People on both sides of the polarized arguments surrounding abortion try to portray the discussion as clear-cut: you are either for abortion or against it. Even those pollsters and organizations that make an effort to clear up the muddiness do a pretty poor job of it. Most people are uncomfortable with the lack of clarity in these discussions, and might want to resolve the conflict they often personally experience regarding it. Unfortunately, they think one way to feel less conflicted is to avoid the discussion completely. So the conflict goes “underground” and manifests in ugly protests and eventually violence.

Instead of wallowing in the muddiness of abortion, I’m proposing a different way to move to an intelligent and compassionate approach. I was surprised to learn that many people, particularly on the pro-abortion side, experience ambivalence toward the topic, for a myriad of reasons; that experience influences their conclusions (or the lack of them). If we look at the role of ambivalence regarding people’s opinions of abortion, it not only explains the multiple positions that are becoming obvious, but also suggests ways to help people come closer to resolving their values, their stances, and their decision-making regarding the changes that will be coming in the abortion laws.

Even the most credible and ethical pollster has a hard time knowing how to ask questions about abortion, and how to evaluate responses, and overcome the ambivalence of respondents:

The political fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade remains to be seen. But while public opinion polls offer some sense of what Americans think about abortion, the data is murkier and more contradictory than either supporters and opponents of abortion rights tend to admit.

Partly, that’s because views on abortion are intensely personal. Complicating matters further, these views may be tallied differently depending on how the pollster asks the question.

‘There is ample evidence that many people are ambivalent about the issue or experience significant cross-pressures in formulating an opinion,’ Scott Keeter, a senior survey advisor to the Pew Research Center, told PolitiFact in May. ‘These realities make it quite difficult to sum up abortion attitudes in one or two sentences or with one or two questions.’

Survey statistics also can’t overcome the complex responses of those surveyed:

Ultimately, analyzing abortion-related poll questions is tricky because people are honestly conflicted about their views on abortion. Views on abortion are ‘complicated or ambivalent,” said Bowman, the polling analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

A team of University of Notre Dame researchers conducted 217 in-depth interviews with Americans across six states in 2019. “Abortion attitudes are more complex than survey statistics suggest,’ they concluded. ‘Survey summaries can be misleading and should be interpreted with caution.’

Often, the researchers found, ‘surveys miss the ways that Americans offer disclaimers and caveats, contradict themselves, hedge their responses, change their minds, and think through things in real time. Most Americans, moreover, do not hold bipolar views toward abortion but multidimensional ones.’

These observations suggest that ambivalence toward abortion may play a significant role in people’s attitudes about the topic. That conclusion suggests that people may be subject to being influenced to clarify their understanding, in an environment that presents reasonable data and information that they have not received in the past.

Since the dialogue about abortion has been dominated by the pro-choice community, key data has been left out of that exchange. A number of opportunities to receive a more balanced understanding of the abortion process could be critical in forming not only people’s opinions about abortion, but also assisting them in their decisions about whether to have an abortion or not. Here are a number of approaches that the pro-life movement should be utilizing to provide information.

Although over the last several years, abortion numbers have gone down, the reasons are unclear :

It is becoming common to observe that we really don’t have a solid grasp of what Americans think about abortion, nor of any trends. Pro-life education is important – how many of us would be pro-life without it? – but not because we can see that it’s changing public opinion as a whole. A local pregnancy medical center director told me that they still commonly hear women say, as they look at their unborn children on the ultrasound screen, ‘I had no idea.’

The pro-life movement needs to do a better job of determining what types of data distribution influences women who are considering abortion:

We continue to need public education, academic debate, legal engagement, lobbying, and even protest, whether these demonstrably affect abortion numbers or not. If it can be shown, however, that pregnancy help is driving abortion ratios lower, then we should direct greater resources to the increase of the number of these centers, and to making all of the centers better known in their communities through advertising.

Since state legislatures will now be determining the law on abortion in their respective states, lawmakers might benefit from receiving these data as well, including ultrasound images. They may also want to make available information on resources that pregnant women may use, preferably from the non-profit sector. Counseling, child care, and other kinds of assistance would make the prospect of motherhood less daunting and more positive.

The ambivalence about abortion is not limited to the prospective mother, but also affects the important people in her life. Friends and family may also feel torn about the role they can or should play regarding a person close to them, based on their own values, beliefs about abortion, and if and how they might help. A group of researchers examined both data from the 2018 General Social Survey (GSS), which measures public opinion on a range of concerns, and 74 of 217 in-depth interviews from the National Abortion Attitudes Study:

The interviews, conducted in 2019 in different regions around the U.S., show how Americans who engage in discordant benevolence* make sense of it for themselves. Three logics dominate: one, a view that friends or family members are worthy of help despite imperfections; two, that friends and family constitute an exception precisely because they are friends/family; and three, that friends or family members make independent moral decisions . . .

‘When it comes to abortion,’ says co-author Bruce, ‘greater levels of help amplify feelings of inner conflict for Americans who are morally opposed. We found that many will still help friends and family, but moderate how much and why.’

The pro-life movement could help people who may want to provide assistance in sorting through their options to help people who want to take their babies to term.

*     *     *

There is no doubt that the challenge will be great in meeting not only the pro-choice movement in a non-threatening way, but also to reach those who may be open to considering life instead of abortion. Those for life must take a less celebratory approach to their victory, or they will be seen as relishing the defeat of those who support abortion. They must meet those who are willing to listen to them with tact, compassion, and objectivity, and be willing to acknowledge to themselves that every effort they make to persuade others of their ideas for life may not be successful. They must be willing to empathize with the fear, the pain, and the incriminations that will be made against those who choose life. They need to assume that it will be a battle of long duration, with twists and turns, as the states navigate the labyrinth of ideas they will face. The intensity of the ambivalence that each person faces will be unique to each individual.

We must empathize.

We must be patient.

We must persevere.

*Discordant benevolence is the experience of a person who experiences inner conflict over assisting a pregnant woman.