Opinion | Roe V. Wade Overturned: What Do Pro-Life Voters Think?

The pro-life movement has been fighting to overturn Roe v. Wade for decades. So it was striking that in the wake of Roe’s demise, the pro-life Americans who participated in one of our latest focus groups expressed a range of emotions about last month’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “Complicated” and “debatable” were a few of the words participants used to describe the decision, with several calling it “challenging” and expressing surprise that it happened. One participant said, “It’s important that the government is in sync with the public opinion, but I don’t think they are.”

Some of the participants, who spoke with us last week from around the country, said that despite identifying as pro-life, they believed that women should be able to make the choice about whether to have an abortion. “It’s their bodies,” said one man. Many from the group said that abortion should be available in some circumstances, such as early in pregnancy or when a woman is the victim of rape or incest.

Abortion was an obviously emotional issue for the group, with several participants expressing a desire for women who get pregnant unexpectedly to take responsibility for their actions. A number were clearly moved by the claims of anti-abortion lawmakers who have worked to ban abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, starting around six weeks of pregnancy. Most medical experts say there is no real heartbeat at six weeks, and many women do not know they’re pregnant at that stage. But those claims have a clear emotional pull, as expressed by the group: They believe that even very early pregnancies are babies, with rights of their own.

As with the pro-choice focus group we conducted on the same evening, many of the pro-life participants thought abortion to be much more dangerous than it is. Fewer than a quarter of 1 percent of abortions result in serious complications, and childbirth is 14 times as likely to result in death as an early abortion.

But it was the emotional weight of this moment in American history that the participants came back to again and again in our conversation. As one participant said, “I feel like the good days are long gone. Raising my 2-year-old in this world terrifies me.”

In both focus groups, participants used the phrases “pro-life” and “pro-choice” to describe themselves as well as others, and to describe viewpoints; these edited versions retain that language to reflect how the participants spoke about these issues.