In the past week alone, three government stooges succeeded in getting the Food and Drug Administration to needlessly review the abortion pill; Donald Trump got his administration to nix Biden-era guidance that said hospitals need to perform abortions if otherwise a pregnant patient will die; and a prosecutor in West Virginia suggested that women should maybe let cops know when they have a miscarriage…in order to avoid getting in trouble with the cops.
So with all this in mind, to say nothing of the last three years of decaying abortion access in the United States, I was soooooooooooo fucking psyched to learn about a new divide in the abortion rights landscape: the gender gap. Specifically, the fact that the gender gap between men’s and women’s views on abortion rights just hit a record high. Which, put another way, means that men in 2025 are generally less likely to support abortion rights than in years’ past.
A new Gallup poll released Monday found that 61% of women currently identify as “pro-choice,” whereas only 41% of men do. In 2022, right after the Roe v. Wade decision was leaked, 48% of men said they identified as “pro-choice.” Good job, guys. (The percentage of women has stayed the same.) The poll also found that 32% of women and 54% of men currently identify as pro-life.
This 20-point difference is the largest gender gap on the issue since Gallup began polling abortion in 1995. The Guardian pointed out that, before Roe, “men and women were never more than 10 points apart from one another on the issue, according to decades of Gallup polling.”
“It’s more just a out of sight, out of mind issue for men,” Lydia Saad, director of social research at Gallup, told the Guardian. “Whereas for women—it’s just been more salient.”
However, despite men’s failure to gain a greater understanding of why abortion access is necessary, the poll found that, overall, support for abortion rights has increased.
Of course, there is a difference between Republican men and Democratic men on abortion rights, with a reassuring increase from male Democrats. Before Roe fell, 63% of Democratic men believed abortion should be legal in most circumstances between 2020 and 2021; that number has since increased to 78% of Democratic men.
“The net result is that the gender and partisan gaps in Americans’ views on abortion are at historical highs, and the country as a whole has moved slightly left in its abortion views,” Saad, director of social research at Gallup, wrote of the poll’s findings. “Although some of the changes seen in 2022 have eased, the public opinion landscape remains more accepting of abortion than it was prior to Dobbs.”
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