Newsweek: Roe's Army Reloads

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Roe's Army Reloads

They've been dreading this moment for decades. How the pro-choice movement is readying for Roberts—and navigating a critical political crossroads.
By Debra Rosenberg
Newsweek

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Pro-choice activists like Keenan aren't shying away from the struggle—however uncertain their prospects. The Roberts fight is shaping up as a moment of truth for a movement that's struggled to find its footing in recent years. After losing the '04 election, some Democrats began pointing out that although the majority of voters say they're pro-choice—51 percent in a July CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll—the party wasn't connecting with them. Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Democratic think tank Third Way—run by the same strategists who moved the party to the center on the gun issue—is crafting new message and policy ideas to help Democrats appeal to Red State voters on abortion. And the pro-choice groups themselves have begun tinkering with their approach, even considering whether to abandon the framework of "choice" itself. "We've gotten a little far away from talking with people very much from the heart," admits Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood. The Roberts hearings could give the movement a chance to publicly test the new strategy.

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Democrats recently began realizing they were caught in the slide. Democratic Party chair Howard Dean met with members of Democrats for Life last month. Later the same day he told the party's national finance board that he didn't want to change the Democrats' fundamental position, but he did want to "reframe" it. "He said he wanted to take 'abortion' out of the political lexicon," recalls former DNC head Steve Grossman, who attended the meeting. Dean's already taken action: in April, he let pro-life Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan use DNC headquarters to announce his bill to cut abortions by 95 percent over 10 years.

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In one forthcoming issue brief obtained by NEWSWEEK, Third Way divides voters into abortion "polars"—those at each extreme, who believe it should be always legal or always illegal—and abortion "grays," those who believe abortion should be mostly legal or mostly illegal. Surprisingly, Third Way found that Democrats were losing among abortion grays, even though more of them leaned pro-choice. "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," says Third Way president Jon Cowan.

The pro-choice groups themselves have also been heatedly debating what to do. This spring, activists in New York and Seattle invited Berkeley linguist George Lakoff to speak about how to reframe the abortion issue. "They found that choice wasn't playing very well," says Lakoff, who's become an unofficial guru to beleaguered Democrats. He told the groups it was no wonder: "choice" came from a "consumerist" vocabulary, while "life" came from a moral one. In one of his more controversial suggestions, he advised the activists to reclaim the "life" issue by blaming Republicans for high U.S. infant-mortality rates and mercury pollution that can cause birth defects. "Basically what I'm saying is that conservatives are killing babies," he says. Lakoff advised focusing on reducing unwanted pregnancies and suggested that the groups talk about "personal freedom," a phrase intended to evoke unpopular government intrusion into matters like the Terri Schiavo case.

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URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8770089/site/newsweek/

[bobbieinok]

1. Newsweek working hard at depressing and demoralizing democrats????

[question everything]

2. That's the way I felt when I read it

Wonder how people here would react