Pro-abortion groups realize ‘choice’ isn't selling in U.S. politics

NEW YORK, N.Y. — Since the Democratic defeat in the last election, the party's spin doctors have been crafting a new approach to abortion to get their abortion rights message across, Life Site News, an online news agency reported.

Democratic think tank, the Third Way, billing itself as a "strategy center for progressives" attempting to reverse the social tide in the United States toward traditional values, said that the Democrat party and abortion groups need to change their rhetoric.

After its success in moving the Democrats to the center on gun control, the think tank is now focusing on abortion with "a series of briefing papers on abortion, with policy and messaging that will help progressives win the war of ideas."

Newsweek magazine obtained a brief from the Third Way that shows the country is locked into polarized positions, but that most of the public falls into the undecided category which the brief calls, "grays."

"We've now gotten locked in a frame and policies for 30 years that speak to the polars but don't speak to the grays," said Third Way president Jon Cowan.

With the retirement of the key swing voter on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, the aging forces of abortion support in the United States are gearing up for a new fight. This second stage will be one in which the subtleties of linguistic manipulation will be a key weapon.

This spring, Newsweek reported, Berkeley linguist George Lakoff addressed abortion activists in Seattle on the issue of spin. Lakoff said that the "choice" rhetoric was backfiring and failing to address the real issue.

"They found that choice wasn't playing very well," Lakoff said to Newsweek.

He told the groups that their problem was a basic misunderstanding of the issue. "Choice," he said, came from a "consumerist" vocabulary, while "life" came from a moral one.

Lakeoff's strategy, to turn the argument around and attempt to pin the deaths of unborn children on the Republican economic policies, sold well with one Democrat representative. In July, Louise Slaughter made a speech in which she decried the "pollution" of "unborn babies," a tirade that struck pro-life observers as a bizarre contradiction considering her 100 percent pro-abortion rating from NARAL, the leading abortion rights advocacy group.

Softening heart?
Even Planned Parenthood appears to be moving away from its militant image.

"We've gotten a little far away from talking with people very much from the heart," admits Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood.

Last month, DNC party chairman Howard Dean met with the group, Democrats for Life, an organization of Democrats attempting to move the party away from its support of abortion while returning it to its pre-1960's roots. Dean said he wanted to "reframe" the issue to make it more palatable.

"He said he wanted to take 'abortion' out of the political lexicon," former DNC head Steve Grossman said.

Lakoff, whom Newsweek called an "unofficial guru to beleaguered Democrats," suggested that the new approach to abortion should be on "reducing unwanted pregnancies" and using the phrase "personal freedom."

This suggestion has been eagerly adopted by NARAL, which introduced its new advertising strategy, using the phrase, " 'culture of freedom and responsibility'… soundly beats 'culture of life.' "

Though the phrase, "Culture of Death," coined by the late Pope John Paul II has apparently hurt the abortion cause, the failure of much of the Catholic Church establishment in North America to support its own teaching on artificial birth control may end up biting the pro-life movement.

NARAL pollster, Celinda Lake, said that 'prevention' by means of the birth control and abortifacient morning after pills sold well with the public in reducing abortion rates.

LifeSiteNews.com
Published by Keener Communications Group, September 2005

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