The Republican Party remains out of sync with the views of the American people on abortion rights. An Associated Press-GfK poll reported:
Support for legal abortion in the U.S. has edged up to its highest level in the past two years, with an Associated Press-GfK poll showing an apparent increase in support among Democrats and Republicans alike over the last year.
Nearly six in 10 Americans — 58 percent — now think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, up from 51 percent who said so at the beginning of the year, according to the AP-GfK survey. It was conducted after three people were killed last month in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado.
While support for legal abortion edged up to 40 percent among Republicans in this month’s poll, from 35 percent in January, the survey found that the GOP remains deeply divided on the issue: Seven in 10 conservative Republicans said they want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases; six in 10 moderate and liberal Republicans said the opposite.
Besides trying to defund Planned Parenthood based on bogus attacks, the Republicans have been restricting access to abortion in many states. Vox has a series of maps showing where the new restrictions are. The article began:
States have enacted an unprecedented number of anti-abortion laws in the past five years, and 2015 continued that trend. According to a new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights, state lawmakers proposed nearly 400 bills restricting abortion in 2015, and 47 of those bills were enacted. Some of those 47 bills contained more than one restriction, and the Guttmacher Institute estimates that a total of 57 new abortion restrictions became law. Arkansas passed six new anti-abortion laws, the most of any state in 2015.
Vox broke down the new restrictions to include waiting periods and mandatory biased counseling, bans and restrictions on certain abortion procedures, and other types of restrictions. The maps show the new restrictions to be primarily, but not exclusively, in red states. Some of the new restrictions have been overruled in the courts, and if not for this would probably be even more widespread in the more conservative parts of the country.
