For those of us who bring marketing backgrounds to full-time pro-life work, it can be very challenging to understand the grand strategies put forward by the pro-life community.
National pro-life leaders and organizations still put tremendous effort into advocating for abortion-restricting laws of all kinds, especially at the state level following the overturn of Roe v Wade last year.
This in spite of the fact that the abortion industry continues its pivot away from surgical abortion as its primary product to the abortion pill as its primary product.
The abortion pill will likely account for upwards of 80 to 90% of all abortions within five years.
The new reality is that when we say “abortion” we’re talking about the abortion pill.
Abortion is now in the form of a drug.
As such, the pro-life community finds itself joining forces with the so-called “war on drugs.”
And if you’ve been following the war on drugs, and keeping track of how well restrictive laws have worked in quelling the supply of illegal drugs into our country, let’s just say the results have been less than stellar.
American citizens still demand illegal drugs, and if there is demand and money to be made from it, the suppliers will find a way to deliver the drugs, no matter the laws.
And so it goes with the abortion pill.
Yet, most of the talk coming out of the pro-life community at large continues to be about laws.
What is that saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
Old habits die hard, I guess.
When I bring up this issue of the ineffectiveness of pro-life laws to quell supply of abortion, the retort is usually something like, “Yes, Brett, but laws are a teacher.”
The more I think about this, the less I believe it’s true, at least on a large scale.
As the late Andrew Breitbart once said, “Politics is downstream of culture.”
In other words, it is culture that shapes politics, not the other way around.
Building on that claim, I would say that culture is a much greater force for teaching than laws are.
So I don’t believe pro-life laws will make us a pro-life America.
But I do believe that a pro-life culture will make us a pro-life America.
Brett
John Willing
Brett, I agree with you in your observations about laws concerning abortion, and people just turning to alternatives like the pill. But if we give up on tightening laws, then what can we do? How can anything except an enduring, spiritual revival change people’s hearts?