Unwanted Pregnancies and Unwanted Laws: Public Support for the Criminalization of Abortion and the Consequences for Criminal Justice Officials

Abstract

For roughly half a century, from 1973 to 2022, a woman’s autonomy to have an abortion was a constitutionally protected right. The situation changed in 2022 when the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson that the Constitution does not confer the right to have an abortion and more than a dozen states enacted statutory abortion bans which make the performance of the procedure a felony offense. The present study provides analyses of survey data on public support for the criminalization of abortion gathered from a random sample of more than 1,500 respondents subsequent to the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson and the enactment of the abortion bans. The results of the analyses show that more than three out of four respondents opposed laws which proscribe abortion, with support for the criminalization of abortion being most significantly impacted by political ideology and religious beliefs. The finding that there is a paucity of public support for the recently enacted statutory abortion bans suggest that the statutes undermine the principles of democracy, erode the legitimacy of the law, are unlikely to be willingly obeyed, and create multiple challenges for criminal justice officials.