If we hope to change election outcomes, we must change people’s minds well before the voting starts.
If we hope to change election outcomes, we must change people’s minds well before the voting starts.
I s the pro-life movement doomed to failure?
That’s the inevitable question since last Tuesday’s disastrous elections in Ohio and Virginia have dashed hopes for meaningful protections of mothers and unborn children in each state. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, seven states have put abortion to the voters, and in all seven, life lost — including in deep-red Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas. People who’ve devoted decades to the cause are wondering how, or even whether, to carry on.
Yet there’s still hope. Pro-life laws in many states have already saved tens of thousands of innocent lives. We can save even more, but only if we realize a critical truth. We need to win over the culture if we hope to start winning at the ballot box.
Historically, the pro-life movement hasn’t had to worry about the culture. While we’ve always cared about rallying more people to our side, success didn’t depend on it. In the Roe era, we were focused on fighting a legal battle, not a cultural one. We had to convince the Supreme Court to recognize its mistake and restore states’ ability to protect the most vulnerable members of society.
The legal fight required a specific strategy. We had to cultivate generations of lawyers who understood the Constitution, while electing presidents and senators who would put principled justices on the Supreme Court. We simultaneously had to publicly pressure the Court, most notably through the annual March for Life. That massive protest showed the justices that unilaterally mandating abortion nationwide subverted democracy and that repealing Roe would help heal the country.
The strategy worked, paving the way to Roe’s demise. Yet it’s clearly insufficient in a post-Roe America. Of course, we still need principled jurists, pro-life elected officials, and well-attended rallies such as the March for Life. We also need the kind of grassroots infrastructure that gets pro-life voters to show up in force on Election Day. But as Tuesday’s elections made painfully clear, large numbers of Americans currently support abortion in some form or fashion. Their minds are made up well before they get to the ballot box. If we hope to change election outcomes, we must change people’s minds well before the voting starts.
This is the great challenge facing the pro-life movement. We need to convince far more Americans that abortion is wrong. We need to make them see the humanity of the unborn child — and the inhumane nature of taking an unborn child’s life. Driving this kind of cultural change will be harder than anything the pro-life movement has done to date. But if we don’t put in the work and invest the resources, we have little chance of moving our cause forward and protecting more mothers’ children.
The new watchword of our movement must be innovation. We need to build new grassroots groups that are laser-focused on educating Americans about what abortion does, not only to babies, but to their moms. A stunning 75 percent of the women most likely to get an abortion change their mind when they see an ultrasound at a pregnancy resource center. That’s why I just donated three ultrasound machines to pregnancy centers in Napa Valley. And we should look for new ways to show parents what their child looks like, leveraging all of modern technology and communication.
On that note, we need to meet Americans where they are in the 21st century. That means ditching mailers, which get trashed, and television ads, which get ignored. We need to flood TikTok, Snapchat, and other social-media platforms, place paid content in video games, and embrace new platforms and means of communication.
And we have to stop framing life only as a religious issue. In our increasingly secular society, the effect of appeals to faith will be limited. Science and reason can also be compelling, especially as technology illuminates the beauty of unborn life. And we can also appeal to America’s principles. At a time of widespread concern about racial equality and individual freedom, we have to compassionately make clear that abortion, like slavery before it, treats human beings as disposable property.
Where possible, we should get public policy to support a culture shift. The law can be a powerful tool for shaping people’s minds, especially if it confronts them with the facts. In the same way that states and cities promote wearing seatbelts and warn against drunk driving, they could easily inform people about the developmental stages of unborn children and the murderous practices that abortion entails. Yet we can’t make the mistake of thinking that such laws are enough. Shaping culture from the bottom up, through ongoing private action, will always be more effective than top-down public policy.
We must be happy warriors, especially since reorienting the pro-life movement for a sustained cultural campaign can’t happen overnight. It will take years, perhaps decades, and in that time, voters are likely to expand abortion in more states. But the sooner we start, the sooner we’ll reach the day when Americans’ hearts and minds turn toward life. Fifty years ago, abortion’s defenders told us that Roe v. Wade would never be repealed. Now they say Americans will never stop voting to protect abortion. We proved them wrong once, and we can yet prove that Americans will ultimately support the right to life.