In the grief-choked days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I’ve been haunted by a moment from the new documentary “Battleground.” Much of the film, which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows female leaders of the anti-abortion movement, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. These aren’t the people regularly standing outside of abortion clinics harassing patients. They are, in fact, skilled lobbyists and organizers. The documentary is part of a window into how and why they won.
The scene I keep revisiting features a Students for Life training session about “how you can change minds about abortion online,” in which members of the group learned how to draw young pro-choice people into debate in comment threads. Hawkins said they’d had 105,000 conversations.
Cynthia Lowen, the director of “Battleground,” told me she was struck by the activists’ “strategy to get into environments and places, online and offline, where young, typically pro-choice people are,” and to try to create “doubts about their position.”
This is quite different from what I’ve seen in the pro-choice movement, where activists frequently act as if those who don’t agree with them on everything aren’t worth engaging with. (Last week NARAL tweeted, “If your feminism doesn’t understand how anti-trans policies disproportionately impact BIPOC folks, particularly Black trans women and girls, it’s not feminism.”) In the aftermath of the anti-abortion movement’s catastrophic victory, it’s worth asking what we can learn from their tactics.
Obviously, the anti-abortion movement hasn’t convinced anywhere near a majority of Americans. Roe’s death comes courtesy of three Supreme Court justices appointed by a president who lost the popular vote. According to a CBS/News YouGov poll taken after the ruling, 59 percent of Americans — and 67 percent of women — disapprove of it.
The Senate can’t codify minimal reproductive rights because of the filibuster, which gives a minority of conservatives veto power over much of national policymaking. Wisconsin is one of the states where legislatures are so gerrymandered it will not take a majority of the people to repeal abortion bans. The right pretends that ending Roe returns abortion to the democratic process, but Roe’s demise was made possible by democracy’s erosion.
That shouldn’t blind us, however, to the success of the anti-abortion movement, which has organized for almost 50 years to bring us to this moment. Those state-level gerrymanders didn’t just happen. The New York Times reported that they were possible due to the 2010 Republican Wave, which saw the number of state legislatures held by Democrats drop from 27 to 16. Redistricting was used by Republicans to consolidate their power, even as they passed a slew of state laws to undermine Roe.
The legal and political wings were meticulous in their pursuit of an anti-abortion movement. They often waited until they could get a friendly Supreme Court in order to be able to do so. James Bopp, the general counsel of National Right to Life Committee was opposed to any attempts to ban abortion, fearing that Roe would be strengthened by their rejection. Instead, he focused on wedge issues such as 20-week abortion bans, as Irin Carrmon reported in 2013.
Despite this, grass-roots pro-choice abortion opponents have not relented. They continue to draw people in for their sociability, as well as ideology. In “The Making of Pro-Life Activists,” the sociologist Ziad W. Munson found that many activists had been ambivalent about abortion, or even pro-choice, before being invited to a rally or meeting. They were welcomed by the movement and converted by the experience of activism. Similarly, one of Lowen’s interviewees said she wasn’t opposed to abortion until she tagged along to the March for Life with some college friends. Later, she worked for Students for Life.
I fear that some abortion-rights activists are learning the wrong lessons from their enemies’ triumph, taking inspiration from the most confrontational anti-abortion forces. A string of arsons at anti–abortion crisis pregnancy centres mimic years of prolife attacks on abortion clinics. (So far, mercifully, the arsons haven’t caused any injuries.) Protesters followed Dr. Barnett Slepian’s children to school before he was assassinated. Ruth Sent Us, a shadowy prochoice group, tweeted about the school that Justice Amy Coney Barrett attended.
These tactics are not only morally wrong, but they also reflect a misinterpretation about how the anti-abortion movements got to this point. Anti-abortion terrorism has been linked to greater support for abortion rights, thereby harming the political campaign against Roe. The movement that spent decades studying American politics and persisting despite years filled with failure and disappointment, was the reason that this campaign prevailed.
This doesn’t just mean “vote harder.” It means contesting every level of power, all the time, including local elections, judicial selections and administrative rule-making. It is about making continuous struggle rewarding, rather than exhausting.
Abortion opponents have forced abortion opponents into a nightmare world that involves surveillance, coercion, medical desperation, and coercion. They’ve also shown us the arduous path out of it.
Source: NY Times
