Lord_Mike has pointed out a disturbing trend: "pro-life" people now outnumber "pro-choice" people. The responses to his post suggest several reasons, and one such reason is that a whole generation of kids (who are now between zero and 20) has been exposed to a lot of "pro-life" propaganda.
Many of those who say they are "pro-life" are young (and naive) people who think in sound bites. And the Right has had better sound bites than us for a long time.
As Lakoff points out in "Don't think of an elephant", how one frames the debate is crucially important. On most issues, for decades now, the Right has had a larger, better-funded, and better-organized propaganda machine than ours. And the kids from zero to 20 have been exposed to large doses of these sound bites.
This could be very bad for us. If a "pro-life" mindset becomes firmly entrenched by, say, age 15 or so, and will not yield to facts, logic, or any other force later in life, then the zero-to-20 year olds will be an entire "pro-life" generation.
Once Michael Moore finishes his documentary about how our current financial crisis is the result of both Republican deregulation and corporate greed, we really need him to make a pro-choice documentary. Call it "Unwanted", and include the information that economist Steven Levitt discusses in Freakonomics: there was a dramatic drop-off in violent crime in the 1990's, as a delayed result of allowing abortions in the 1960's and 1970's:
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In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years-the years during which young men enter their criminal prime-the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.
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Imagine if Progressives were seen as being "anti-juvenile-delinquency" and not as being "anti-life". Not only would "anti-juvenile-delinquency" be an accurate way to portray us (unlike "anti-life"), but it would be a label that would make us much more popular.
I only hope that the "'pro-life' generation" idea is not true, or that it can be cured fairly quickly. If not, then we have a long, tough fight ahead of us.
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