Planned Parenthood’s abortion “storytelling” tactic borrowed from LGBT playbook
The strategy of abortion “storytelling” – a tactic borrowed from LGBT activists – is that a person who has had an abortion talks about it openly and positively in order to elicit the empathy of listeners who might then be persuaded that abortion is normal and a good thing for women….
[T]he architect of the storytelling initiative is a gay political activist named Dave Fleischer, who moved to California in 2009 following the passage of Proposition 8 with the plan of helping the militant gay rights movement get its agenda moving.
Previously, Fleischer had worked for Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation to get out the minority vote in 2008….
Fleischer saw that personal storytelling could be applied to the abortion issue as well.
Observing that the pro-life movement had been successful, he said, “They’ve made people feel that to speak up and say something positive about abortion is something where you risk disapproval, then you’d be suggested to a certain amount of stigma. This is even truer around abortion than it is same-sex marriage.”
Fleischer took his strategy to Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, and had the LGBT Center manage its canvassing effort.
My hunch is,” he says, “talking about real lived experience is extraordinarily helpful in developing empathy and support.”
~ Breitbart News, May 15
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.
Secular Pro-Life wrote up a response to this a while back.
http://blog.secularprolife.org/2014/10/how-do-you-understand-someones-position.html
I hope you’ll read the whole thing, but if you don’t, the bottom line is that their premise– the idea that pro-lifers don’t know people who’ve had abortions– is ridiculous. Of COURSE we know people who’ve had abortions. That doesn’t erase the existence of preborn children.
The problem with their story telling is that there is one voice not heard from…the child. Yes, we know people who have had abortions…they are some of the hardest workers as converts in the pro life movement. As one commenter on JLS said in another post…it has been 27 years and I still grieve what I did. Sorry, their strategy does not hold up. Anytime, someone tries to justify abortion to me…I trot out the toddler. If you can convince me that you have a good reason for killing your toddler….
These people live in a surreal space, where evil can be good and fantasy can be reality.
Reality is that abortion is murder. The child is killed, and the mother is tricked (or fools herself) into being her child’s killer.
Then follows a lifetime of denial, or a lifetime of remorse. But the reality doesn’t go away. And the child never comes back.
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There were ancient, decadent societies who were built on prostitution and infanticide. Ancient Canaanites, Carthage, the rich class of ancient Rome. This is what these social engineers hope to replicate in our time.
Storytelling itself sounds like it is something that is not true. As in once upon a time ending with, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!”
“a tactic borrowed from LGBT activists”
No, it’s borrowed from… humanity. People have been attempting to emotionally sway people to their positions with personal tales forever. Aristotle defined it as pathos (if the story is intended to elicit sympathy or pity), and that was millenia ago. Another attempt to blame everything on LGBT people, it appears.
Anyway, I think it’s a strong tactic pro-lifers need to be aware of. People blow of facts and figures that don’t cater to their mindset all the time, but humans are emotional animals who connect to people deeply from their personal stories.
Exactly DLPL,
We were listening to abortion stories long before R v W. Definitely NOT something dreamed up by the LGBT people.
Its just an ages old tactic being recycled.
Jack, I don’t think the author was blaming the LGBT movement for anything. Rather, he was observing that abortion proponents are attempting to emulate the (incredibly successful) LGBT-rights movement with their new campaigns featuring personal stories. He’s not the only person that’s made the connection:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/03/22/why-is-the-gay-rights-movement-is-so-far-ahead-of-the-abortion-rights-movement/
And as noted above, Planned Parenthood recently did recruit a pro-abortion LGBT leader to help them promote abortion:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2014-10-06/how-do-you-change-someones-mind-about-abortion-tell-them-you-had-one
who might then be persuaded that abortion is normal and a good thing for women…. – I’d say reminded rather than persuaded.
I recall seeing a couple of nicely written anti-choice stories here a while back. Why were they created?
These people live in a surreal space, where evil can be good and fantasy can be reality. – you speak of fantasy being reality??
Reality is that abortion is murder. – well that’s not correct.
The child is killed, and the mother is tricked (or fools herself) into being her child’s killer. – nor is this.
Then follows a lifetime of denial, or a lifetime of remorse. – rarely. And everybody makes some sort of decision about something in life they may later regret.
But the reality doesn’t go away. – no, it doesn’t.
And the fetus never comes back. – that’s rather the point.
There were ancient, decadent societies who were built on prostitution and infanticide. Ancient Canaanites, Carthage, the rich class of ancient Rome. – that is not correct.
This is what these social engineers hope to replicate in our time. – another statement that bears zero resemblance to the real world!
What impresses me is that they are not showing the entire picture, just a portion of it. ^ Fantasy, like you, they are explicitly trying to show a distorted picture in order to present a disordered agenda. If this was not the case, they would not be so proud of their storybook / fairytale version of RU487(tele) abortions=feel same as non-chemically induced miscarriages and are equally physically painful. By the way, did I mention their telemed abortions feel the same as a miscarriage? They don’t tell us that, because they don’t care.
I am surprised the big PP’s haven’t been sued for false advertising.
Abortion isn’t wrong because I regret mine and other women do or don’t regret theirs.
Abortion is wrong because it takes the life of an innocent, fully alive and growing human being.
THAT is the central horrifying intent of every abortion.
The emotional narratives do not stand up to biological and scientific truth.
Now, we have the retraction of an article that appeared in Science and was propagated by other news outlets that supported the personal storytelling approach.
This American Life’s host Ira Glass writes:
“Last month we did a story about canvassers who’d invented a way to go door to door and, in a 22-minute conversation, change people’s minds on issues like same sex marriage and abortion rights. We did the story because there was solid scientific data published in the journal Science — proving that the canvassers were really having an effect. Yesterday one of the authors of that study, Donald Green, asked Science to retract the study. Some of the data gathered by his co-author seems to have been faked.”
“Ira just got off the phone with Dave Fleischer and Steve Deline at the Leadership Lab at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and they told him some incredible details.
Dave Fleischer told us that he now believes data was being fabricated from the beginning.”
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2015/05/more-strange-details-about-that-apparently-fabricated-study
Lies heaped upon lies.
MoJoanne: “Dave Fleischer told us that he now believes data was being fabricated from the beginning.”
I think it’s one guy’s wishful-thinking.
So, here we have Planned Parenthood borrowing a tactic that was based on a fabricated research study. It’s not really anything new in their playbook.