It’s been just over two months since the Supreme Court’s 5-4 vote reversing Roe and sending the issue of abortion back to the states – and propelling abortion activists into full-fledged panic mode.
Earlier this summer, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced a bill that’s ironically called the “Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act” – legislation that’s supposedly going to address false advertising from pregnancy resource centers. The bill calls on the Federal Trade Commission to issue rules “prohibiting disinformation in the advertising of abortion services.”
Only these clinics don’t deceive women at all – they simply educate, inform, and ensure that mothers are aware of the full range of assistance that exists for them and their baby.
If there’s any “deception” it comes from the abortion lobby and abortion mills like Planned Parenthood. Rather than show mothers an ultrasound of their baby, they’ve been known to cover up the screens, lest the women see their child and decide to carry him or her to term. They try and frighten women into thinking having a child is somehow going to ruin them. They refuse to refer them to adoption clinics or organizations that exist to help single women manage an unexpected pregnancy.
My colleague Nicole Hunt, who writes for Focus on the Family’s Daily Citizen, and who has been deeply involved in the pro-life movement for decades, tells me:
“As a helpline volunteer for a pregnancy resource center, I was trained by the center to tell callers who were abortion-minded that while our organization doesn’t provide abortion services, we would be happy to meet with them to discuss all of their options. We were always honest about the services we provided and the ways we could help.”
History is always a good teacher – and watching and analyzing the Left’s hyperbolic reaction to the High Court’s constitutionally sound decision about life seems to be something straight from Saul Alinsky’s playbook, “Rules for Radicals.”
Just prior to his death in 1972, the Chicago-based community organizer put to paper his strategy for upending culture’s norms. It might be 50 years since Alinsky’s treatise first hit the streets, but that hasn’t stopped the Left from embracing and employing his tactics.
Consider some of Alinsky’s classic techniques:
Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Planned Parenthood claims “abortion services” comprise only three percent of their efforts. Yet, if that were true, why are clinics closing down where abortion is now illegal? They hide the real numbers – and in some states like California, never report them at all.
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
The Left loves to mock and malign those of us who consider all life sacred. We’re accused of being “in love” with the “fetus,” and they claim we care more about the child than the mother. They ridicule – and choose to ignore – all the wonderful work countless volunteers and pro-life champions have done for the last fifty years to help moms live into God’s will for their lives.
Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
As conservatives committed to preserving God’s design, we’re naturally going to be on the defensive. It’s good to be on the Lord’s side, but the relentless attacks can be wearisome.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Faced with the reality of an ultrasound image dispelling the lie that a baby is nothing more than a blob of tissue, abortion activists change the subject. A pregnant celebrity can refer to their “baby,” and the tabloids will report it – but in the next article decrying an “attack” on “abortion rights” the baby is now called a “fetus.”
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
This rule is the coup de grace of abortion activists. Senator Warren and Senator Menendez’s attacks on pregnancy resource centers is a perfect illustration of their use of the tactic. In falsely accusing these pro-life champions, they’re attempting to demonize the very people who stand ready to help the women abortion advocates are actually hurting by supporting abortion.
The abortion lobby likes to try and convince women that their only real option is to get an abortion, because that’s their business model. They make hundreds of millions of dollars for abortions – but zero for adoption referrals.
Abortion zealots like to call themselves “pro-choice” – but let’s be perfectly clear – the abortion industry isn’t “pro-choice” at all. If they were, they would encourage women to know all their options and make a decision that is best for them.
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