And so they need to develop a new strategy to fight back.
One activist by the name of Mary Ann Castle describes one strategy used in the Southern and Western US in a paper she has written for a journal called Reproductive Health. The operation has been underway since 2008, but the author deliberately omits the names of the groups and people involved in this operation, for fear that if they were to be discovered, their efforts would be sabotaged.
The author's main idea is that poor-choice activists have to create new networks and constituencies in order to fight back the Christian Right/Corporate hegemony.
So what they do is hire a bunch of organizers in each local area. Their goal is to get people to come to understanding, on their own, their own "oppression". The job of these sympathetic local volunteers is to link up with local organizations and identify "unmet needs" for women. The targeted population is mainly rural and marginalized women.
She says that the emphasis would be on promoting reproductive healthcare. The idea is that if they pushed abortion, people would recoil at the initiative, so the agenda is couched in "health care" language. This would "normalize" abortion and get women to empathize with other women (because so-cons are completely unable to empathize) and to push the idea of the "collective" rights of women.
Meanwhile, while this is going on, these groups would ally with other groups, like teen pregnancy programs, homeless shelters, domestic abuse shelters, pharmacies, etc to co-ordinate action.
Once these coalitions are built:
The next step in this type of work must be to encourage new allies to participate in coalitions or networks engaged in political action. In creating diverse, new pro-female/pro-choice constituencies, partners must be meaningfully integrated into existing or newly created
progressive or reproductive health coalitions. When the newly involved agencies are ready, they must be helped to participate in progressive coalitions directed toward preventing the continued
slippage of women’s rights.
In other words, they have a secret agenda. Doesn't that sound a little like unions? Organizing with the nominal objective of protecting workers' rights, but really having an ulterior goal?
I bring this up because I think that the wider American pro-life movement might want to learn what's going on. It might be going on in their community.
