Ohio's Abortion Disgrace Needs to Be a Wakeup Call for New Pro-Life Strategies
The pro-life movement is overdue for an uncomfortable talk about our failures to change the culture.
Tuesday night saw a tragedy in Ohio, as voters decided 56% to 43% to pass a constitutional amendment transforming the Ohio Constitution into one of the most evil governing documents in America.
The amendment enshrines a “right” to make “personal reproductive” decisions “including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion,” which the state “shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against.”
In practice, this means all of Ohio’s current abortion bans, limits, and regulations will soon be rendered inoperable, including its six-week abortion ban based on fetal heartbeats, 20-week ban based on fetal pain, post-viability abortion ban, ban on abortions sought specifically to exterminate a child diagnosed with Down syndrome, ban on second-trimester dilation & evacuation (“dismemberment”) abortion methods, mandatory 24-hour waiting period and informed-consent standards, abortion pill safety regulations, restrictions on taxpayer funding of abortion, contraception, and fertility procedures; and parental involvement requirements for minors’ abortion, contraception, and sterilization decisions (as well as underage gender transitions).
Given the state of public opinion on abortion, it’s unlikely Ohioans support everything they just voted to do, or even fully appreciated that they were making it impossible to bring back any of these laws in the future. But they did it just the same. As with any such defeat, the losing side is assessing the usual technical factors, like being outspent and out-advertised. That’s all well and good, but the pro-life movement is also long overdue for a tough conversation on a more fundamental issue: its failure to move the culture in the right direction.
As we discussed in the wake of pro-lifers being scapegoated for the Republican Party’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms, abortion isn’t an issue Republican candidates need to fear, and the failed ex-president currently trying to make the Right less pro-life is no solution. But it is true that public opinion has been going in the wrong direction for some time now.
Part of that is still the fallout from the new status quo of overturning Roe v. Wade, but another major part is the lack of any real messaging plan for moving to the next phase of the battle, all while failing to deal with the Left’s ongoing poisoning of the culture through the institutions it occupies. One of the best pieces on the situation so far comes from Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine:
The pro-abortion side is not as wide as the media makes it seem, but it is deep. These days there are fewer single issue pro-life voters than single issue pro-abortion voters. And that is a factor of the decline of religion. There are more passionate pro-abortion people in many states than there are passionate pro-life people. A whole lot of young women have been groomed by shows like Handmaid’s Tale and media propaganda that they’re one vote away from being doomed by a worst case scenario pregnancy. The pro-life movement has made efforts to reach them, but it’s hard.
There’s also a trend line.
Conservatives have lost decisively on most sexual morality issues except abortion until now. (The transgender issue may prove to be another exception, but the jury is still out on that.) The abortion except was based on the ability of conservatives to make the one argument they had trouble making in other instances: whom does it hurt.
The future of the movement rests on that argument.
Morality has imploded. Reviving it is crucial, but there are no easy answers.
So how do pro-lifers successfully navigate the culture’s current whims while working to transform them? For starters, by following the basic advice we previously discussed here and here: find solid candidates who will be pro-life once in office but know how to appeal to voters with messaging focused on their most immediate problems and concerns; work to de-propagandize future generations with things like real embryology in science education; and train officeholders so that when the subject does turn to abortion, they can level with the public about what they believe, where they differ, and what their positions do and don’t mean in a way that earns their trust and respect.
A few words of elaboration on some of these points. Regarding pro-life candidates who focus on kitchen table appeal, Republicans have always struggled to figure out that the same platitudes about tax cuts only get you so far; you need to make people’s lives tangibly better in immediate, obvious ways to counteract the myriad ways Democrats effectively bribe people for votes (this insight was part of Donald Trump’s theoretical appeal for about five minutes, before it became clear that all he really meant by that was clumsy attempts to out-lib liberals). But when you find a candidate who has figured it out, it turns out he can get away with a lot of hardcore conservatism and still be rewarded by the electorate. Associating pro-life values with government that makes the people’s lives better and doesn’t turn their communities into The Handmaid’s Tale won’t magically flip them, but it will contribute to defanging the abortion lobby’s fearmongering over the long term.
This is also why pro-lifers engaged in the political arena need to be politically savvy about the full range of conservative issues beyond simply figuring out who’s strongest on abortion and calling it a day. Case in point: in my home state of Wisconsin, Pro-Life Wisconsin and Wisconsin Family Action both endorsed state Supreme Court candidate Daniel Kelly due to his perceived strength on abortion. Considering the fact that the other conservative candidate, Jennifer Dorow, also opposed a judicial “right” to abortion anyway, perhaps some consideration should have been given to the fact that he had lost his previous Supreme Court race by ten points.
As for embryology education, pro-lifers can’t just require some new textbooks or pamphlets and call it a day. Pro-lifers also need to get involved in local school board and superintendent races, to ensure like-minded people are monitoring teachers and administrators for proper implementation of new content, and study what the right-to-work movement has to say about reining in the malign influence of teachers’ unions. Further, pro-life education needs to be part of a broader, multi-front campaign to get states to follow Florida’s lead in reining in their university systems and dismantling government incentives for corporate wokeness, which also pumps pro-abortion reinforcement into the culture. Again, advancing the pro-life cause requires engagement on issues beyond just abortion.
Finally, and perhaps most uncomfortably, the pro-life movement needs to bring some attention and heat on churches across the country of every denomination that either aren’t pulling their weight for or are actively harming the cause, whether because they’ve chickened out, sold out, or are shot through with liberal “Christians.” Even the ones who are stepping up seem not to be getting the necessary results—to its credit, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati directed every parish under its purview to play a recorded message directing the faithful to vote against the amendment. Yet only 35% of Hamilton County voters did so. For whatever reason, many churches’ flocks seem not to have internalized that opposing the slaughter of God’s children isn’t optional if they want to be spared eternal damnation.
Personally, I’ve long found myself wondering if tax-exempt status for religious institutions isn’t a net negative after all, simply because of the incentives it creates for religious leaders to dance around or keep quiet about moral imperatives they should be loudest about. Indeed, what is the value of organized religion to a community (as distinct from religion’s immense value to the individual) if it does not move the community to do good and reject evil? But if nothing else, pro-lifers need to do a better job of impressing on problem churches that not doing their part for life has consequences for their memberships and donations.
Of course, all of this will be purely academic if America gets transformed into a permanent, one-party hellscape because we nominated the wrong man for president next year....