The studies, polls and anecdotal evidence showing a dramatic shift in Americans' attitudes toward abortion continue to emerge. Cybercast News Service reports today on another study (this one conducted by Overbrook Research) showing that younger voters, especially women, hold much clearer and committed pro-life positions than those held by their age group just 15 years ago.Results in 1992 were largely in step with what study authors Christopher Blunt and Fred Steeper call the "self-interest hypothesis." Women and men under 30 were the most ardently "pro-choice" (39 percent) and the least likely to be strongly "pro-life"( 23 percent).
Today, by contrast, among the current generation of 18- to 29-year-olds, 36 percent say they are strongly "pro-life," while just 18 percent say they are strongly "pro-choice," the study authors said. The trend was particularly evident among women in that age bracket. Forty 40 percent identify themselves as strongly "pro-life" and only 20 percent as strongly "pro-choice."...
..."The most surprising and compelling findings we have are on young people," he said. "They've grown up with high-quality ultrasound images of unborn babies, and their passage into adulthood coincides with the ascendance of partial-birth abortion as the issue's dominant frame."
The authors also examined the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, drafted following attacks on abortion clinics in the 1980s and 1990s and signed into law by President Clinton in 1994. Over time, Blunt said, more dramatic demonstrations at clinics gave way to prayer vigils and sidewalk counseling.
For young voters the "abortion wars" of the 1980s and 1990s amount to a "dim memory," overshadowed by the attention now given to partial birth abortion, Blunt and Steeper suggest. "As grisly details of partial birth abortion procedures replaced confrontational and often violent clinic protests on the evening news, voters seemed to have changed their minds about who the 'abortion extremists' were," they wrote in their analysis...
Here's the rest of Kevin Mooney's revealing, hopeful story for Cybercast News Service.