Pro-Life Group's New Strategy To Elect Anti-Choice Politicians: Lying
The New Yorker has a very kind, very polite profile this week about the Susan B. Anthony List, the lobbying group whose sole purpose is to get anti-abortion politicians into office. The piece centers around Marjorie Dannenfelser, the SBA List’s president, who the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh says is trying to avoid the “controversial” side of abortion rights, focusing only on “issues on which there is, or might be, a broad consensus” and getting politicians to talk “smarter” about abortion.
A more accurate, slightly less polite way to put that might be that Dannenfelser and the SBA List have no problem politely, decorously lying to get anti-abortion politicians into office: lying about what these politicians believe, lying about their voting records, their opponents’ voting records, and anything else that might be handy and might make the SBA List’s agenda sound less extreme. (Just how extreme, you ask? That’s Dannenfelser up top there, embracing Ted Cruz after an SBA List event earlier this year, one where he accused abortion rights advocates of engaging in “savagery” and “walking arm-in-arm, chanting ‘Hail, Satan,’ embracing the right to take the life of a late-term child.”)
Sanneh doesn’t sugar-coat the SBA List’s main objective, which is, as he puts it, “to bring an end to widely available abortion.” But he calls Dannenfelser’s approach “incremental,” which isn’t really true. She and the organization as a whole want to get the most anti-abortion politicians into office as quickly as they can; they’ve just realized that the best way to do that is to get kinda fuzzy on what exactly these particular politicians stand for. The SBA List, for example, supports personhood, the idea that every sperm is sacred and an embryo is a person from the moment sperm meets egg. But in the past couple years, they’ve stopped openly supporting personhood legislation or ardently pro-personhood candidates. (That’s because personhood amendments do really, really badly at the polls.) Instead, the organization is finding it’s better to, as Sanneh puts it, “link the pro-life movement to less controversial causes, like fiscal discipline and general opposition to Obamacare.”