The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization had far-reaching consequences for women's access to abortion and prenatal healthcare, but a new analysis highlights the extent to which the Dobbs decision is also reshaping the political landscape of the United States.
A new book, Not Going Back, unpacks a tremendous amount of survey data and offers in-depth analysis of the impact Dobbs continues to have on voter behavior and public attitudes toward political institutions. To learn more, we talked with co-author Steve Greene, a professor of political science at NC State.
The Abstract: What made you want to write this book? And when did you start working on it?
Steve Greene: The short version is that we saw Dobbs coming. By early 2022, anyone paying close attention to the Supreme Court, and certainly anyone watching the leaked Alito draft, knew that Roe was likely to fall. My co-authors Laurel Elder, Mary-Kate Lizotte, and I had already been collaborating on political science research examining abortion attitudes for several years, so when the political ground started shifting, we put a national survey in the field in May 2022, a few weeks before the ruling actually came down. That gave us pre-Dobbs baseline data we could compare to everything that followed.
The book grew out of that survey and a second one we fielded in September 2023. For nearly fifty years, Roe was the legal status quo and abortion attitudes in the aggregate looked remarkably stable. Then the country was suddenly living in a completely different legal and policy universe. In the wake of Dobbs more than a dozen states enacted complete bans on abortion and others enacted restrictions that would have been unconstitutional under Roe. As public opinion scholars, moments like that are extraordinarily rare. We wanted to understand how ordinary Americans were reacting politically and emotionally to this changed policy landscape.
TA: So how has public opinion changed in the wake of Dobbs, and what have been the political consequences of that shift?
Greene: One of the central arguments of the book is that public opinion on abortion shifted in politically consequential ways in the wake of Dobbs.
First, public opinion moved in a more pro-choice direction. That shift was especially pronounced among groups that were already somewhat supportive of abortion rights - including Democrats, women, and younger Americans. More Americans now believe abortion decisions should remain between women, their families, and their doctors rather than politicians or courts.
Second, the intensity and salience of the issue changed dramatically. For decades, abortion intensity asymmetrically benefited Republicans because anti-abortion voters often cared more deeply about the issue and voted more consistently around it. But after Dobbs, the energy around this issue reversed. The energy and momentum around the issue is now stronger among abortion-rights supporters.
Third, Dobbs created substantial cross-pressure within the Republican coalition. We found that 30-40 percent of Republicans hold views on abortion that are more liberal than the party's pro-life stance. Before Dobbs, many pro-choice Republicans could support candidates in their party without confronting the full implications of abortion bans. In the wake of Dobbs, these cross-pressured Republicans have responded by being less reliable voters and in some cases more open to supporting Democratic candidates.
TA: Who is this book for? Is it aimed solely at scholars, or do you think it has value for other readers interested in this political topic?
Greene: This book is certainly written for scholars of public opinion and American politics, but we also very intentionally wrote it for a broader audience because abortion politics affects so many Americans in deeply personal ways.
At its core, this book is about one of the central questions in democracies: what happens when public opinion and public policy diverge on an issue that millions of Americans experience personally and think about deeply?
Abortion is politically unique because it is both deeply personal and deeply political. About one in four American women will have an abortion during their lifetime, and majorities of both men and women report knowing someone close to them who has had one. People think about this issue not just abstractly or ideologically, but in relation to family planning, healthcare, finances, education, relationships, and decisions about whether and when to have children.
So we wrote the book to do double duty. It's a serious empirical study; we draw on about a dozen national surveys, including two we designed ourselves, and we run the kinds of statistical analyses political scientists expect. So it absolutely belongs on the shelves of scholars who work on public opinion.
But we also worked very hard to make it accessible. The arguments don't depend on knowing what an "ordered logit coefficient" is. If you're a journalist, a policy person, an activist, or simply someone trying to understand why American abortion politics looks the way it does right now, there's a great deal in the book for you. There is an enormous amount of commentary on abortion and not nearly enough careful data. We wanted to bring more careful evidence into the conversation.
TA: As you worked through all of the research on this topic, was there anything in particular that surprised you?
Greene: One surprising finding was the emergence of a gender gap on abortion. People assume there has always been a gender gap, that women have always been more pro-choice than men. But the data are very clear that this simply wasn't true. For the fifty years between Roe and Dobbs, men and women held essentially identical views on abortion in the aggregate.
Then Dobbs happened, and within just a couple of years we're looking at roughly a twenty-point gap in pro-choice identification between women and men. That's a profound political shift, and it happened with remarkable speed.
The other surprise, for me, was how strongly racial resentment correlates with abortion attitudes, and how recent that connection is. Before about 2012, there was essentially no statistical relationship between Americans' racial attitudes and their abortion views. That relationship emerged during the Obama presidency and has only strengthened since. Abortion has increasingly become intertwined with the broader identity and cultural conflicts shaping contemporary American politics in ways that simply were not true a generation ago.
TA: Are there findings in the book that complicate the conventional political narrative on either side?
Greene: Yes, definitely. One revolves around the issue of abortion in the 2024 presidential election. Abortion did not save Kamala Harris in 2024, even though the issue is now structurally favorable to Democrats. Trump deliberately muddied his own position and the economy mattered more than abortion for many voters. Abortion gave Democrats a real structural advantage. It did not give them a guarantee of victory. And this is true going forward as well.
Another surprising finding is the lack of support for moderate abortion proposals coming from some Republicans who realize complete abortion bans are unpopular. We ran a survey experiment to test Americans' reaction to proposals for a 12-week or 15-week ban and found that even these more moderate proposals are unpopular. In post-Dobbs America, a ban is a ban, and bans are unpopular. This puts Republicans seeking moderate ground on abortion in a tough position.
TA: Do your findings tell us anything about the country more broadly, beyond the issue of abortion?
Greene: This is the part of the argument I think general readers should pay especially close attention to. We have a growing and unprecedented gap between what the public wants on abortion and what the law permits. In a healthy representative democracy, those two lines should move in roughly the same direction. Right now they are moving in opposite directions, and the gap is widening.
When political movements increasingly pursue policy goals through courts, agencies, and obscure statutes after failing to persuade majorities of voters, it raises profound questions about democratic responsiveness and institutional legitimacy. Those tensions have implications far beyond just abortion policy.
The Supreme Court's approval ratings are historically low, and they did not recover after Dobbs the way some observers expected. If the Court continues to issue rulings that run sharply counter to public sentiment, that disconnect deepens. Abortion is the most visible example of a broader democratic phenomenon, not a unique one.
TA: What's next for this line of research?
Greene: The most important thing, in my view, is Gen Z. We're seeing the beginnings of a generational gender divide on abortion that is unlike anything in the prior fifty years of public opinion data. Young women have moved sharply pro-choice; young men are noticeably more conservative on these issues than their female peers.
If those attitudes harden, we may be watching the emergence of a durable gender-based political divide among younger Americans. That could have enormous implications not just for abortion politics, but for the broader trajectory of American political coalitions in the years ahead.
