Planned Parenthood strategist goes rogue
Planned Parenthood executive VP Dawn Laguens (pictured above right) took Glover Park Group’s founding partner Carter Eskew (pictured below right) apart in a drippingly sarcastic August 22 Huffington Post piece, “Thanks for the lecture”:
In a recent Washington Post blog post… Eskew took the reproductive rights movement to task, and not a minute too soon by his watch. In his column, he explains that advocates for reproductive health are mired in “convoluted, poll-tested messaging” and “cannot win the debate as it is currently framed.” He probably imagines he’s doing us a favor, but he instead seems to be just tuning in to a conversation that’s literally happening all around him.
In his WashPo piece, Eskew basically concurred with me, without naming names, that pro-abortion messaging has become a hot mess:
Janet Harris says… people who support abortion rights need new language for expressing their advocacy. She couldn’t be more right, but from a pro-choice perspective, the current political dialogue is even worse than she documents.
For years, the pro-choice movement has been on the defensive, using more and more convoluted, poll-tested messaging to try to stand its ground….
The pro-choice side cannot win the debate as it is currently framed; it can achieve only small victories when the other side overreaches…. The reason pro-choice advocates can’t and won’t win is because they don’t have an affirmative argument, only a defensive one….
The problem is “choice” will never trump “life.” Choice is valuable, but life is precious. As long as there is no competing affirmative value for abortion, then life will always win.
Lately, there have been murmurings of new language presaging a new movement to affirm the true value of abortion…. But it remains abstract.
The “convoluted, poll-tested messaging” is of course, Planned Parenthood’s, the group which in 2013 rocked Abortion World by announcing it was abandoning the movement’s beloved self-descriptive term, ”pro-choice.”
Eskew obviously still likes “pro-choice” – note how often he used it in his piece.
The problem is Planned Parenthood actually hired Eskew’s firm to help formulate its “convoluted, poll-tested messaging,” or at the very least identify the weakness in using “pro-choice” terminology. Continued Laguens:
The reproductive justice movement… deserves the lion’s share of credit for articulating the weakness of the choice frame. Admittedly Planned Parenthood Action Fund was later to this party, and interestingly we worked with Eskew’s firm to help us name this in our own work.
In fact, Planned Parenthood has hired Glover Park Group, a “public relations, advertising, opinion research, and lobbying” firm, according to Wikipedia, for each of the last six years to lobby and strategize, for a total of $710,000.
So Eskew’s post is inexplicable, unless he’s on a hari kari mission.
Or perhaps Eskew just decided to be honest. Planned Parenthood’s decision to publicly dump “pro-choice” from its lexicon has resulted in chaos, particularly among groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America that boast the shunned term in their names.
Or perhaps Eskew was trying to back away from the race-relations nightmare Planned Parenthood launched within the movement by initially taking credit for the phrase, “reproductive justice,” which it is trialing as the new, cumbersome stand-in for the dreaded A-word. As Women of Color quickly reminded Planned Parenthood, they coined that term decades ago.
UPDATE 8/27, 9a: One late thought that occurs to me is Eskew may have opposed Planned Parenthood’s decision to abort “pro-choice” and was writing an “I told you so.”
Whatever, suffice it to say we can expect Planned Parenthood to abort Glover Park Group.
And the very public infighting between pro-abortion groups continues, much to pro-life delight.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
It is entertaining to watch the pro-bort activists struggle with their “framing” and their “message.” They are like prostitution brothels that offer “massages” and “lingerie models.” They are never going to have more than euphemisms.
But we must not be distracted. We have a positive message of care and love for mothers and children. We will need people, more donations and more charity to help women in need.
When Planned Parenthood is defunded of their $600 million per year, that money will not suddenly become available to help women and children. We have work to do!
They want to drop the choice thing as quickly as possible, because too many women and girls are choosing life. When they walk out of the Planned Parenthood clinic still pregnant, that’s lost money for PP. Obviously this choice thing is a money loser for them. It will take a while before women and girls forget that they have a choice and don’t have to submit to forced abortion. The sooner they drop the choice mantra, the sooner they can legally force women and girls (for their own good, of course) to have unwanted abortions, and get away with it legally. Then their cash resisters will go Kaching once again.
Yes, they have to be very careful how they frame “It’s raining,” while peeing on your leg.
The Late, Reformed Bernard Nathanson has told that he and fellow abortion advocate Lawrence Lader sat around devoting brain power to the messaging of abortion.
http://www.pregnantpause.org/abort/remember-naral.htm
“I remember laughing when we made those slogans up,” recalls Bernard Nathanson, M.D., co-founder of pro-abortion group NARAL, reminiscing about the early days of the pro-abortion movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s. “We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical.”
Self-euthanized abortion advocate Garrett Hardin recognized the task before him and his fellow culture-of-death fanatics as they strove to make abortion palatable. It took Hardin, a smart man, years to evolve the rhetoric we recognize now. This is reported in his book, “Stalking the Wild Taboo.” -This was a major accomplishment in demoting any cultural value if its support was gained from blind taboo.
It is too bad he opted to leave the planet before seeing incest work its way into common acceptance.
This is what it takes to make abortion palatable to society: smart people devoting themselves to figuring out complicated messaging.
Why not devote that energy to helping the moms and kids with their lives, instead? Like so many pro-life Christians I know?
My wife and I just spontaneously supported two struggling single moms with school supplies. Plus, since I hate bureaucracy so much, I just handed my kid’s principal $100 cash for whatever a kid in need or teacher in need might need here or there.
There is plenty of work to do, and plenty of resources, that will help these kids, rather than thinking of ways to make it palatable to kill them off. If we have no doubt about supporting tens of thousands of foreign kids stumbling across our southern border, it sure seems like we can help our own citizens. Let’ get to work.
All this makes me happy, happy, happy!
“Reproductive rights” as a buzzword for abortion is an old one that’s been around at least since the mid-1980s. They try to paint abortion as just one of a plethora of “reproductive rights” they champion. The trouble is that all of their “reproductive rights” are anti-reproduction. They argue for birth control, abortifacients, and abortion as “reproductive rights” but nary a word about anything that actually has to do with the right to give birth — which is, after all, what reproduction is about.
I’m told that abortion is a “reproductive right” because “it involves the reproductive organs.” By that logic the gas chamber is a “respiratory care facility” because it involves the respiratory organs!
We need to make sure we seize on “reproductive rights” as:
1. The right to adequate prenatal care.
2. The right to adequate gynecological care.
3. The right to full disclosure of reproductive options.
4. The right to make and follow a birth plan.
5. The right to give birth in the least restrictive environment.
6. The right to mental health when pregnant. (There is no mental health disorder that can be “treated” with abortion, yet doctors perform abortions for women who are suffering from depression, adjustment disorder, and anxiety without doing a proper diagnosis and developing the same treatment plan a non-pregnant woman would be entitled to.)
7. The right to specialized and high-risk obstetric care. (Too many doctors just refer for an abortion.)
8. The right to perinatal hospice. (Too many doctors just push for abortion.)
If we vocally advocate these reproductive rights, we can fix in the public mind that the abortion-rights movement is PURELY an abortion-rights movement that does not advocate for any actual reproductive rights.
Thanks very much Christina for one of the best analysis that I’ve ever read. We have heard about ‘reproductive rights’ for decades now, and because it sounds medical and technical abortion in these terms sound quasi-medical and get a pass. But the comparison with Nazi gas chambers is a remarkably apt one.
It seems to me that the direction in which the pro-aborts are heading is one that is the opposite of what the Catholic Church teaches in the “Seamless Garment” ideology promulgated by Cardinal Bernardin back in the 80’s.
On its face, there is nothing wrong the seamless garment, properly understood. In a nutshell it goes like this: all issues are linked, advancement in one area advances the whole thing and some issues take precedence over others.
The pro-aborts are attempting this, albeit in their own special way, with the increased use of the phrase “reproductive justice” which now means much more than abortion, they say, to include things that are on the periphery, like the right to a community in which you can raise your children without violence.
Wesley Smith tried to raise an alarm in First Things recently by saying that they are headed solely in a pro-abortion ONLY direction. Although some elements of the movement may be headed that way, the majority clearly are not.
For better or worse, it’s going to be a pro-abort/reproductive justice/seamless garment, whatever that may end up looking like.
I agree with Christina Dunigan’s analysis above that this would be a good time for us to hijack their phraseology in order to make sure “reproductive justice” includes things that actually, you know, help women who are pregnant etc. although I would tweak number 5 to say “the right to give birth in the environment of their choice.”
For an excellent review of what Cardinal Bernardin actually said about this, go to this link: http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/bernardinwade.html
Pfft. All this angst about the messaging. Too bad they don’t feel angst about the KILLING.
[…] Laguens’ piece attempting to defend Planned Parenthood’s transition away from “pro-choice” terminology included this absurd […]