I’ve written before in this space about how today’s teens and young adults are fundamentally very pro-life. Multiple surveys over the last several years have revealed the same thing: the current generation of young people (known as Millennials or Generation Y) has considerably more pro-life views than previous generations (Baby Boomers and Gen X).
The latest proof of this reality came from an unlikely source: the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). According to an internal poll NARAL shared with Newsweek (April 16, 2010), young Americans are more passionate about pro-life views than pro-abortion views.
NARAL’s survey of 700 young Americans, conducted earlier this year, revealed a significant “intensity gap” on abortion. According to the Newsweek article, “More than half (51 percent) of young voters (under 30) who opposed abortion rights considered it a ‘very important’ voting issue, compared with just 26 percent of abortion-rights supporters.”
Nancy Keenan, NARAL’s president, expressed concern in the Newsweek article about the aging ranks of pro-abortion activists, which she called the “postmenopausal militia.” “These leaders will retire in a decade or so,” the article says. “And what worries Keenan is that she just doesn’t see a passion among the post-Roe generation—at least, not among those on her side.”
Keenan cites her encounter with pro-life attendees at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. last January as evidence of this phenomenon. “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young,” Keenan recalled. “There are so many of them, and they are so young.” The Newsweek article acknowledges the March for Life estimate of 400,000 participants and compared it to a pro-abortion rally two months earlier that drew about 1,300 attendees.
“Millennials are more likely than their [baby] boomer parents to see abortion as a moral issue,” the article continues. “In the NARAL focus groups, young voters flat-out disapproved of a woman’s abortion, called her actions immoral, yet maintained that the government had absolutely no right to intervene.” That latter sentiment will provide a challenge to the pro-life movement as we work to provide legal protection to unborn children.
The article attributes some of the shift toward pro-life attitudes among young people to the pro-life movement’s focus on the unborn child. It also attributes the increase in pro-life attitudes to the advent of ultrasound technology which provides “increasingly clear pictures of fetal development.”
“The technology has clearly helped to define how people think about a fetus as a full, breathing human being,” admits former NARAL president Kate Michelman. “The other side has been able to use the technology to its own end.”
Michelman’s comment reminds me of this comment made many years ago by Harrison Hickman, former pollster for NARAL, at its 20th anniversary convention:
“Probably nothing has been as damaging to our cause as the advances in technology which have allowed pictures of the developing fetus, because people now talk about the fetus in much different terms than they did 15 years ago. They talk about it as a human being, which is not something I have an easy answer on how to cure.”
In other words, technology is removing the veil of verbal deception that the abortion industry has used to dehumanize unborn human beings and to deny them the most basic human right—the right to life.
The trend toward pro-life attitudes among young people—and even the population at large—is encouraging. If this trend is to have positive consequences for protecting unborn children and their mothers from the violence of abortion, the pro-life movement must nurture and develop those attitudes and translate them into action.
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