roe retain a stranglehold over Republican politics.
So far, the threat of a Roe v. Wade repeal necessarily remains something of an abstraction to many American voters. The question is, if and when Kavanaugh is confirmed and women lose the right to choose, whether the inevitable glut of widespread backlash challenges the GOP's longtime unity on the issue. It's worth noting that the the NBC survey found "public support for Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court is significantly lower than it was in advance of most of his predecessors’ confirmations." That suggests that, long before abortion makes it back to the Supreme Court's docket, Democrats have an opportunity this fall to make Republicans own the prospect of Roe repeal in hopes of winning over the suburban moderates they need to carry swing districts and take back Congress.
As for the broader question of why so many Americans live in fear of a supreme panel of high judges repealing a landmark ruling the vast majority of them support? At this point, it might seem trite to observe that we don't really live in a genuine democracy, but that doesn't make it any less true.
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