Eighty-seven percent favored requiring doctors to inform patients about possible risks of abortion before performing the procedure, while 71 percent favored requiring parental consent for women under 18 for any abortion. Sixty-nine percent favored a 24-hour waiting period before a woman has an abortion, while 64 percent favored a ban on “partial birth abortion,” except to save the life of the mother.
However, only 50 percent favored requiring that a woman be shown an ultrasound image of her unborn child at least 24 hours before an abortion. Fifty-one percent opposed a law allowing pharmacists and health providers to decline providing medicine or surgical procedures that result in abortion, while 57 percent opposed a prohibition on federal funds for health clinics that provide abortion services.
Smith said it was “a little discouraging” that a majority of respondents do not support conscience protections and bans on federal funding for abortion providers. She suggested more education efforts are needed in those areas.
“There is a lot of mistaken understanding and misinformation about the so-called abortion rights in political and judicial circles. There is a misunderstanding of how harmful abortion is to the woman,” she continued.
“There tends to be a general belief that women need abortion in order to advance a career or have the type of life that they want to have, and that pregnancy takes away from that.”
“Study after study after study has demonstrated that not only the physical risks of having an abortion, but the psychological risks, and the consequences involved,” she said, citing the “substantial risk” of pre-term birth in a subsequent pregnancy of a woman who has had an abortion.