Right-Wing Causes Can Learn a Lot From the Pro-Life Movement’s Formula for Success

It’s not supposed to work this way for patriots. Only liberals are supposed to get huge political wins through long campaigns of institutional takeover. Conservative victories are supposed to be exclusively rearguard actions, delaying the inevitable, but always doomed to eventual defeat.

But on Friday, that playbook went out the window. Forty-nine and a half years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the U.S. nationwide, the Supreme Court reversed itself. In the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Justice Samuel Alito announced that Roe was wrong from the day it was decided:

Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.

In one stroke of the pen, five decades of abortion jurisprudence was undone. Abortion is once again an issue for states to decide on their own.

This was a remarkable victory, and adding details only underscores just how remarkable. Public opinion on abortion has been stable for decades. It’s fairly clear there was no overwhelming public support for overturning Roe, or for banning abortion more generally. Even more importantly, elite opinion in the United States is decisively pro-abortion.  Dobbs was the rare right-of-center case where a smaller but more passionate and committed political faction carried the day.

This wasn’t a fluke or a random twist of fate. Alito’s ruling was the byproduct of decades of effort by the pro-life movement. That movement operates very differently from other conservative and populist political causes in America, so the fact that it has won so many victories, and just won its biggest one yet, deserves close attention. All patriotic Americans looking to secure long-term political victories should be looking to the pro-life movement for lessons on how to succeed.

Here are some lessons that everybody could learn from the pro-lifers’ success.

1. You have to have women involved. 

Source: March for Life Instagram

In contrast to basically every other right-of-center political movement, and in defiance of the large gender gap in American politics, the pro-life movement has long been a very feminine movement. The head of the National Right to Life Committee is a woman and has been since 1991. A woman, Nellie Gray, founded the March for Life, and the group is still led by a woman today. Live Action was founded by Lila Rose when she was just 15. Rank-and-file anti-abortion demonstrators are heavily female; it’s likely that the issue is the single most popular one for women getting involved in right-of-center politics.

One reason this matters is obvious: America is a democracy, and women are a majority of the electorate. But it’s also far more than that. Having a large mass of women within a political movement confers advantages that are missing in a movement that is too predominantly male.

For one, people generally like women (especially cute young women or loveable motherly types), or at least don’t like being nasty to them. There’s a reason that, as some say, “women’s tears” perform so well in the marketplace of ideas. When a lot of women turn out to protest or to lobby a lawmaker, they’re a lot less likely to face police resistance, and a lot more likely to have lawmakers looking to please them.

Substantial female involvement also means that anti-abortion activism is a full-blown family affair. Pro-life moms raise their kids to be pro-life too.

Source: March for Life Facebook

For millions of Americans, anti-abortion campaigning is a major part of life, has been as long as they can remember, and will remain that way year in and year out. It is not a passing concern ginned up by the news cycle or the passing actions of the current presidential administration.

There are internal advantages too. Consider this photo of a Louisiana Right to Life demonstration held last month.

Source

The demonstration features both men and women, but if one looks closely it becomes clear that the vast majority of people in the photo are women. Women are more inclined to “do the work” of day-to-day activism drudgery. Since women are more likely to work part-time, have flexible hours, or not work at all, they have more likely to time to commit to activism. They turn out for protests. They call and visit lawmakers’ offices to lobby them on bills.  Much like wives who will never forget the details of an argument five years ago, pro-life women will never forget which lawmakers stayed loyal to the cause, and which ones disappointed them.

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About the Author: NC Scout

NC Scout is the nom de guerre of a former Infantry Scout and Sergeant in one of the Army’s best Reconnaissance Units. He has combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He teaches a series of courses focusing on small unit skills rarely if ever taught anywhere else in the prepping and survival field, including his RTO Course which focuses on small unit communications. In his free time he is an avid hunter, bushcrafter, writer, long range shooter, prepper, amateur radio operator and Libertarian activist. He can be contacted at [email protected] or via his blog at brushbeater.wordpress.com .

5 Comments

  1. Spingehra July 1, 2022 at 10:45

    Hail the ladies that put decades of effort into this cause.
    Got a chuckle from “much like wives who will never forget” lol.
    A truism of my wife’s ” nagging gets results”
    I am blessed far more than I deserve.

  2. vagabond July 1, 2022 at 11:00

    LOTS in here, but quickly (patients waiting) – nothing really happened at the local level until the moms found out about CRT and all the LGBT agenda and got involved and went to war with school boards. Only then did many more men step up. And not blaming men: for decades being male is to be ignored, ridiculed, discounted, challenged, dismissed, and found pre-emptively guilty at every turn. So were to men have led the charge would have been defeat before first shot was fired.

    But only then did an honest mother’s instinct activate.

    However, most of the moms were at least a decade late; too much ignorance, too much competing with other moms to have super kids, too much time at Starbucks. And the ones that sexualize MY kids early on – off the bridge with them like the proverbial stray cat and let the cat out of the bag to make more room.

    However, ‘the hand that rocks the cradle” apparently still can rule the world.

  3. no July 1, 2022 at 14:02

    If the strategy is to win by appeals to emotion and sympathy then we win the battle to lose the war. We don’t need more feminine “leadership”. That’s one of the ways we got here and a specific time-tested strategy of the Talmuds for subversion and weakening. Men need to sack up and re-take control of the situation. That’s not to say that women don’t have a place in this. It’s to say men need to stand up and lead again.

    • NC Scout July 1, 2022 at 14:41

      Wanna know how everyone knows you’re full of shit?

  4. Dan July 1, 2022 at 22:23

    Thanks for posting this article; good stuff. In my view the women leading this effort demonstrated the key personal attribute which led to the recent Supreme Court decision: stamina. What they did not do is also instructive; for the most part, they did not engage in demonizing the opposition. For sure we men can learn something from them.

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