Hat tip to Jill Stanek for highlighting this interesting blog post from Academic OB/GYN, a reflective piece on “why pro-choice is losing.”
Right now, anti-choice is wiping the floor with pro-choice. Pro-choice is always on the defensive, and never on the offensive. Prochoice is tending goal and Prolife is always taking shots. This can only go on so long before one gets in the net, and we’ve been seeing that happen lately.
This is probably worth keeping in the back of our heads at a time when most pro-lifers feel like we just lost a big one on Health Care. But the point is that, in the big picture, pro-lifers continue to chip away at the pro-abort monolith through education and pro-life regulation. To an extent, this is to be expected, and one can only take so much hand wringing from the other side without rolling our eyes in boredom.
Abortion on demand is the law of the land, the pro-life position is not the law of the land. So…yes, if the “goal” is public policy, then pro-aborts are rather obviously the one’s on defense, with pro-lifers on offense. To continue
Pro-choice needs to stop addressing the question of morality question all together. The only question that should be addressed is whether or not abortion should be legal, and the best way to do that is to clearly show the country what the effects of a ban on abortion would be. Pro-choice needs to make sure that everyone in this country can imagine the effects of an abortion ban on women, and is vividly reminded of what was going on in this country prior to Roe v Wade. Prior to Roe v Wade hospitals had entire wards full of women injured or dying from illegal untrained abortion. This is incredibly compelling, yet Pro-choice gives it a back seat to a pointless argument about morality. Pro-choice needs to make it clear that despite the huge number of people that argue that abortion is wrong, the same people seek abortion when they need it just like those who believe that it is acceptable. Despite their advertised belief, when the rubber hits the road many of them feel differently. The country needs to understand this – that the moral objection to abortion is not the same thing as wanting to make abortion illegal.
There are other problems as well.
Pro-choice also needs to stop pretending that abortion is not destroying life. Pro-life argues that abortion is murder, and in response we hear from pro-choice is that it is not life, but a potential life. This is not a compelling argument. A fetus, from any scientific point of view, is alive. Claiming that a fetus is not alive is inaccurate, and this somewhat vampiric idea paints Pro-choice in a bad light in the eyes of the middle ground population that might be convinced to support their cause. Pro-choice must recognize that abortion is destruction of life, but is still a justified thing. Parallels must be drawn between abortion and other justified destruction of life. It is ironic that the conservatives who are the greatest detractors of abortion are often also the greatest supporters of war, and in so are the greatest supporters of killing. To be a supporter of war and then to claim abortion cannot be justified because it is killing a life is a very bad argument, and the weakness in this position must be capitalized on.
Pro-choice is also losing because they are not aggressive enough in marketing. There are billboards all over the place promoting pro-life ideas. I never see billboards promoting pro-choice ideas. This is a problem. I don’t know why this is, but I think it has something to do with pro-choice believing that their side is morally justified and does not need to be defended publicly. I believe this is folly. The position must be defended aggressively. Pro-life is also very effective in promoting their cause through picketing of abortion clinics. While they probably don’t scare off too many patients, their presence is a constant and vivid advertisement for their cause, and can draw support from the important middle ground. Why isn’t pro-choice doing the same? Every time there are picketers outside an abortion clinic, pro-choice supporters should have picketers out there peacefully promoting the opposite message. Pro-choice should be picketing Crisis Pregnancy Centers EVERY DAY.
Go for it.
While this is just one blogger, it would be interesting to see the pro-abortion movement re-brand itself. As a rule of thumb, when debating a pro-abort, you can tell you’re making headway in the argument if they switch arguments from the “moral” aspect of the argument to the “pragmatic” grounds of “it may not be a good thing, but it needs to be legal to help women.” A necessary evil. We’ll happily take the concession and proceed to debate on the pragmatic grounds. The science on Fetal Development was getting clearer by the day anyway, that debate was getting boring. More room for us to go educate all the undecideds out there. If it’s not a point of contention anymore, we should all be able to talk about it without controversy, right? Right.
The other piece of advice for pro-aborts, that they need to be better at “marketing” is indicative of deeper problem the pro-aborts have always suffered from. Thinking of it as “marketing” is too businesslike, too much of the top down corporate notion of approaching a problem. To pro-lifers, the issue is about saving lives, to pro-aborts, at most it’s a moral issue of helping women. It’s not product placement. The pro-life movement doesn’t “market” itself. It spreads Truth. Calling it “marketing” is just an admission that there’s a particular package, a particular angle, that needs “selling.” Not the best word choice. In any event, bill boards are more tangential to the problem. The pro-life advantage in bill boards is the consequence of the deeper pro-life advantage. Boots on the ground.
By and large, the pro-life movement does things on the cheap, pro-abort interest groups and lobbies raise and spend money like…popularly demonized unethical big corporations…
The difference is the so-called “enthusiasm gap,” down at the bottom. Planned Parenthood is a billion dollar a year organization. The average crisis pregnancy center is a small group of all volunteer staff which sometimes gets money from private donations. The latter can only operate with broad support on the local level by dedicated individuals. There is no real counterpart on the other side, more a small group of aging feminist activists or recent victims of the tragedy of abortion trying to justify their actions. Pro-lifers continue to slowly win over the culture at large because the undecided majority is just that; undecided or apathetic. Most haven’t had fetal development explained to them, or know about the often tragic consequences of abortion for the mother, or they just don’t want to think about an unpleasant topic.
Also, picketing a PP clinic may rile up pro-aborts, but it’s easy to make the case that “these people do it because they feel strongly that innocent lives are being destroyed.” The controversial nature of them is well understood. But are Crisis Pregnancy Centers equally controversial? If pro-abortion proponents favor “safe, legal, and rare,” then oughtn’t CPCs be a good outlet for helping ensure the “rare” part, while doing nothing to harm the “safe, legal” part? Demonizing CPCs seems like a losing PR issue, so if pro-aborts want to start picketing them, they’re more than welcome to.
Assuming they can find enough people to protest that is.
