Gallup poll: 64% of Americans agree that "The decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician."

In the summer of 1972, half a year before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.

A majority of all identified groups, including Catholics, agreed with that statement. There was almost no difference between men and women. The group expressing the strongest agreement – 68 percent – was made up of Republicans. George Gallup’s syndicated column discussing the poll results, “Abortion Seen Up to Woman, Doctor,” ... was... in Justice Blackmun’s files.

And Justice Blackmun, the Nixon appointee who wrote the Roe v. Wade opinion, had that column in his files. Also in his files:

[A]n account by Dr. Jane E. Hodgson, a Mayo Clinic-trained obstetrician/gynecologist, of her arrest in St. Paul in 1970 for performing a first-trimester abortion for a patient who had contracted German measles in the fourth week of pregnancy. (In those days before immunization eradicated the threat posed to pregnant women by German measles, the disease commonly caused serious birth defects.) Justice Harry A. Blackmun, formerly the Mayo Clinic’s lawyer, knew Dr. Hodgson’s story; I had found her account, published in the clinic’s alumni magazine, in the justice’s files at the Library of Congress.

That's from a long column by Linda Greenhouse, referencing historical materials collected here. The column also talks about the post-Roe political strategy of the Republican Party, which we were just discussing a couple days ago here. The idea is that Republicans were for it before they were against it.

(Feel free to relate this post to the previous post about Second Amendment rights, which Democrats don't believe in.)