Americans support a ban on "partial birth abortions" UNLESS

[BurtWorm]

they're indicated to save the life or protect the health of the mother, which is the only time late-term abortions are ever indicated. Even white evangelical protestants waver in their strong support for a ban when the "mother's health" issue is raised.

This is from a post of mine on another thread on this subject that was locked:

I made a neat little table that probably won't reproduce. You can see the data I copped following the link below. Effectively, it shows that while people clearly oppose "partial-birth abortions" across the boards, they don't want to outlaw the procedure in cases when a woman's health is endangered. A majority of only one of the control groups studied--white protestant evangelicals--thought it should be outlawed in both cases, but even with them, support for banning the procedure dropped radically (from 76 to 53 percent), and support for keeping it legal rose even more dramatically (from 12 to 43 percent). This means that banning this procedure is ultimately anti-democratic: the views of white evangelical protestants are given far greater weight than those of other groups.


http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/GoodMorningAmerica/poll030724_abortion.html


Note: I'm posting this yet again because I think it's surprising information and it has gotten lost in two other giant, unwieldy threads about late term abortion, because it's on a slightly different topic, which is the question of the sense of the democracy about this issue. Common knowledge is that this ban is popular. The ABC News poll strongly suggests otherwise.