Millenials: A pro-life generation

Released on the eve of the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a new poll reveals that the majority of Americans consider abortion to be morally wrong. The poll’s findings offer real signs of hope for the tens of thousands of pro-lifers from across the country who are gathered in Washington, D.C. today for the annual March for Life.

Over the past year, we’ve been highlighting poll after poll depicting America as becoming an increasingly pro-life country. (In one of her recent columns for Headline Bistro, attorney Margaret Datiles compiles no fewer than five such national surveys from the past four months). And so to anyone who’s been following the trend, at least one finding from yesterday’s Knights of Columbus-Marist poll shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: that 56% of Americans think abortion is morally wrong.

Breaking that percentage down by generations, however, one gets incredible results.

As the pro-life tide rises to historic heights across the country, it is swelling especially among our youth. 58% of Millenials (18-29 years old) said abortion is morally wrong – even more so than their Baby Boomer parents (51%), many of whom experienced as adults the immediate, cultural aftermath of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

In the poll’s press release, Knights of Columbus head Carl Anderson reflected on the meaning of the data.

“Advances in technology show clearly – and ever more clearly – than an unborn child is completely a human being,” Anderson said. “That, coupled with the large number of Americans who know one of the many people who has been negatively affected by abortion are certainly two of the reasons that Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with Roe v. Wade’s legacy of abortion.”

As the graying leaders of the pro-abortion campaign look to pass the torch, they will find that their ideology is becoming more and more out of touch with the rising generation. For example, last November, a 5,100-word article in New York magazine asked, “Just how pro-choice is America, really?” No one can pretend that the publication is a bastion for pro-life literature. But even as the piece is sympathetic toward the language of abortion rights, it can’t escape facts like these:

• “If forced to choose, Americans today are far more eager to label themselves “pro-life” than they were a dozen years ago. The youngest generation of voters – those between the ages of 18 and 29, and therefore most likely to need an abortion – is the most pro-life to come along since the generation born during the Great Depression, according to Michael D. Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover, who got granular data on the subject from Pew Research Center.”

• “Crisis Pregnancy Centers, dedicated to persuading women to continue their pregnancies, now outnumber the country’s abortion providers, who themselves are a rapidly aging group (two-thirds are over 50, according to a National Abortion Federation study from 2002).”

• And, in the vein of Anderson’s comment: “As fetal ultrasound technology improved during the nineties, abortion providers, conditioned to reassure patients that the fetus was merely tissue, found it much harder to do so once their patients were staring at images that looked so lifelike” (emphasis mine).

Six months before he died, First Things editor Father Richard John Neuhaus described the National Right to Life convention as “partly a reunion of veterans from battles past and partly a youth rally of those recruited for the battles to come.” The same description could be applied to the March for Life with its particularly striking quality of youthfulness. 

Nearly 500 students from some of the most prestigious Jesuit universities in the country – Boston College, Georgetown, Marquette, Saint Louis University – will be at today’s March. College students from Michigan boarded busses last night for a near-sleepless ride to D.C. High school and junior high youth groups from Kansas are making the road trip. From Virginia, Christendom College’s entire student body is expected to be at the Mall, and, bringing up the rear, my own alma mater boasts an 800-member contingent of tired but excited students happy to be standing up for life. The annual Catholic youth rally and Mass – held this morning at D.C.’s Verizon Center – ran out of its more than 17,000 available tickets within 45 minutes of going online.

Have no doubts about it: the public outcry against the injustice of legalized abortion that began even before Roe v. Wade will not disappear with the next generation. It’s only getting stronger. 

-- Elizabeth Hansen, Headline Bistro editor

Comments

[John P. Slauson]

I don't understand why you are so happy with 58%; it should be 100%.

[Tom Perez]

I also want to mention that several busloads of Notre Dame and St. Mary's students also attend the March annually. I myself attended 3 times while a student at ND. With all of the ways Notre Dame is losing it's Catholic identity, including the honorary degree given to President Obama this summer, I wanted to recognize that there is still a large pro-life contingency at Our Lady's University. Notre Dame, Our Mother, Pray for us!