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Over the past few decades, the American public has become more socially liberal on most issues. It has reversed its opposition to gay marriage and marijuana legalization and grown unsupportive of the death penalty. But there’s one issue that’s effectively stagnated, evenly dividing the electorate, with no signs of budging: abortion.

Twenty years ago, 56 percent of the country favored legal abortion. Today, that number is 57 percent, with minimal fluctuation over the past two decades.

But the binary of pro-choice vs. pro-life doesn’t tell the whole story.

Today’s Democratic Party would have you believe that the future is female and demands abortion on demand at any time in a pregnancy. But the average American’s view on the matter can pretty much be summed up with “safe, legal, and rare,” the standard that Democrats abandoned long ago.

While the majority of Americans favor legal abortion in the first three months of pregnancy, just one quarter believe in allowing it in the second trimester. That figure plummets to 13 percent when Americans are asked about legal abortion for the final trimester of pregnancy. These numbers have remained constant for two decades.

These figures grow even more complicated when Americans judge the rationale behind an abortion. The overwhelming majority of the public favors a woman’s ability to abort a pregnancy conceived through rape, but only 45 percent of Americans believe a woman should be allowed to get an abortion solely for personal reasons, even in the first trimester.

Compared to the nation’s new, popular support for gay marriage and legal pot, our abortion polling demonstrates that social liberalism is now social libertarianism. Letting people live their lives without the imposition of the government is broadly supported, but abortion imposes a level of cognitive dissonance in the American psyche. If the stagnancy and breakdown of our abortion polling numbers indicate anything, it’s that Americans don’t want to abolish the practice outright but remain extremely uncomfortable with the Left’s fetishization of it.

Rather than treat abortion as a necessary evil, as most Americans seem to, the new Democratic Party has heralded abortion as a positive good, a personal undertaking to celebrate as an act of feminist independence. The execrable “ShoutYourAbortion” campaign repeatedly trends on social media, and the ardent pro-choice crowd has vilified Republican lawmakers for attempting to deregulate and increase access to birth control pill as well as commonsense pushes to reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancies.

Now, New York and Virginia have made concerted efforts to legalize abortion not just past the point of fetal viability but right up until the time of birth. Democrats in those two states have turned their backs on all meaningful attempts to define the beginning of life as, say, the point at which a fetus can feel pain or the moment of quickening (the European Medieval understanding). Instead, they’ve abandoned any pretense of ethics and accepted that some humans simply have less moral value than other humans.

Democrats have relied on the most sympathetic presentation of women seeking abortions, invoking teen pregnancies and poor, single women to win over Americans skeptical of abortion. But now the Left is gambling that the country will accept abortions up to birth, motivated by pure selfishness, as a positive good. This may just detonate the tenuous coalition that’s kept the pro-choice movement a national majority.