{"id":262218,"date":"2025-06-12T13:56:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T17:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/?post_type=short-read&p=262218"},"modified":"2025-09-16T14:07:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T18:07:31","slug":"americans-views-on-abortion-differ-by-state","status":"publish","type":"short-read","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2025\/06\/12\/americans-views-on-abortion-differ-by-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans\u2019 views on abortion differ by state"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nearly three years have passed since a 2022 Supreme Court decision<\/a> overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. The ruling gave states new discretion to restrict or ban abortion<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, public opinion on whether abortion should be legal or illegal varies considerably from state to state, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. That survey, the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study<\/a>, was large enough to break out results in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, although the margins of error for the state-level estimates are much larger than for the survey\u2019s national estimates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How we did this<\/summary>\n

This Pew Research Center analysis explores Americans\u2019 views by state on whether abortion should be legal or illegal. The data comes from the Center\u2019s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS), a nationally representative survey of 36,908 U.S. adults. It was conducted in English and Spanish from July 17, 2023, to March 4, 2024. The RLS is the largest single survey that the Center conducts, which allows us to analyze the results in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more details, including a list of sample sizes and margins of error for each state, refer to the accompanying table<\/a> or the study\u2019s Methodology<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 34 states and D.C., more people say abortion generally should be legal<\/em> than say it generally should be illegal.<\/strong> For example, in the District of Columbia, 81% of adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Support for legal abortion also stands at about 75% or higher in several New England states, including Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Connecticut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, people in Arkansas are more likely to say abortion should generally be illegal (57%) rather than legal (41%). Arkansas is the only state where the balance of public opinion is against abortion by a statistically significant margin<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 15 states, the shares saying abortion should be legal and saying it should be illegal are not significantly different once the margins of sampling error in each state are taken into account<\/em>. (In the chart below, the blue and orange bars show the confidence intervals around each estimate. The 15 states where the differences are not statistically significant have overlapping confidence intervals.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n