Brutal Honesty is Required to Develop a Winning Strategy

I’m going to add an idea to last week’s article about winning.

I believe a requirement for developing a winning strategy is to be brutally honest about the reality of the current competitive landscape.

As I said in last week’s article, my definition of winning means scoring more points than your opponent, and in the pro-life world that would translate to mean that a larger number of abortion-determined women decide to choose life instead of choosing abortion.

Under that definition of winning, Team Pro-Life is in trouble.

In every city across the country, if we measure how many abortion-determined women get an abortion versus how many change their minds about abortion and choose life, I estimate that Team Pro-Abortion outscores Team Pro-Life 20 to 1 in most cities.

But some pro-life organizations would disagree with me on that.

For example, in early November, an article was published with the headline, “Texas Abortions Drop 99% as Abortion Ban Saves Thousands of Babies.”

Now that sounds like a win for Team Pro-Life!

Is this claim true though?

Let’s dissect the headline to find out.

What the author of the article means in the first part, “Texas Abortions Drop 99%…” is that abortion procedures, both surgical procedures and abortion pill purchases, at abortion facilities in Texas have dropped 99%.

That claim is likely true based on available data from public sources.

However, I think it is a completely inaccurate picture of the current competitive landscape because it doesn’t capture the fact that abortion has gone mobile in two ways.

First, clients for abortion procedures have gone mobile as women travel to states where they can legally obtain an abortion.

Young women in Texas who are very determined to get an abortion are simply crossing borders into states where abortions are legal, and procuring abortions there.

Second, the abortion procedure itself has gone mobile by means of distribution of the abortion pill by mail order.

More than half of abortions this year will be by the abortion pill, and young women in Texas can order the pill online from a number of overseas providers who will ship it to them no matter the state laws against mail order abortion pills.

Because of the reality of abortion going mobile in these two ways, the second part of the headline, “…as Abortion Ban Saves Thousands of Babies” is simply an unsubstantiated claim.

Or in logic terms, the conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow because the premise is faulty.

The premise is based on an old paradigm that “all abortions take place at abortion facilities,” and that since those abortion facilities are no longer allowed to offer abortions, then the abortion-determined women of Texas must by default choose life for their preborn babies.

This is simply grossly inaccurate.

Many in the pro-life community are still stuck in the old paradigm of thinking of abortion exclusively as a procedure that takes place on a certain day, at a certain time, at a certain place, done by a certain abortionist.

Of course, that type of abortion still exists – but every day that passes it becomes a lower percentage of the total number of abortions as abortions done by the abortion pill continue to increase its majority share of total abortions.

In addition to that, the problem is exacerbated further by states like California that are becoming so-called “abortion sanctuary states” that will fly women in from abortion-illegal states to get abortions in California, all at California taxpayer expense.

Until some pro-life organizations catch up with the reality of the new competitive landscape that abortion has gone mobile, they will continue to draw faulty conclusions about the number of lives saved from abortion.

And that is not conducive to rallying Team Pro-Life to engage against Team Pro-Abortion with effective strategies that stop us from getting outscored 20 to 1, and eventually lead us to flipping the script and outscoring our competition for the first time in history.

This article was published in Heroic Media‘s weekly newsletter