Is Abortion a Medical Choice?

Is abortion a medical choice?

I don’t think so.

And if you’re reading this article you probably don’t think so either.

But now for an uncomfortable truth.

From the perspective of effective marketing and sales, it doesn’t matter what you or I think.

All that matters is what the client thinks.

And in the case of abortion about 70% of the clients are young women between the ages of 18-29 years old.

So the question is, “Do those young women think abortion is a medical choice?”

And the answer is, “Yes, they do.”

Why?

Because Planned Parenthood has relentlessly pounded the message into the heads of young women for decades that abortion is a medical choice.

Planned Parenthood accomplished this by placing abortion under the banner of “women’s healthcare.”

We have to give credit where credit is due from a marketing perspective (not from a moral perspective, of course).

It was a very savvy marketing move by Planned Parenthood.

So what should a life-affirming pregnancy center do with this knowledge?

Well, if the center wants to attract more clients away from Planned Parenthood, it should first acknowledge that Planned Parenthood won the “abortion is women’s healthcare” positioning battle in women’s minds long ago.

The center should then take advantage of that positioning to use it against Planned Parenthood.

How?

A good first step would be to put the words “women’s healthcare” in the name of the center’s organization.

Doing so will immediately resonate with abortion-determined young women.

Next, the center should make everything it does have the look and feel of a medical organization from the first moment an abortion-determined woman contacts the center all the way through to her final decision for what she decides to do with her pregnancy.

The center should offer ultrasound and STD (sexually transmitted diseases) services, and have medical professionals on staff.

That, too, will resonate with abortion-determined young women.

So if you look at the current state of the 3,000 or so life-affirming centers across the country, how do they stack up on these two points?

The news is not good I’m afraid.

In my experience, the majority of centers, in both the names of their centers and in their processes, use a “counseling” model that assumes the woman should choose to carry her pregnancy to term.

Even if you and I agree that that’s exactly what a woman should choose to do with her pregnancy, again, it doesn’t matter what you and I think since we are not the clients.

What the counseling model telegraphs to young women, at least subconsciously, is that the center thinks there is something wrong with them.

A young woman’s thinking will be something like, “Why do I need to be counseled? I just want an abortion procedure.”

So the counseling model causes a profound dissonance and confusion in the woman’s mind, and confusion causes the woman to have doubts about the center’s intentions.

Of course, there are some life-affirming centers that are an exception, and do follow the medical “women’s healthcare” approach.

Next week, we’ll dive into the advantages of that model.

Brett

This article was published in Heroic Media‘s weekly newsletter