Support for Abortion Rights is Increasing Among Young People
By Laurel Bliss and Brian Schaffner
Young adults are often viewed as leaders of the progressive movement on social issues. For example, in 2008, when even then-candidate Barack Obama felt the need to oppose same-sex marriage, people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were the only age group to overwhelming approve of same-sex marriage. And yet, also in 2008, young adults were not more progressive than older generations on abortion rights. In the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study survey, people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were no more likely to endorse allowing a woman to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice than those who were thirty or older.
A decade later, however, this pattern is changing. In 2018, a significant gap emerged between young adults and those aged thirty years and older. When asked whether a woman should always be allowed to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice, 62 percent of Americans in the 18–29 age group supported such full abortion rights, while older Americans were most closely divided (54 percent in support and 46, percent opposed). The gap between young Americans and their older counterparts has grown from nonexistent in 2008 to 8 percentage points today. The gap widens even further—12 percentage points—when comparing young people to those sixty-five and older in 2018.
With an issue like abortion rights, one might expect there to be a gap in opinion based on gender, which has historically been the case. Abortion rights are often seen as a “women’s rights” issue. Indeed, there is a gender gap on this issue among older adults—among adults aged thirty and older, women are 7 points more likely to support a woman’s right to choose than males in that same age group. However, this is not the case for people aged eighteen to twenty-nine; in this age group, men are roughly equally as likely as women to support abortion rights. In fact, men in the 18–29 age cohort are even more supportive of abortion rights than women in the thirty and over group. Men thirty and over are the real outliers, though, as they are the only group among whom there is not majority support.
Another poll fielded in 2018 found a similar pattern of increasingly progressive views on abortion rights among young Americans. One reason given for this shift is that younger Americans are less likely to be born-again Christians. However, in the CCES data, a similar percentage of young adults identified as born-again Christians in 2018 as had done so in 2008.
The difference is actually that, in 2008, young born-again Christians were just as likely to be opposed to abortion rights as older born-again Christians. But in 2018, this is no longer true. In fact, the age gap in support for abortion rights appears to be coming in part from young born-again Christians. In 2018, more than one-third of born-again Christians under the age of thirty supported full abortion rights for women, compared to about 30 percent of those thirty and older. On another question young born-again Christians were also significantly less likely than their older counterparts to support a ballot initiative that would prohibit government funds from being spent on abortions.
Young born-again Christians also now appear more progressive than their older counterparts on other social issues. For example, while 58 percent of born-again Christians aged thirty and over support Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, nearly 60 percent of born-again Christians under thirty oppose the ban. And when compared to older born-again Christians, younger born-again Christians are more likely to acknowledge that whites have advantages in the US and that feminists are making reasonable demands of men. Thus, to the extent that young Americans are now expressing increasingly progressive views on social issues like abortion rights, born-again Christians appear to be an important part of that story.
Laurel Bliss is a senior majoring in Political Science at Tufts University.
Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies in the Department of Political Science and Tisch College at Tufts University.