Jim Lindgren, of The Volokh Conspiracy, reports data that I had not heard: repeated polls from the late 1980s onward show solid majorities of the public favoring spousal notification for abortion decisions - and the numbers appear to be rising. The polls are by reputable agencies and the questions do not appear slanted. Percentages in favor range from about 60% in the late 80s to over 70% recently; a 1996 poll found at least 60% support, often much more, across every ethnic, political, and age category (tellingly, they didn’t report gender). (See the link above for his summary of the data.) There is some variation between polls, but the general thrust of the data is unambiguous.

I must say this is surprising. The data mostly come from broader-ranging polls including various questions about abortion rights (and sometimes general political issues). The tendency has been to focus on the overall question whether abortion should be legal at all (with fairly consistent results showing double-digit percentages favoring almost complete freedom and almost complete restriction, and a broad middle ground favoring abortion rights with some restrictions). I had not extracted a trend for questions regarding very specific scenarios or types of restrictions (and neither had most other people), but the data was there all along.

Lindgren is correct to say that “[t]hose of us who oppose a law requiring spousal notification of a woman’s intention to have an abortion must recognize that ours is the minority view — and has been for nearly two decades” - however startling a notion that is for the strongly pro-choice. To those who have thought about the matter systematically, spousal notification (even without an explicit spousal veto) is one of the more obviously objectionable restrictions to place on abortion rights, because it not only creates a barrier to exercise of those rights, but it makes that right dependent upon the opinion and intervention of some other person - voiding the woman’s autonomy almost entirely. It is objectionable for other reasons, too: it infantilizes women by giving men special standing in the decisions they make about their own bodies; it reactivates misogynist marriage protocols that place the woman’s freedom of action in the man’s hands; it turns into a de facto spousal veto for women who are fearful of their husbands’ reactions; and it may actually be dangerous for women with abusive husbands. I think there was a tendency to assume that those who favored abortion rights in general would see this, and oppose spousal notification to the same degree that they favored abortion rights at all, even if they also favored other kinds of restrictions. Apparently that’s not so.

This information should give pause. It reinforces a message that abortion-rights supporters have seen written on the wall for some time: though there is broad support for women’s freedom, the pro-choice movement has not succeeded in making it clear just how vital abortion rights really are, and how destructive restrictions on them can be. This result, taken with other trends regarding abortion restrictions (broad support for parental notification for pregnant teens, restrictions in third- and even second-trimester abortions, greater support for abortion in cases of rape or incest, support for “fetal personhood” laws, etc.), may also tell us something about the public mindset regarding abortion. Though a woman’s right to self-determination is valued, the public often sees outside forces having some moral salience in the abortion decision - that the decision should not be made without consultation with parents or husbands, or that there are “rights” of the fetus that must be balanced against those of the woman even early in pregnancy, or that some abortions are more justifiable than others.

Though disheartening, these results also delineate the program that lies ahead for supporters of choice: to re-emphasize the degree of intrusion upon a woman’s freedom that abortion restrictions impose, to re-emphasize that abortion rights flow from the basic right to control one’s own body, and that restrictions on that right take that most basic freedom away; to highlight the asymmetric nature of supposed conflicts over abortion (the husband may not want his wife to abort, but it’s not his body; even if the fetus has interests at stake in abortion, it is the woman’s body that is at issue).

I strongly suspect the poll numbers Lindgren reports are not solid - that is, that the attitudes they reflect are susceptible to amelioration when the issue is made clearer and when women assert their rights and their demand for security in their persons in terms that make it clear exactly what is at stake. These numbers are thus a call to engage the debate that pro-choicers have to some degree taken for granted so far.