Alinsky meets the pro-life movement

There is a useful tactic available to the pro-life community, courtesy of Saul Alinsky.  It has the side benefit of addressing a moral outrage that is little understood and happens much too often.

Alinsky's fourth rule, "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules," is just waiting to be applied to coerced abortion, a killing with two victims.  If they are truly about "choice," abortion advocates must condemn coerced abortion.  The fact that they are so allergic to even acknowledging that the phenomenon exists suggests that there is only one choice they are interested in promoting.


Photo: Liveaction.org.

As it happens, there is a lot of evidence that coerced abortion is a serious problem in the United States.  National Review has an excellent (and horrific) account at National Review Online, while Alexandra DeSanctis at NRO raises the Alinsky corollary to his work:

[T]he article also brings to mind something extremely troubling: how little most on the pro-abortion Left care about this coercion, and thus how little they truly care about choice. In fact, the pro-abortion movement almost uniformly ignores the reality that coerced abortions take place. Frighteningly, many of the most virulently pro-abortion voices on the left actively claim that this type of coercion never takes place at all. Whatever happened to "her body, her choice"? ...

It is particularly telling that the pro-abortion Left immediately pounces on these stories, not to defend women's reproductive rights, but to insist that coerced abortion never or rarely happens. It is nearly impossible to find examples of pro-abortion activists saying that such coercion is unacceptable and a violation of the all-surpassing "right to choose."

Even if this coercion didn't happen often, which is far from evident, anyone who claims to be pro-choice should care deeply about the possibility that it might occur. If those on the Left were truly pro-choice, they'd actively search for claims of coerced abortion and denounce them as flagrant violations of "reproductive freedom."

I'd add Alinsky's fifth here: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."  There are plenty of women who have been bullied into abortions by boyfriends, husbands, poverty, and all sorts of other malign forces leftists love to demonize.  They are turning a blind eye toward men abusing women.

As the MOTUS A.D. blog reminds us, "Alinsky works for us, now."  We are the insurgents fighting a powerful establishment.  Alinksy devised his tactics for those fighting entrenched power from the bottom.  We're the fighters.

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