No, Americans Don’t Want to Kill Babies in Abortions Up to Birth

Jessica Valenti, the abortion industry’s ever-reliable cheerleader, was positively giddy yesterday. On October 14, she breathlessly unveiled a new University of Pittsburgh study on her Abortion, Every Day Substack, claiming that Americans will happily vote for abortion ballot measures even when they contain no limits on how late in pregnancy an abortion may occur.

Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that voters have suddenly abandoned their longstanding opposition to late abortions.

Not for a minute.

The study, “Is the Viability Limit Necessary to Win Back Abortion Rights?: An Empirical Study,” comes from University of Pittsburgh researchers Greer Donley, Dana Loll, and Tamar Krishnamurti. It is scheduled for publication in the Emory Law Journal in 2027 and builds on polling conducted by PerryUndem in 2023.

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The researchers tested three hypothetical abortion ballot measures. One included a strict fetal viability limit. Another included a viability limit with a health exception. The third contained no gestational limit whatsoever.

The results were 67 percent support for the first, 68 percent for the second, and 66 percent for the unrestricted version. The researchers found no statistically significant differences.

Valenti promptly and triumphantly declared that abortion advocates no longer need to compromise on viability restrictions. She believes the findings vindicate her longstanding demand for abortion without gestational limits.

OK.

It’s an awfully ambitious conclusion for a study that never tested a single voter in an actual election. Consider what the researchers did.

They recruited participants through Prolific, a paid online survey platform. After removing respondents who failed attention checks or completed the survey suspiciously quickly, they retained 1,841 participants. All were U.S. citizens at least 18 years old. Researchers sought national proportions for age, sex, and political affiliation, then randomly assigned participants to ballot language using party-stratified groups. Each measure appeared in both legal and plain-language versions.

Participants indicated whether they would vote for their assigned measure. That’s it. No campaign. No competing advertisements. No months of public debate.

No examination of what happens when voters hear precisely what an unrestricted abortion amendment would permit.

And the sample itself raises questions.

An extraordinary 92.6 percent of respondents reported that they were registered voters, compared with roughly 74 percent nationally. Only 23 percent identified as pro-life, while 51 percent called themselves pro-choice. Another 21 percent identified as both. The paid online panel also depended on participants with reliable internet access and may not have reflected the country’s socioeconomic makeup.

The researchers acknowledge these shortcomings. They also concede that their national survey cannot capture the political realities of individual states. Yet we’re supposed to accept that a two-point difference in hypothetical support means viability restrictions serve no electoral purpose.

Tell that to Missouri.

In 2024, Missouri voters approved Amendment 3, which included a viability provision, by just 51.6 percent to 48.4 percent. A margin that narrow should make anyone cautious about dismissing even small shifts in voter support.

The researchers also admit that they made no attempt to measure how opposing campaign messages might influence voters. That omission alone should give pause to anyone treating this exercise as a roadmap for future ballot initiatives.

Valenti makes much of another finding. Among respondents who received the unrestricted ballot language, 76.5 percent understood that it would protect third-trimester abortion. A majority of those respondents still supported the measure.

OK.

But a majority of one questionable online survey group is hardly evidence that Americans now embrace abortion throughout pregnancy.

Gallup’s findings paint a considerably different picture. In its 2023 polling, 55 percent said abortion should be illegal during the second trimester. Opposition climbed to 70 percent during the third trimester. Only 22 percent favored legal abortion during those final three months.

Gallup’s May 2026 survey also found that just 33 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal under any circumstances. Another 48 percent supported legality only under certain circumstances, while 17 percent favored making abortion illegal in all circumstances.

Those numbers hardly suggest a nation clamoring for unrestricted abortion.

Even the Pittsburgh researchers uncovered resistance beneath their favorable topline results. Many respondents who supported viability-limited amendments specifically valued those restrictions. Among Republicans, the measure containing a viability limit with a health exception received 47 percent support. The unrestricted version received only 37 percent.

That’s a ten-point gap among Republicans. In a competitive state, such differences can easily influence an election’s outcome.

The study’s authors also argue that viability itself lacks a sufficient moral justification. Can you imagine? They contend that viability does not change the burdens of pregnancy, does not entitle a woman to demand premature delivery, and relies too heavily on an infant’s ability to survive outside the womb.

Pro-lifers have never accepted viability as the beginning of human life. An unborn child’s humanity does not depend on whether medical technology can sustain that child’s life outside the womb.

The child who cannot yet survive premature delivery is no less human than the child who can.

The researchers point to the relative rarity of abortions after viability. But rarity doesn’t settle the moral question. Nor does it establish that voters favor eliminating legal protections for those children.

Perhaps the most revealing part of this entire exercise is what Valenti wants abortion advocates to take away from it. She believes they have unnecessarily conceded ground by including viability restrictions in ballot measures. She wants those restrictions gone.

The study gives her a convenient headline. It does not give her convincing evidence.

A compensated national survey cannot reproduce the electorate in Missouri, Florida, or any other state. It cannot account for campaign spending, turnout, persuasion, or the effect of sustained scrutiny of unrestricted abortion proposals. Its own authors recognize those limitations.

And the researchers cannot demonstrate that removing viability limits carries no political cost.

The American public has repeatedly expressed deep reservations about abortion later in pregnancy. A narrowly framed online experiment does not erase that record.

Valenti may celebrate the study as proof that abortion advocates can finally dispense with viability restrictions. She is entitled to her enthusiasm. But enthusiasm is not evidence, and 1,841 online respondents do not speak for an entire country.

Most importantly, the study never answers the question that should come first: Why should an unborn child’s right to life disappear simply because the child has not yet reached an arbitrary developmental milestone?

No amount of ballot testing can make that child any less human.

LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.