Poll results: Who is part of the pro-life movement?

Last Friday we posted a 2 question poll about who you consider “pro-lifers” and who you consider part of the “pro-life movement.”

The point of the poll was to explore how people define these terms. We considered four factors:

1. Whether a person is politically active in fighting abortion.
2. Whether a person thinks abortion should be illegal.
3. Whether a person thinks abortion is immoral.
4. Whether a person offers social support to pregnant or parenting people.

You can read the descriptions of our 8 hypothetical people on last Friday’s post, but here are the variables in chart form:

To our frustration, due to technical problems we couldn’t analyze the answers to the question “Who are the pro-lifers?” We’re sorry about that.

But at the time we analyzed the data (Sunday evening PST), we did have 130 people cast a total of 375 votes for who belongs to the pro-life movement. Here is the chart reordered from most accepted to least accepted person. The column on the far right is the percent of voters who cast a vote for that person (remember voters could pick as many of the 8 people as they liked).

• 76% of the people who voted picked 3 people or less. Most of them picked people who think abortion should be illegal.
• David, Anthony, and Mike are nearly tied. Apparently if a person doesn’t take some kind of action based on their beliefs, it doesn’t make much difference what they believe.
• Given Elena got more votes than Anthony or even David, it seems voters value social support more than anti-abortion beliefs alone.
• However voters valued political activism above all. Lucas was the ideal because he covered all fronts, but Christine wasn’t terribly far behind. And Christine got a lot more votes than Jen, even though both think abortion is wrong and should be illegal. Christine took political action, and Jen offered social support. It seems if voters have to pick between the two, they value political action more.