Abortion: How to Begin to Win

One of the great mysteries in most polling on abortion is the small percentage of those surveyed who are fully committed to either a pro-life or pro-choice position.

One study of swing states across the country found that only 31% of adult Americans said they put a stake in the ground on one viewpoint or another, with the balance being somewhere in the middle.  

It doesn’t make sense not to have your mind made up on abortion—the life developing in the womb is either a human being deserving of protection or it’s not.

But four decades in the branding business have taught me that the decisions people make are not always sensible. We who value life are losing at the ballot box because we presume what’s going on in the minds of abortion-vulnerable women is what matters, rather than what’s happening in their guts. That’s where the battle is raging.

What appears to be driving a lot of women’s thinking is a feeling—a raw, primal, and often subconscious sense of unease, what novelist and pop culture commentator Kat Rosenfield describes as “a nightmarish state of perpetual physical vulnerability.”

That’s why, when given a binary choice of outlawing abortion entirely or making it legal up to birth, even many who lean pro-life choose the latter. Though their position isn’t morally justifiable, it is understandable.

Women are fearful for themselves, for their daughters, and for their granddaughters. They’re anxious in ways they can articulate and in ways they can’t.

They’re continually disturbed—not in an adrenaline-inducing state of conscious fright, but in a dull, unrelenting apprehension about what might happen: “I am against abortion, but what if it happens to me?”

That may never have crossed the frontal lobe of many women, but it’s a question that can lurk in the back of their minds like other conflicting thoughts we all have as human beings.

“I would never kill someone—unless my family was threatened. I would never steal a loaf of bread—unless my children were starving. I would never want my daughter to have an abortion—unless … ”

This is the emotional context underlying any debate about abortion. Women believe they must protect themselves and those they love—from criminals, yes, but more commonly from men who’ve let them down. From deadbeats and slackers. From cowards. From men who would abandon them; not only those who have, but those who might. Even if it hasn’t happened to them personally, it’s enough that it could happen potentially.

Consider a twisted yet compelling video in which a woman pens a letter to her deceased father.

“If some psycho was dead set on having a baby with me,” she says, “he literally could. Dad, that scares me. It really scares me. What the hell is happening?”

She goes on to say: “I know you understand. And I also know if you were here, you would [vote for Democrats] too. Because you’ve always done everything to protect me. And I have to protect myself.”

How did we get here? It didn’t happen overnight.

Over the past several decades, what it means to be a man has been under continual assault in America. Militant feminism increasingly has made masculinity a byword, resulting in two generations of men who have lost their way.

That’s not to indict every man—far from it. But too many have relinquished their roles as providers and protectors, instead indulging their base desires, taking advantage of women’s so-called sexual freedom, or simply giving in to defeatism.

Chivalry isn’t dead, but it has become little more than a curiosity.

Because this is a widespread, hydra-headed sociocultural issue, it doesn’t avail itself of simple political solutions. But those who value a child’s life from conception must no longer assume the answer lies in merely sharpening arguments; there’s no debating with dread.

We must recognize the current reality and begin to address the root issue: Men are the reason women are afraid.

This is fertile ground on which the life-affirming may create resonant, emotional messaging every bit as compelling as the fearmongering at which the Left is so adept. And it can provide those who are running for office what, in recent cycles, they’ve desperately lacked: a way of going on offense.

Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, candidates on the Right largely have been frozen on the abortion issue, unable to dodge it but afraid to take it on.

Equivocation, however, doesn’t win votes (and more often loses them). Rather than soft-pedaling their views on the sanctity of life, conservative candidates should step into them on behalf of the mother as well as the child. There are a variety of ways of doing so.

Candidates can rhetorically go after cowards who selfishly use and abuse women. They can advocate stronger laws to stop predators more effectively, from abusive husbands to sex traffickers to dangerous illegal aliens.

They can work to increase the certainty and severity of penalties for sex offenders. They can vow to hold men financially accountable for their offspring from the moment of conception.

And they can use the power of the bully pulpit to exhort deadbeat dads to embrace accountability, encourage basement boys to take responsibility, and take to task today’s so-called alpha males for their abdication of true manhood.

It takes two to tango, as they say, and last I checked pregnancy was 100% man-caused. Allowing it to be framed as a women’s issue is just another symptom of the problem—men have gotten off too easy.

Recognizing the predicament into which they’ve put women won’t, by itself, make women feel entirely safe. But it’s a starting point that likely would be welcomed by people from across the political spectrum.

Perhaps it would encourage just enough of them no longer to feel they have to vote for a ghastly escape hatch. In a swing district, that could make all the difference.

Times change, issues evolve, and political winds continually shift, but some things are immutable. The more men live up to their calling as men, the more women will embrace their instinct to nurture and protect those who can’t protect themselves.

And the more children will be saved from the scourge of our time.

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