(RNS) — With Roe v. Wade overturned, white evangelicals support restricting abortion, including through so-called heartbeat laws that ban abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, according to a new survey.
Almost all want to see abortion banned after 15 weeks.
More than half said providing an abortion should be a felony.
These views put them at odds with Americans from every other faith background, according to new data from the Washington, D.C.-based Public Religion Research Institute. The survey found Catholic, Black Protestant, non-Christian and unaffiliated Americans are more supportive of abortion rights than white evangelicals, said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI.
Deckman said that overall, support for legal abortion had risen in the past decade. In 2010, PRRI found that 55% of Americans said abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Today, she said, that number has jumped to two-thirds.
“Americans have become more supportive of abortion rights in the past decade,” she said. “I think part of that is driven by the fact that we have more religiously unaffiliated Americans.”
RELATED: Survey: White evangelicals oppose abortion; all other religious groups support it
The survey of 2,038 Americans, which used the Ipsos online panel, was conducted from June 24 to June 26 and was put in the field right after the announcement of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe. The idea was to get an immediate response from the public.
“Having the survey in the field immediately after the court released the Dobbs decision was by design, allowing us to evaluate the decision’s impact on public attitudes in near-real-time,” said a PRRI spokesman in an email.
Several states have begun to enact so-called trigger laws to restrict abortion in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Those laws, in states like Texas, Tennessee and Oklahoma, included provisions to put them in effect if Roe was overturned. The Dobbs decision put abortion regulation back into the hands of states — and, for some states seeking to enact new laws, into the hands of voters.
