Do you know Roe?

Just ready to sign off, which is hard for a news junkie to do, when I noticed over at NRO’s Bench Memos that Ed Whelan has this piece on the public’s changing attitude toward abortion on demand as it currently is practiced in America.

According to a new Gallup poll, public sentiment against overturning Roe (and restoring abortion to the democratic processes) has fallen since January 2006 from a 66-25 margin to a 53-35 margin.

Notice that double negative. You have to unwind these things to get the full meaning.

In other words, the margin has fallen from 41 points to 18 points in less than 18 months.  Somehow Gallup chooses to describe this 23-point swing as a “slight increase in the percentage of Americans who say they would like to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Sounds like the average reporting in the major media.

The 53-35 margin that Gallup finds is virtually identical to the 55-34 margin in the recent poll jointly commissioned by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Judicial Confirmation Network.  As I discussed here, the numbers fall to a virtual dead heat when those polled focus, even briefly, on what Roe really means.  Given that 60%-70% of Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in the very circumstances that actually account for well over 90% of this country’s abortion, there is ample reason to believe that a sustained public education campaign would result in a supermajority of Americans favoring the overturning of Roe.

Let’s have a sustained public education campaign. Here’s one way to be informed. Go back and look at what some “pro-choice” legal scholars thought about Roe all along.