WHY SD's REFERRED LAW 6 FAILED
Why did South Dakota’s anti-abortion Referred Law 6 fail? Was it too pro-life? No! It wasn’t pro-life enough. How can I say that when there wasn’t even an exception for rape or incest in the law? The flaw was not in the law but in the marketing. Vote Yes for Life lost when they decided their strategy was to cast the mother as the victim of abortion and not the child. So their misguided efforts could better be described as pro-woman and not pro-life. While women are certainly victims of abortion, the campaign disregarded the true victim of abortion and tried to get sympathy for the lesser victim.
So when they focused on the lesser victim, they had less moral authority. They must have been resigned to the fact that the undecided didn’t care about the baby and we can’t change their mind. There was a time in America when most people didn’t care about the fate of a slave. Yet when people finally realized the humanity and victimization of a whole group of people they did do the right thing. First by rescuing only a few through the Underground Railroad, which is where America is at in the abortion battle. Then next the Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom to all men, which will come for the babies with Roe V Wade's reversal. And today in America slavery is unthinkable, as I pray abortion will someday be.
When Vote Yes for Life cast the mother as the victim to be saved, they had a problem. What about rape and incest? They were teaching the voters to have sympathy for the mother so when these topics came up it would be cruel to their victim to force her to give birth to an unwanted child. How did they work around this problem? The pro-lifers produced a television ad that promoted the use of the plan-B pill and called it “among the best options”. How could a pro-life group get so confused? They promoted the wrong victim. Instead of depicting the mother as the victim they should have educated the public about the humanity and rights of the child, when rape and incest came up, the sympathy would rightly still be on the baby and people could see that violence toward a victim is not the solution to the problem. It is the problem.
So how do we as pro-lifers continue the fight? We must show America the true victim of abortion. Every ultrasound shown to a new mother and father chips away at the lie of abortion. Every 4-D ultrasound shown is like a sledgehammer to the foundation of their evil empire. Every beautiful pre-born picture or grizzly post abortion picture is like a wrecking ball to the lie that this baby is just a blob of tissue. The walls of abortion will not fall tomorrow, but they will fall if we stay focused on the true victim of abortion, the baby.
Fighting for the pre-born,
Jason Troyer
Director, Colorado Right to Life
Passionate advocacy for legal protection for all human life from biological beginning, through natural death.
I'm an Abolitionist!
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3 comments:
My own analysis is that while American pro-lifers have done a good job of convincing people abortion is morally wrong, I think they need to work on fomenting the opposition.
When I look at polling on abortion, what I notice is that those who strongly favour legalized abortion are constantly at about 30% in the polls, while those who strongly oppose it are usually at about 20%. What that says to me is that there are more poor-choicers who want legalized abortion more badly than there are pro-lifers who want it badly. It's a numbers game. The folks in the middle won't do a WHOLE lot about abortion, so the war is basically fought by those who feel strongly about it. Pro-lifers must increase their "strongly opposed" ranks and convince people it is their duty to DO SOMETHING.
You're absolutely right when you say that it's about the unborn child. But the rhetoric of the day does not favour him. We talk of it as the abortion issue. What's an abortion? In the popular mindset, it's a so-called operation used to get a woman out of a tough spot. It's something that helps the woman. The death of an unborn is unfortunate, but the costs must be weighed.
What pro-lifers must do is talk about EQUAL RIGHTS FOR UNBORN CHILDREN. This is a human rights crusade. With the "abortion" issue, female supremacists can skirt around the question of the humanity of the unborn child. I'm sure you've seen how feminists do not want to deal with that question.
When you assert EQUAL RIGHTS FOR UNBORN CHILDREN the rhetoric forces the female supremacists to deal with the issue of the status of the unborn child, and that makes them squirm. Did you see Amy Richards on the O'Reilley factor? She couldn't admit straight up that she thinks killing an unborn in the third trimester is morally okay. She doesn't have the courage of her convictions. Because even though people don't assert equality for the unborn, when their babies are in the womb, they treat them like persons.
Anyhow, sorry to be so wordy, but you're right that the ultimate focus has to be the unborn.
VoteYesForLife didn't ignore the baby. They let the mothers be the ones that addressed the issue. Abortion hurt them. Why did abortion hurt them? Because it killed their babies.
It's not dropping the message. It's changing the packaging.
People see the traditional prolifer packaging and they don't even listen to the message. They tune it out. But if they see a woman who is hurting, crying, begging them to spare others the pain she's endured, they are sympathetic and they want to hear what happened to make her so sad. When she says, "They lied to me, and I believed the lie, and I ended up killing my baby," they hear the message that we've been trying for over 30 years to get out. The package of the strident prolifer is one that they throw away. The package of the weeping post-abortion woman is the package they open. The message is the same: Abortion is wrong because it kills babies. Why not use the packaging that's gonna get the message into people's hearts?
I was jolted off the fence not by what abortion does to babies, but by the way abortionists treated the women. The lies. The betrayal. For some reason that jolted me. And I have little doubt that letting the women speak for a change will jolt a whole lot of other people.
I don't think you guys understand the South Dakota mindset. We have a live-and-let-live Libertarian streak with many people disliking the idea of the government telling us how to live our lives. Plus, a large portion of people in SD who think of themselves as pro-life want exceptions to rape, incest and the health of the mother.
That's why we saw a lot of pro-life people not supporting this abortion ban. It's not that they're pro-abortion, it's more that their beliefs are not quite the same as the national pro-life movment.
About mid-way through August, a poll was released showing more South Dakotans didn't support the ban than did. But of the undecided voters, most would have supported the ban if it included those exceptions. So Vote Yes for Life started working to convince voters that the ban did include those exceptions (when it really didn't). Their hopes rested on a part of the ban that said it was okay to use emergency contraception (like the morning-after pill) up until you can medically tell you're pregnant. From my understanding, the national pro-life groups would not support wording like that in a ban, and have actively tried to outlaw the morning-after pill.
So you have to be able to understand the voters' mind-set in situations like this and adjust accordingly. If the South Dakota legislature tries this ban again, it just might pass if it contains clear exceptions for rape, incest and health of the mother.
I hope this was helpful in understanding why South Dakotans voted against the abortion ban. God Bless and have a nice day!
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