According to an article by the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/us/02abortion.html), a large number of Americans have changed their stance on abortion(54% supported abortion in 2008 while only 47% supported abortion in the new 2009 poll). It noted this shift occurred among many demographic groups except for 2 groups, African Americans and people with no religious affiliation. The article mentions attributes the shift to President Obama, who supports abortion but wants to reduce the quantity of them.
I think this shift is due more to Americans becoming more religious(and hence conservative) as a whole. There was an article in the Washington Post in 2008 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/25/AR2008102502053.html) that observed that in general, people became more religious during times of financial hardship. Due to the economic crisis of this year and last, I think more people have turned to God(or some other deity) for guidance and became more in tuned with their religion and its set of beliefs. Since this change happened mostly to people who were already affiliated with a certain religion, I think these people started going to church more often and started to turn to scripture. By doing these things, they started identifying themselves strongly with their religion. And with this, it makes it easier for them to decide that abortion is wrong, especially when one of the commandments explicitly says that it is wrong to kill.
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