We've been having the wrong conversation about abortion. Let's change it.

Image designed using uterus graphic by @pikisuperstar

I was pandemically, politically, and existentially exhausted. And then Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

My first thought upon hearing of her passing was this: Who will fight for women now?

The answer, of course, is that we will continue the fight for our daughters and ourselves. But to do so, we need to admit we’ve been having the wrong conversation about abortion, the single issue that many Americans use to determine their vote for candidates whose platforms and actions run antithetical to most of the voters’ own values and to reality itself.

Whether abortion is moral—something we’ll never agree on—has nothing to do with how to reduce the abortion rate. We have decades of global and domestic data that show us how to reduce abortions. I’ll get to that part in a minute, but first I’ll tell you what does not stop women from procuring abortions: making the procedure illegal or heavily restricting it.

I spent the summer doing research for a new writing project on scientific literacy, which led me to read extensively about these two things: all the ways our brains are terrible at thinking critically, and all the ways interest groups—political parties, industries, religious institutions, you name it—prey on these deficiencies to successfully manipulate us.

I began to understand that modern anti-abortion discourse in the U.S. is one of the most effective political manipulations in our lifetime, the consequences of which extend far beyond reproductive rights.

But I’m seeing a fissure among some evangelicals who have been shaken awake by the hypocrisy of the “pro-life” Trump administration. It cages children. It denies the mounting, life-threatening dangers of climate change. (Yes, there is scientific consensus that it’s happening and that we’re in trouble.) And it has, to date, squandered more than 208,000 lives to a pandemic it has vehemently denied, despite growing—and quite impressive—scientific evidence on how insidious the virus is and how to control it. These evangelicals have woken up to the fact that the GOP reeled them in with one simple lie: that making abortion illegal saves lives.

I see a window here for evidence-based conversations that focus not on whether abortion is moral but about how to actually reduce the abortion rate—a goal most of us share, regardless of our reasoning.

Thinking critically about how to actually reduce abortions

To be sure, restricting or abolishing the legal right to abortion has consequences. Decades of global evidence show that women seek abortions when they feel they need them regardless of legality; when abortion is illegal or heavily restricted, they just procure them at greater physical, financial, and legal risk to themselves and their families. For obvious reasons, illegality therefore puts a greater burden on low-income women. Heavy restrictions on abortion punish women for having sex, no doubt. But they do not stop abortion from happening. In fact, over the last 30 years, the proportion of unintended pregnancies that result in abortion has increased in countries where the procedure is illegal or heavily restricted compared to the rate in countries where it is broadly legal. The lowest rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion, and the lowest proportion of unintended pregnancies that end in abortion are found in high-income countries where abortion is broadly legal.

If you were actually interested in reducing the number of women who feel they need abortions—as most people who provide reproductive health services are—here is how you would think critically about where to channel your vote, your voice, and your money. The process would only take about five minutes.

First you would look up the reason for most abortions. You would find that unintended pregnancies account for the majority of them. Globally, about half of pregnancies are unintended, and about 60 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. In the U.S. in 2011, around 45 percent of pregnancies were unintended, and around 42 percent of those ended in abortion. To reduce abortions, you would need to focus on reducing unintended, unwanted pregnancies. (It get much more complicated to reduce the chance of abortion once an unintended pregnancy exists. Women who choose to terminate unintended pregnancies typically cite several reasons for feeling they could not continue the pregnancy, but the most frequent factor given is socioeconomic concerns.)

Next you’d look up how to reduce unintended pregnancy. Does abstinence-only education keep women from getting pregnant? No. The methods that prevent unintended pregnancy are these: access to free or affordable contraception, and education on how to use contraception effectively. When women have access to contraception and know how to use it, the rate of unintended pregnancy takes a dive. In 2014, publicly funded contraceptive services helped women in the U.S. avoid an estimated two million unintended pregnancies, 700,000 of which would likely have ended in abortion. With an uptick in contraceptive use, the abortion rate in the U.S. has been falling since the early 1980s.

Now you might look up data on whether making abortion illegal or highly restricted reduces the abortion rate. You’d find that countries where abortion is illegal almost always have higher abortion rates than countries where it is legal. Women who feel they need abortions have always sought them. Making abortions illegal punishes women by making the procedure more dangerous in numerous ways, but it does not save fetuses.

If you were in the business of saving lives, you would then look into which political parties and organizations advocate for preventing unintended pregnancy by providing free or affordable contraception and comprehensive sex education. You would find that the Democratic Party and Planned Parenthood are among these organizations.

So, if making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent the procedure from happening, and Democratic policies and Planned Parenthood services actually reduce the abortion rate, why is the anti-abortion movement staunchly associated with the GOP? The answer is nothing short of sordid.

The Grand Manipulation of the Christian Right

Jesus never commanded Christians to legislate women’s bodies; that was a Republican strategist named Paul Weyrich, a Southern Baptist televangelist named Jerry Falwell, and some of their loud conservative buddies. The story is long and well-documented from a variety of angles, yet rarely recounted. (I’ll give you an abridged version, but you can read more about it here, here, and here.)

It’s difficult to imagine today, but prior to the late 1970s, abortion wasn’t considered a political issue, nor was it associated with a particular political party. Most people considered it a “Catholic issue.” For centuries, Catholics had condemned abortion, first for being sinful if used to cover up fornication or adultery. Over time, the church went through many iterations of justification for scorning abortion, eventually settling on the idea that a fetus had its own rights. By the time Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, Catholic opposition to abortion was actually couched in a liberal social welfare movement more associated with the Democratic Party. Liberal Catholics coined the phrase “right to life.”

But for the rest of the country, abortion just wasn’t very controversial. In fact, Southern Baptists, who fall into the broad category of evangelical Christians, affirmed during several conventions in the late 1960s and 1970s that abortion was acceptable under some circumstances. Other evangelical churches and Christian publications, including Christianity Today, did the same.

Immediately following Roe, the Virginia Baptist Convention’s Religious Herald wrote: “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” They wanted nothing to do with the liberal Catholic right-to-life argument.

Also in response to Roe, well-known evangelist W. A. Criswell, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Evangelicals were not politically active as a group at the time, though many Southern Baptists had been Democrats since the end of WWII.

By the 1970s, the GOP was struggling, and it needed to drum up a reliable bloc of new voters if it were going to hold on. A conservative Republican strategist named Paul Weyrich noticed something as he began to think about whom to target: Southern Baptists were growing disenchanted with the Democrats over several issues, including taxes.

Religious historian Randall Balmer pieced together what followed from the personal papers of Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell. Falwell abhorred the Civil Rights movement. (Falwell is not to be confused with his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., who urged evangelical support of Trump, was recently ousted as president of Liberty University following an alleged sex scandal, and whose dealings as president are now being investigated by the university.)

In protest of school desegregation in the 1960s, as became a trend with Southern Baptists, Falwell created a “segregation academy”—a private, Christian school for whites only called Lynchburg Christian School. After a legal battle related to the tax status of segregation academies, Republican Richard Nixon demanded that the IRS not grant tax exempt status to these schools because their racial discrimination violated the rules of what constitutes a charitable organization. Falwell and his fellow Southern Baptists were enraged by this development.

Weyrich noticed that racial discrimination surrounding the segregation academies had become a rallying cry among Southern Baptists and thought Republicans could capitalize on their fervor to politicize the group. (Never mind that it was actually a Republican president who created the policy; Weyrich brushed this detail under the rug.) The problem was that it didn’t seem appropriate to add blatant racism as an official GOP platform to bring them on board. Weyrich had to find another issue to attract them that would be more palatable for the evangelical masses.

Simultaneously, the GOP was toying with trying to lure Catholics to the party by taking a rather moderate anti-abortion stance for the first time. It didn’t work the way they’d hoped, though. Despite the staunch teachings of the Catholic Church, Catholic voters turned out to be a mixed bag at the voting booth.

The concept, however, gave Weyrich an idea. He tested abortion on the riled-up Southern Baptists as a potential issue to unite them politically. Prior to Roe, many had viewed the Catholic Church’s anti-abortion stance as simply an extension of its anti-contraception stance, but in the years since, abortion had become more associated with the leftist feminist movement and the sexual revolution, and this association was starting to concern evangelicals. They began to view abortion as a symbol of the nation’s disintegrating morality.

This, Weyrich realized, was the winning issue. He reached out to Falwell and others with large evangelical platforms and convinced them to start an anti-abortion movement. The GOP would make a place for them and their conservative social agenda if they could fire-and-brimstone their followers into believing that their religion deemed abortion immoral, and that the GOP could stop abortion in the U.S. by overturning Roe. The partnership would be mutually beneficial, generating a larger Republican base and giving evangelicals a measure of political power.

Falwell took to the airwaves, mobilizing the Christian Right to condemn and politicize abortion, and declaring that the GOP could protect the unborn through legislation. He created the Moral Majority in 1979. Falwell and others proof-texted the modern “pro-life” movement right into their religion and convinced followers that it was the issue they should prioritize above all others at the voting booth.

(Falwell later founded Liberty University, where alumni have reported convocations three times per week that often focused on political indoctrination. In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, he infamously said: “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.”)

In the late 1970s, evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer egged on this new anti-abortion agenda, offering evangelicals graphic films and fresh vocabulary—infanticide and eugenics—to equate with the procedure.

The strategy worked; evangelical voters obliged and have since proved to be a shockingly homogenous voting bloc. In fact, 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016, and they continue to comprise a healthy chunk of his base.

The marriage between the GOP and the modern anti-abortion movement relies on a culture that denies evidence-based reasoning—after all, only by denying evidence could you maintain your essential position that making abortion illegal stops it from happening. This culture now spans far past reproductive rights. It has transformed into one of intense science denial, which has resulted in the deadly denial of climate change and of the existence and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, among many other issues.

So where does this leave us?

The GOP’s manipulation surrounding the politicization of abortion has left us with blocs of single-issue voters, many of whom do not understand that the “pro-life” cause does not save lives, how abortions are actually prevented, and how the movement was crafted specifically to take advantage of their political support.

We know how to reduce abortions, and it is a far cry from the GOP’s silver bullet that amounts only to legislating women’s bodies. Preventing unintended pregnancies requires supporting free and affordable contraception and comprehensive sex education. It also requires men to stop ejaculating irresponsibly, in the words of Gabrielle Blair, and raping women. Offering more women what they need to consider continuing unintended pregnancies requires supporting access to affordable health care for all, paid maternity leave, paid sick leave, equal pay for women, affordable childcare, and strong public education. It requires dismantling systemic racism, too. Let’s challenge ourselves to change the conversation.