Harris Poll Shows Lowest Support for Roe v. Wade in Decades.(Survey)

When it comes to abortion, there are pollsters and there are pollsters. When one as consistently, unabashedly partisan as the pro-abortion Harris poll splashes this headline"Support for Roe vs. Wade Declines to Lowest Level Ever, Says Harris Poll; U.S. Adults Almost Equally Split: 49 Percent in Favor, 47 Percent Oppose"you can't help but be encouraged.

First, the highlights of the poll of 1,016 adults, released May 4.

* Asked about Roe v. Wade, only 49% supported the 1973 decision as opposed to 47% who did not. In 1998 the percentage in favor of Roe was 57%, according to Harris, and 52% in 2005. This is a decline in support for Roe that no amount of hemming and hawing can change.

What makes this even more intriguing is that Harris's question does everything humanly possibly to minimize and misrepresent what Roe allowed, and still the percent in favor continues to drop. Here is the question:

"In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that states' laws which made it illegal for a woman to have an abortion up to three months of pregnancy were unconstitutional, and that the decision on whether a woman should have an abortion up to three months of pregnancy should be left to the woman and her doctor to decide. In general, do you favor or oppose this part of the U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortions up to three months of pregnancy legal?"

Notice that three times the Harris question drives home the totally erroneous conclusion that Roe only legalized abortion up through the first three months. The question further tilted the response by adding the idiom-of-choice ("left to a woman and her doctor to decide"), which always increases the level of support.

* Harris asked under which circumstances respondents would permit abortion. The exact question was: