Democracy in Tatters? Only 24% of Americans Want Roe v. Wade Overturned

As the Republican/McConnell conservative activist Supreme Court hears a Mississippi abortion case, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows just 24% of Americans want Roe v. Wade overturned.

Just 24% of Americans want Roe V Wade overturned:

The Yahoo News poll shows “more than twice as many Americans (55 percent) say they want the court to reaffirm its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision as say they want it overturned (24 percent).”

A full 61% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases:

More broadly, a full 6 in 10 Americans (61 percent) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while just 39 percent say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Likewise, 56 percent say abortion is “a constitutional right that women in all states should have some access to,” while only 29 percent say it is “something that individual states should be able to outlaw” — the inevitable result of a decision to fully overturn Roe.

Abortion beliefs are much more nuanced than yes or no, but a majority support the general right to an abortion:

Even here, however, there are nuances. Poll questions that focus on the general right to an abortion typically show majority support; those that focus on narrower restrictions, such as parental consent or “late term” abortions, often show more opposition. That’s because few Americans are hard-liners one way or the other. Just 11 percent, for instance, say abortion should be “illegal in all cases”; just a quarter (26 percent) say it should be it should be “legal in all cases.” More remain somewhere in the middle, saying the procedure should be “legal in most cases” (35 percent) or “illegal in most cases” (28 percent).

Here we are – at the place conservatives have wanted for decades and the place Democrats warned everyone was coming. Yes, the rights of every American to make their own medical decisions are currently at the mercy of not just a “conservative” Supreme Court, but an *activist* *hack-filled* Supreme Court, thanks to Mitch McConnell’s steadfast devotion to destroying democracy so Republicans can grab all of the power voters don’t want to give them.

The 6-3 conservative majority Supreme Court is hearing – and appears eager to uphold – the Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks. This is the law I warned had a much higher likelihood than the Texas law of being upheld by this court, simply because it doesn’t allow liberals to use the precedent to ban guns, etc.

As usual, though, this is actually very unpopular — a big sign that our democracy is under grave threat, as more and more power is grabbed by a few powerful people refusing to implement the people’s will.

We can’t forget that Kentucky’s greatest shame stole a seat on the Supreme Court from former President Barack Obama, only to hand it over with what read as smug accomplishment to a failed reality TV show star who became the only twice impeached “president” of the United States.

That same reality TV show “star” went on to appoint two other justices, in a scenario Democrats had been warning about, even as a smattering of far left activists claimed absurdly that Hillary Clinton would be a much bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump. One doesn’t need to even like Hillary Clinton to grasp how intellectually empty that argument was, but she just happened to be the most qualified presidential candidate in modern history. It seems a large swath of Americans feel so insecure in the face of female competence that we are now here…

… democracy in tatters. A Congress that can’t pass gun legislation because the Republican Party is wholly owned by the gun manufacturing lobby and a Supreme Court that wants to impose their religious beliefs on our medical rights.

As bad as things look and indeed are, there is always room for hope. We must all remember the fight of enslaved African Americans for freedom and for voting rights as one of our greatest examples of how the human spirit longs for freedom and what it has battled and is willing to battle to get it.

Democracy demands we engage, it demands we push it to be better, it demands we rise above ourselves to think and act as a union — for the betterment of our country, and of the freedom and liberty she promises.

As former President Barack Obama always says, YES, WE CAN. (And yes, we will. Even now.)