Southerners Are Misrepresented on Abortion

In 2022, the Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, allowing states to control their own reproductive health policies. Since then, Southern legislatures have passed rigid limits on abortion and other forms of reproductive health care. At the same time, doctors now must weigh the possibility of felony charges when administering life-saving care. In Georgia, the Maternal Mortality Review Committee reportedly found that two pregnant Black women had died for lack of appropriate care.

As Southern legislators continue to push for more restrictive measures, we investigated whether the post-Dobbs abortion bans they have already enacted are consistent with their constituents’ views. They are not. Surveys indicate that Southern voters largely do not support the abortion policies in their states. That is especially true of the five states that make up the Deep South — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina — all of which either ban abortion outright or prohibit it beyond six weeks, making it effectively unavailable.

Beyond the South, our analysis shows that individuals who live in regions with the strictest antiabortion legislation are the least likely to support abortion bans. This mismatch reflects the democratic deficit that pervades state legislatures. Across party lines, extreme restrictions on abortion contradict the majority of voters’ preferences and threaten civil liberties.

Legislating and Restricting Abortion in the South

Southern states have historically been the staunchest opponents of women’s political and social autonomy. Women’s fundamental right to vote was stalled countless times over its 50-year fight by Southern congressmen who feared platforming women’s Progressive ideals. Shortly after the 19th Amendment was finally approved by Congress in 1919, eight Southern states rejected its ratification, refusing to support the enfranchisement of Black women, whom they perceived as intellectually inferior. In the 1970s, 12 of the 16 Southern states either rejected the Equal Rights Amendment or rescinded their approval, leaving it in limbo.

This inclination toward the social control of women extended to reproductive rights. The landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade originated when Norma McCorvey challenged Texas’s abortion ban, which limited the procedure to instances in which a mother’s life was at stake.

Even after Roe recognized Americans’ right to abortion, in 1973, Southern legislators functionally limited abortion access. Since they were no longer allowed to ban abortion procedures before fetal viability, many legislatures developed new barriers. So-called TRAP (targeted restrictions of abortion providers) laws, for example, required abortion clinics and physicians to meet onerous demands, for instance by imposing the design specifications of ambulatory surgical centers or requiring that doctors have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Texas’s 2013 TRAP law, HB2, led to the closure of 21 of the state’s 40 abortion clinics. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), the Supreme Court found that such requirements did not provide medical or health benefits that justified the burdens placed on abortion seekers and clinics.

In 2022, the Supreme Court once again faced a decision regarding limits on abortion. However, this time the ideological composition of the bench leaned more conservative and antiabortion than in previous reproductive rights cases. Mississippi’s sole abortion provider challenged a 2018 state law that prohibited abortions after 15 weeks. With Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned Roe and federal abortion protections. In advance of the ruling, 13 states, including 7 in the South, had enacted trigger bans that would take immediate effect in the event of the overturning of Roe. Since Dobbs, 13 Southern states have enacted total bans on abortion or gestational restrictions that are far more stringent than the standard set by Roe.

Assessing Public Opinion Post-Dobbs

We investigated national survey data to understand where Southerners stand on abortion today and whether their views are represented by the current reproductive health legislation in their state. Our analysis indicates that support for abortion bans is not as universal as current laws suggest. In fact, we find that support for some legal abortion access is especially high among people who are living in regions with the strictest antiabortion legislation.

We have used data from the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), a survey of more than 15,000 Americans nationwide.¹ The survey was fielded following the 2024 election, the first presidential election post-Dobbs, in which reproductive rights (or their restriction) was a prominent issue in presidential debates.

We grouped voters into six regions based on U.S. Census Bureau designations. We also split Southern respondents into two subregions, the Deep South and the Peripheral South, based on long-standing political distinctions identified by scholars of Southern politics.² This differentiation recognizes the South as both unique relative to other regions in the country and diverse within itself. As early as 1949, political scientists theorized that the racial dynamics of the South — namely the enfranchisement of the large share of Black Americans in the Deep South — would create distinctions in the way Southern voters behave politically. Contemporary studies confirm this divergence in both partisan and policy preferences between the subregions, leading us to expect these states to behave differently on questions related to representation and democracy.

Southerners’ Views on Abortion

Public opinion surveys ranging from Pew to the Public Religion Research Institute show that across the country, the majority of Americans support legal access to abortion, even if only under specific conditions. Our analysis corroborates that. In every region, we find that less than 13 percent of respondents approve of an outright abortion ban. This number is lowest, however, in the Deep South, where all five states have a ban in place. Respondents in the Deep South are slightly more supportive of some form of abortion access than respondents in all other regions.³

Support varies across racial and partisan lines. Across the country, white and Latino males are most likely to approve of an abortion ban, but even then no more than 12 percent support one. Some of the largest differences between groups are along party lines. Republicans (18 percent) are roughly three times more likely than Democrats (5 percent) and twice as likely as independents (8 percent) to endorse abortion bans.

In the South, support for abortion access appears to have increased since Dobbs. The General Social Survey’s longitudinal data shows a 14 percentage point increase in support in the South between 2018 and 2024, providing evidence that the South is not the bastion of antiabortion voters that legislation would suggest.

Some voters are in favor of abortion access only under specific circumstances, which we call conditional support. These include respondents who say they support abortion only in the case of sexual assault or incest, or in the event that a woman’s life is in danger. More Southerners fall into this category than into any other.

To tease out the reasons for this, we looked at respondents’ personal reflections on the issue. Nearly one-third of all respondents say they are “personally against abortion” but do not support bans. This number is especially high among respondents in the Deep South.

The fact that these respondents are likely to disapprove of bans despite personal opposition to abortion suggests that Southerners’ personal convictions do not dictate their policy preferences. Further, these respondents may be reacting to the post-Dobbs environment, in which their policy perspectives may have changed as reproductive health care access has also changed. Not only do voters in the Deep South live in states with abortion bans, but these states are bordered by states with bans or severe restrictions, making access to abortion even more cumbersome.

In the Deep South, and across all regions, the message is clear. Voters’ policy preferences diverge substantially from today’s abortion bans. Regardless of people’s personal attitudes on abortion, a strong majority — nearly 70 percent — of those in the Deep South do not believe the government should ban abortion. Elsewhere, voter behavior has reflected this dynamic.

Since the Dobbs decision, 17 states have voted on constitutional amendments related to abortion. In 15 of those states, a majority have supported abortion protections or opposed abortion bans. Moreover, 10 of the states voting in support of abortion access also gave majority support to the Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election, further indicating that partisanship and abortion attitudes are not synonymous.

Southern Voters’ Values Are Misrepresented by Abortion Policy

Scholars have found that Americans have underestimated public support for abortion since the Dobbs ruling. This necessitates a present-day look at Southerners’ perspectives of their specific state in the post-Dobbs landscape as these states make their policies more restrictive and punitive. As of 2025, the data shows that many Southern voters feel unrepresented by these policies.

Among all respondents, those living in the Deep South experience the biggest gap between their preferences and policy outcomes. Deep South respondents are most likely to say that abortion laws in their state do not reflect their values.

To better understand this relationship, we looked at respondents across the country and grouped them by the restrictiveness of their state’s abortion policy. Respondents in restrictive states are 10 percentage points more likely than those in nonrestrictive states to report that abortion policies do not reflect their values.

We assessed this further using a regression analysis. After accounting for factors like gender, political party, Christian identity, and others, the pattern is clear. People living in states with the most restrictive abortion policies are less likely to agree with their state’s policy than those in states that protect the right to abortion. Looking only at Southerners, those in the states with the most restrictive abortion policies are less likely than those in less restrictive states to say that their state’s policy reflects their values.

Despite the unpopularity of restrictive abortion policies in the South, legislators continue to propose even more restrictive legislation. Earlier this year in South Carolina, a state with a six-week abortion ban, six male senators sponsored a bill that would make performing an abortion procedure, as well as possessing or mailing abortion medication, a felony, punishable by imprisonment. Those who obtained an abortion would face misdemeanor charges and jail time, with no exceptions for victims of assault or those whose fetuses were given a fatal diagnosis. This iteration of the bill is slightly less punitive than a proposal last year that would have classified abortion as homicide and abortion seekers as murderers subject to up to 30 years in prison. 

These bills represent just two of many attempts to further restrict abortion in the South. They demonstrate that Southern legislators have felt emboldened since Dobbs to push for increasingly severe legislation in spite of their constituents’ policy preferences.

The South’s Democratic Deficit

Our results join a wealth of data illustrating the mismatch between public opinion and public policy, exposing the depths of the region’s democratic deficit. Its consequences can be life altering — particularly for poor women and women of color, as maternal health data indicates.

The incongruence can occur for a number of reasons. Vote dilution creates powerful partisan supermajorities, and broken campaign finance systems allow megadonors to seat anti-choice politicians who advance unpopular, restrictive policies. Meaningful political representation will be further stymied by Callais v. Louisiana (2026), in which the Supreme Court made racial vote dilution all but impossible to remedy.

Taken together, these representational shortcomings relegate the health and civil liberties of Southerners to the whims of a weakened democracy. Democratic reforms that improve representation can bring Southern abortion laws more in line with the public’s values and make abortion without fear of criminal prosecution available nationwide.

Chelsea Jones is a research fellow and manager in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, specializing in voting rights, elections, and race and gender inequities in electoral outcomes. She earned her PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Samyu Comandur is a research associate for the 2024 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar, and a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.