Play Only One Game to Defeat the Abortion Industry

What can the pro-life community learn from the game of football in order to compete more effectively against the abortion industry?

That may hit you as a strange question, but it’s college football bowl season right now and that question came to me last night as I was watching two teams play in one of the bowl games.

As I watched the game unfold, I was extremely impressed by how well the players and coaches on both teams executed their game plans.

It was all the more impressive because if you know how football is played, it is a very complex sport requiring a team to have an incredible focus on details to execute well enough to outscore one’s opponent.

How is this relevant to the competition between team pro-life and team pro-abortion?

Unfortunately, I think it is team pro-abortion, much more so than team pro-life, that displays incredible focus on details, mainly by the fact that team pro-abortion is very focused on playing only one specific game, while team pro-life is trying to play two different games at the same time.

Let me break that down a little.

What exactly is the one specific game the abortion industry is playing?

That’s easy. It’s to conduct as many abortions as possible.

That is its core strategy, and that is how it measures itself in terms of determining if it’s winning.

For sure, team abortion has various tactics it uses to serve its one strategy of conducting as many abortions as possible, but those tactics are all consistent with a relentless focus on one customer – the young woman – with the goal of achieving one outcome – the woman gets an abortion.

How about team pro-life?

Team pro-life is playing two different games.

The first game, and where team pro-life deploys much of its resources, is trying to get legislators at all levels of government to implement laws that defend the preborn human being from abortion.

In this game, the customer, if you will, is the preborn human.

The second game team pro-life plays is offering “choose life” services to young women through front line pregnancy help centers that compete directly against the abortion industry.

In this second game, the customer is the young woman.

Playing two different games at the same time that focuses on two different customers diffuses the focus and energy of team pro-life and makes it less effective in its competition against team pro-abortion.

In addition, as I’ve written about many times and the message bears repeating, team pro-life’s primary focus on the game of trying to get legislators to pass laws that defend the preborn human being has become much less effective at stopping team pro-abortion from maintaining or increasing its abortion numbers.

This is because abortion is “mobile” in two ways that make abortion laws practically moot.

First, abortion is mobile in the sense that a woman in an abortion illegal state can go to an abortion legal state to obtain an abortion.

Second, abortion is mobile in the sense that an abortion can be delivered to a woman in the privacy of her own home in the form of the abortion pill.

The abortion pill is the more insidious because it is impervious to laws, in other words impervious to team pro-life’s primary strategy.

We are now witnessing the reality of just how effectively the mobility of abortion circumvents legislation.

Recent research reveals that total abortion numbers have fallen very little following the Dobbs decision and the subsequent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

I think this should be a wakeup call to team pro-life that it’s time to massively overhaul our strategy, and get focused on one game – offering world class “choose life” services that research will one day in the future show that the majority of young women prefer to what the abortion industry offers them.

Brett