The pro-life community has been on its heels following the great victory of the Dobbs decision by the US Supreme Court that led to the overturning of Roe v Wade.
In seven states so far, the citizens have spoken through their votes and have to one degree or another guaranteed abortion rights in their state constitutions.
There are eleven more states where citizens will vote on similar measures this year.
Pro-life is losing at the ballot box, even in some traditionally politically red states.
What happened?
There is a great article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that I believe gets to the heart of the matter: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/how-abortion-rights-backers-changed-their-messageand-started-winning-58db41e7
Essentially, the article claims, based on research, that the majority of Americans don’t want to take away “rights” from women.
Yes, you and I are aware that abortion is not really a “right” but instead a license, but that’s not how the majority of Americans view it.
The majority of Americans equate abortion rights with freedom.
As a marketer, I believe that is going to be very difficult to overcome for team pro-life without a deep cultural change in the hearts of American citizens.
I am not optimistic about such a change happening any time soon because I believe that the majority of Americans, forgive me for saying this, just aren’t that deep.
We live in times where profound self-centeredness is the rule, not the exception.
The “me me me” generation, if you will.
For principled pro-life people, who tend to naturally surround themselves with like-minded individuals, the reality that so many of our fellow citizens are not principled decision makers on this issue can be difficult to comprehend.
For example, it’s interesting to hear pro-life leaders dissect why pro-abortion forces have won every single abortion rights state ballot so far.
You hear things like,
“Our messaging was wrong.”
“Our ground game was insufficient.”
“The other side outspent us on advertising by 5X.”
Etc.
But I don’t think a massive improvement in those areas would have turned the vote in our favor in our seven losses to date.
After all, the vote in those ballot initiatives was not close, at all.
Actually, there’s research from Gallup displayed in just one graph that I believe not only explains the seven state losses so far, but also explains why we will likely lose all eleven ballots coming up this year.
Here it is:
Please note in the graph:
- According to the Gallup research, ONLY 13% of Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases.
All leaders of pro-life organizations should read that sentence out loud to themselves at least 100 times a day.
The opportunity for team pro-life, of course, is in the 36% who believe abortion should be legal in only a few cases.
Many of these folks likely identify themselves as “personally” pro-life.
In the pro-life community, we refer to them as the “squishy middle.”
These are the, “I’m personally pro-life, but I wouldn’t want to force my personal beliefs on others” crowd, and the number of folks who think this way is clearly very large.
When it comes to voting on pro-life initiatives, it is clear that many put more weight on the “I wouldn’t want to force my personal beliefs on others” part of their beliefs than on the “I’m personally pro-life” part.
And therefore, many of them are voting for abortion “rights” in their states.
The pro-life side would need the vast majority of these “squishy middle” pro-lifers to vote against abortion rights initiatives in order for pro-life laws to win the day.
As a marketer, my concern is that we will be unable to move all 36% to the “illegal in all cases column” by using savvy messaging, executing an amazing political ground game, and spending massive amounts of money on advertising?
I don’t believe those tactics would bring a large enough number to our side.
Even so, I’m still very optimistic that we can massively reduce the number of abortions over time even if we don’t win a single one of the state abortion rights ballots.
And the exceedingly good news is that there is research that indicates that my optimism is not unwarranted, as long as we in the pro-life community are willing to do hard things.
More on that in the next article.
Brett
