For data-driven pro-lifers, it is no exaggeration to say that our post-Roe v. Wade reality in the United States has been a disaster. Every single pro-life ballot measure has failed while every pro-choice ballot measure has passed. Bad losses even in deep red states like Kansas, Montana, and Kentucky suggest that something more fundamental than partisanship is in play here.
Indeed, even in Ohio, where pro-life donors and activists actually got organized for the fight, they still lost a recent ballot measure by 14 points.
Sure, states like Texas and Florida currently have serious laws protecting prenatal justice. And good data suggest that these laws have saved some of the most vulnerable lives imaginable from terrible deaths.
But pro-choice advocates have used these laws to their advantage in the public debate over abortion, focusing the discussion on areas where pro-lifers are weakest. They almost gleefully file lawsuits on behalf of Texas women who they say need an abortion for health reasons. They aggressively promote even more ballot measures in favor of abortion rights, including in Florida where they recently got the necessary signatures to put one on this year's ballot.
Is the pro-choice side better funded and organized? Yup. Do most members of national and local media have a bias against pro-lifers? You betcha. Have many of the movement's political allies and donors gone limp in the face of mounting social pressure? Absolutely.
But this does not get the disorganized and fractious pro-life movement off the hook. Not least due to many leaders in the pro-life movement getting behind Donald Trump, it is now absurd to refer to young people as "the pro-life generation." We had good reasons to think this way from 2000 to 2006, when the General Social Survey found that young people were more anti-abortion than most adults. But that trend has now totally shifted, with an astonishing 64 percent of 18-34 year-olds saying that a woman should be able to get an abortion for any reason.
Gallup has found something similar. In 2002, 18-29 year-olds were evenly split between pro-life and pro-choice. Today, Gallup finds that these numbers have shifted to only 29 percent pro-life and 64 pro-choice. Furthermore, a CNN exit poll in Ohio found that only 23 percent of 18-29 years-olds voted pro-life in the referendum. Other polls suggest that young people who support abortion rights are extremely motivated to vote in future abortion ballot measures.
Pro-lifers must face a difficult fact: the game plan they deployed over the last few decades is on the verge of losing the culture.
Happily, however, the post-mortems I've seen after Ohio make it clear pro-lifers are ready to move in a different direction. With this fluid situation in mind, and building on an approach I've taken for many years, the short-term plan must be to back off laws which restrict abortion and focus almost entirely on women and mothers. We must center the good of women and mothers in everything we do.
As someone in his third decade of working within the pro-life movement, I am well aware that in even suggesting such a shift I run the risk of losing mainstream pro-lifers who will (rightly) claim that we have already centered women in many ways, mostly obviously via the women who lead all major pro-life organizations, and no serious pro-life movement can simply do away with prenatal justice for children.
In response, I would claim that we must do much, much better at centering women, and while justice requires that we must protect children equally under law, we can only do it in a sustainable way if we win the culture first. And winning the culture means an authentic movement to center women.
Here are three specific proposals for doing just that:
First, craft and insist upon model legislation which clarifies that a pregnant woman can always take actions which preserve her life—and ambiguous or complex cases should be resolved in ways which allow a woman and her physician to determine whether a pregnancy is genuinely life-threatening.
Second, insist on several layers of social protection for women and families, including affordable health care, child tax credits, paid family leave, flexible work hours, affordable child care, and prenatal child support. Happily, an initiative I helped lead saw many, many pro-life leaders sign a statement in support of precisely these policies.
Third, support women who are at risk for unwanted and even coerced abortions. Indeed, we should organize and fund our own referenda demanding that women who seek abortions be screened for intimate partner violence and other signs of coercion. Not least because pregnant women in the U.S. are more likely to die from homicide than they are of the leading obstetric causes of maternal death, like sepsis and high blood pressure disorders.
Significantly, while there are Republicans who support such measures, our pursuing them doesn't tie us to the Republican Party. Indeed, we can and should work with multiple parties in trying to achieve these goals. And, just to be direct about it, there is no need for pro-lifers to support Donald Trump in 2024.
Overturning Roe was necessary to create the possibility of achieving prenatal justice—something that clearly demands our focus in the future. But our focus right now must be on building the kind of culture which can actually support our pro-life vision for women and children of all ages, vulnerabilities, and levels of dependence.
Charles Camosy is Professor of Medical Humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine and Moral Theology Fellow at St. Joseph Seminary in New York.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Pro-Life Movement Needs Fundamentally New Approach
4
0
16.01.2024
For data-driven pro-lifers, it is no exaggeration to say that our post-Roe v. Wade reality in the United States has been a disaster. Every single pro-life ballot measure has failed while every pro-choice ballot measure has passed. Bad losses even in deep red states like Kansas, Montana, and Kentucky suggest that something more fundamental than partisanship is in play here.
Indeed, even in Ohio, where pro-life donors and activists actually got organized for the fight, they still lost a recent ballot measure by 14 points.
Sure, states like Texas and Florida currently have serious laws protecting prenatal justice. And good data suggest that these laws have saved some of the most vulnerable lives imaginable from terrible deaths.
But pro-choice advocates have used these laws to their advantage in the public debate over abortion, focusing the discussion on areas where pro-lifers are weakest. They almost gleefully file lawsuits on behalf of Texas women who they say need an abortion for health reasons. They aggressively promote even more ballot measures in favor of abortion rights, including in Florida where they recently got the necessary signatures to put one on this year's ballot.
Is the pro-choice side better funded and organized? Yup. Do most members of national and local media have a bias against pro-lifers? You betcha. Have many of the movement's political allies and donors gone limp in the face of mounting social pressure? Absolutely.
But........
© Newsweek
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
