Let’s Unify the Pro-Life Movement!

“Why can’t all the pro-life organizations work together?”

In my decade of full-time pro-life work, how many times have I heard this question from pro-life philanthropists?

More than I can count.

Embedded in the question is an assumption that I think is worth diving into a little bit.

The assumption is that closer unity among the various pro-life organizations will somehow lead to greater impact, meaning saving more lives from abortion.

I’m not confident that assumption is correct.

Why not?

Because unity in and of itself is not a strategy.

Unity can help effectively execute a strategy for sure, but I think the pro-life movement has a strategy problem, not a unity problem.

Let me demonstrate what I mean by looking at a pivotal day in world history: D-Day on June 6, 1944.

All the various branches of the armed forces surely had the same mission objective: to win the battle that day.

However, can you imagine what would have happened that day if there had not been a coordinated strategy for the attack?

D-Day would have been known as Disaster Day.

Fortunately, there was a master strategy that all the branches bought into, and the effective execution of that strategy carried the day for the Allied Forces.

When we look at the pro-life community, the good news is that, like the various branches of the armed forces on D-Day, all the various organizations of the pro-life movement are aligned in mission objective.

They want to end abortion.

Unfortunately however, there is no one pro-life organization that leads the way with the master strategy that coordinates the actions of all the other pro-life organizations.

As a result, in the ongoing war to defeat the abortion industry there is no concentration of overwhelming force by the pro-life community that poses any serious threat.

This leads to the pro-life community winning pitched battles here and there, and praise God for those victories, but it hasn’t led to any major advances against the abortion industry.

For example, in terms of metrics, as I have stated before, nine out of ten abortion-seeking women will end up getting an abortion.

Said another way from measuring the effectiveness of Team Pro-Life, we are saving only 1 out of every 10.

That’s not winning.

So what’s the prescription for this challenge of creating and then getting buy in for a unified pro-life strategy?

Leaders in the pro-life movement have been trying to figure that out since, well, since the pro-life movement began.

I don’t claim to have the answer, but in the next article I will offer my thoughts on an industry I think the pro-life movement should follow as a model in order to generate a unified strategy, and why I think so.

Brett