The days of sadness since the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade case. Wade, I’ve been annoyed for a while by the new documentary “Battleground”. Many of the films, which were recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, included abortion, including Susan B. Anthony Prolife America’s president Marjorie Dannenfelser and student president Christan Hawkins for American students. I am following a female leader of the opposition movement. .. These are not the people who regularly stand outside the abortion clinic that is harassing the patient. They are rather savvy lobbyists and organizers, and documentaries are part of the window about how they won.
In a scene I’ve visited many times, there’s a Students for Life training session on “How to change your mind about abortion online,” and group members learn how to get young pro-choice people into discussion in a comment thread. I was afraid. Hawkins said there were 105,000 conversations.
Cynthia Lowen, director of “Battleground”, was impressed by activist’s “strategy to enter the environment and place where young, usually pro-choice people are online and offline” and tried to create “doubt”. He said he was. About their position. “
This is quite different from what I saw in the pro-choice movement. In the pro-choice movement, activists often act as if those who disagree with everything are not worth the involvement. (Last week, NARAL Tweet“If your feminism does not understand how anti-trans policies affect BIPOC people, especially black trans women and girls, disproportionately, it is not feminism.”) Opposition to abortion In the aftermath of the catastrophic victory of the movement, it is worth asking us what we can do to learn from their tactics.
Obviously, the anti-abortion movement is not convinced anywhere near the majority of Americans. Rho’s death is in favor of three Supreme Court judges appointed by the president who lost the popularity vote. According to a CBS / News YouGov poll conducted after the ruling, 59% of Americans and 67% of women oppose this.
The Senate is unable to codify minimal reproductive rights due to filibuster, which gives a small number of conservatives a veto over many of the country’s policy decisions. In states like Wisconsin, the legislature is so gerrymandering that it takes more than half of the popularity polls to revoke the abortion ban. The right pretends to bring abortion back to the democratic process by ending Rho, but the end of Rho was made possible by the erosion of democracy.
But it should not blind us to the success of the anti-abortion movement, which has been organized for almost 50 years to take us to this moment. Those state-level gerrymanders didn’t just happen. As the New York Times reported, they were made possible by the 2010 Republican wave, reducing the number of Democratic-controlled state legislatures from 27 to 16. The law was intended to cut Roe.
The legal and political sectors of the anti-abortion movement were systematic and often took the time to bid until a friendly Supreme Court was established. As a corporate lawyer for the National Life Rights Commission, James Bopp opposed attempts to ban abortion altogether and feared that their refusal would only strengthen Law. Instead, as Irin Carmon reported in 2013, he focused on wedge issues such as 20-week abortion bans.
Meanwhile, grassroots abortionists remain relentless and often attract people for sociability reasons as much as ideology. In Creating Pro Life Activists, sociologist Jiad W. Manson discovered that many activists were ambiguous about abortion and even pro-choice before being invited to meetings and conferences. The movement welcomed them and the activist experience converted them. Similarly, one of Lowen’s interviewees said he did not oppose abortion until he tagged the march for life with his college friends. She later went to work for Students for Life.
I am worried that some abortion activists may be inspired by the most confrontational anti-abortion forces and learn the wrong lessons from the victory of their enemies. A series of apparent arson at an abortion crisis pregnancy center mimics years of pro-life attacks at an abortion clinic. (Be mercilessly, there were no arson injuries so far.) Protesters killed his children before the assassination of Buffalo abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1998. I took him to an elementary school. Recently, a gloomy pro-choice outfit called Ruth Sented Ass hinted at doing something similar to Amy Coney Barrett’s children of justice, and tweeted about the school they attend.
In addition to being immoral, these tactics suggest a misunderstanding of how the anti-abortion movement reached this point. Terrorism against abortion correlates with greater support for the right to abortion and is detrimental to political campaigns that reverse Law. The campaign became popular because of the decades-long movement that took decades to master the essence of American politics, despite decades of failure and disappointment.
This does not simply mean “vote stronger”. It means constantly competing for power at all levels, including local elections, judicial choices, and administrative rulemaking. It means drawing people into the community and making them look rewarding rather than exhausting the ongoing struggle.
Abortion opponents have pushed us into the nightmare of surveillance, coercion, and medical despair. They also showed us the difficult path from then on.