Abortion Movement Abandons “Pro-Choice” Pretense

Those who favor abortion’s legality have long rejected any label that they were pro-abortion. Instead, they maintained that they were “pro-choice” or, alternatively, “pro-women.” That messaging is aligned with bygone marketing slogans like “safe, legal, and rare.”

California is now helping to expose just how misleading that branding has always been. California is suing Heartbeat International to prevent the pro-life group from providing Abortion Pill Reversal—or from even providing information about using progesterone to reverse a medication abortion in progress. In other words, California is actively trying to prevent women who have taken the first step in a chemical abortion from saving their children’s lives.

That’s not “pro-choice.” It is an active attempt to prevent one particular choice: the one that would save a baby’s life. Thus, the mask has slipped, and we can see the active efforts by the abortion movement to promote abortion and death explicitly, not “choice.” The very same woman they were helping to choose abortion is the woman they are now trying to hinder when she reconsiders and chooses life.

The “choice” messaging was always shrewd because it attempted to claim a moral high ground through professed neutrality. See how it works: they claim that, unlike the pro-life/anti-abortion crowd, they care about freedom, rights, and the choice of women. Such buzzwords facilitated the ironic claim of moral superiority compared to those who obviously and proudly took a righteous stand in the abortion debate. In a culture so hinged on openness, and with such a fondness for rewriting freedom as license, the strategy of hiding under the façade of free choice has been an effective one.

This marketing effort has been used to alienate and vilify anyone who works to save the lives of the unborn. Most of the political energy targeting pro-lifers has been done on the basis that they are ideologically led, unlike the supposedly freedom-loving “pro-choice” advocates. The former are judgmental, and the latter are claimed to be open. Even Planned Parenthood supports pregnancy, whenever you plan it—it’s in the name! Likewise, the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act) was weaponized against pro-life advocates under the same notion—because they are supposedly the ideologues in an otherwise neutral field.

That framing had practical consequences. If pro-lifers could be portrayed as extremists standing in the way of women’s freedom, then efforts to restrict their work could be presented as acts of public protection rather than ideological censorship.

The allegation that pro-life pregnancy centers are somehow anti-women has even been the justifying force behind the firebombing and vandalization of such centers. Preceding that violence, there has been a concerted effort to label such centers for “misinformation” if they don’t provide abortions (as if supporting women in their darkest moments wasn’t a good in its own right).

Sites like Crisis Pregnancy Center Map keep a registry of pro-life centers, warn women to avoid them, and seek laws to make operating them more challenging. Far-left cities, like New York City, repeatedly try to bully crisis pregnancy centers into adding public messaging about how they don’t provide medical services, promoting the distorted claim that abortions are not only medical but the only legitimate medical procedure.

Yet the momentum has shifted. The marketing veneer has become less necessary. “Shout your abortion” has become a familiar slogan, and the legal choices coming from pro-abortion advocates have likewise become more revealing. There is a decreased emphasis on hiding overt pro-abortion (not “pro-choice”) efforts.

In other words, pro-choice marketing is a ruse by the abortion industry. It always has been. Those who are involved in the pro-abortion movement are zealously fighting against life—against abortion pill reversal, against ultrasounds for pregnant women, and even against providing counseling to those who are considering abortions (to prevent women from being pressured into such a decision). The pattern is difficult to ignore.

The abortion industry perceives that once a woman has taken mifepristone, the task has been accomplished, and she shouldn’t be able to reverse it. The “victory” has been had. Any other choice by the woman is the wrong one and must be prevented. Hence, pro-abortion activists from California to New York are trying to prevent the Abortion Pill Reversal hotline—which connects women to health-care providers who can prescribe progesterone, thus saving lives—from being made available.

We should appreciate the newfound honesty and candor. It has never been about giving women the right information; otherwise, they would not have fought against ultrasounds and counseling. And it has never been about women’s “choices” either. If it were about choice, they wouldn’t fight to prevent women’s access to Abortion Pill Reversal.

What has long been obscured behind well-placed slogans has now been clarified by the State of California. Those who were misled by such strategies are being given a clear picture of the abortion movement and its malevolence. Pro-abortion activists are working to prevent the choosing of life amid hardship, pain, and regret, when women and couples are at their most vulnerable. The evil that we are fighting has never been clearer.