How abortion rights groups are preparing for the next Trump administration

Abortion rights groups are pivoting away from ballot initiatives and starting to go on defense.

Shefali Luthra
November 21, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump’s victory has energized anti-abortion groups, even as abortion rights organizers notched victories on Election Day. Now, reproductive rights groups are preparing for legal and legislative battles in a new, less friendly environment.

They are planning to embrace a multipronged approach: challenging anti-abortion policies in court, organizing political protests, and lobbying state and national lawmakers to oppose proposed bans.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2024/11/abortion-rights-second-trump-administration/

USA – The Group That’s Changing the Abortion Rights Playbook — and Winning Big

Families United for Freedom is pulling abortion rights out of the traditional left-versus-right frame. On Election Day, that theory won big.

By BEN JACOBS
11/15/2022

In five states on Election Day, voters weighed in directly on various ballot measures involving abortion. The states had vastly different politics, ranging from liberal California to religious, conservative Kentucky. The language on the ballot differed dramatically state by state. Some measures would have inserted a broad-ranging affirmative right to abortion into a state constitution; another would have required medical care for infants “born alive,” such as in cases of failed abortion. But all the measures had one thing in common: The abortion-rights position won in each case.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/15/abortion-rights-election-00066788

15.11.2022

Families United for Freedom

Kansans for Constitutional Freedom

USA – The new abortion rights spokesmen: Dudes, dads, and plumbers

Campaigns have to motivate men, too.

By Rachel M. Cohen
Oct 11, 2022

At 11:30 am on June 24, less than an hour after the US Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Dave Portnoy, the controversial founder of Barstool Sports — a site dubbed the “Bible of Bro Culture” — posted a video to his 2 million followers on Twitter. “We are literally going backwards in time,” he said in a self-described emergency press conference. “It makes no sense how anybody thinks it’s their right to tell a woman what to do with her body.”

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23390955/men-pro-choice-messaging-abortion-rights

How they won: Kansas organizers unpack their big win for abortion rights

The strategies that worked in Kansas – countering misinformation, building a broad coalition – offer lessons for other ballot measures

Poppy Noor
Fri 12 Aug 2022

In February, long before organizers in Kansas had made the hundreds of thousands of calls, knocked on the tens of thousands of doors; or did the thousands of media interviews needed to win a monumental race against an anti-abortion amendment, they started having parties.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/12/how-abortion-rights-won-kansas-strategies

Blueprinting the Kansas Abortion-Rights Victory

Pro-choice forces fought misdirection and marshalled enormous turnout. Can their success be replicated?

By Peter Slevin
August 7, 2022

It was Election Night in a hotel ballroom in Overland Park, Kansas, and Ashley All didn’t know what to think. For months, she had been a public face in the fight to protect abortion rights from a ballot initiative that would change the state constitution and open the door to severe restrictions, or even a ban. Polling had been iffy, the opposition had been relentless, and she was afraid to trust the promising early returns. Nervous, she ducked into a conference room, where Mike Gaughan, a friend and colleague, was sitting at a computer. “He pointed out the impressive numbers in some of the big counties and also great numbers in some not-so-big counties in rural areas,” All told me. It was really happening. A broad coalition with a fresh message was beating the Kansas right-to-lifers at their own game.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/blueprinting-the-kansas-abortion-rights-victory

‘We could feel it’: Kansans celebrate upset abortion rights victory

Organizers said treating reproductive rights as a non-partisan issue was key to success in a Republican-leaning state

Poppy Noor
Wed 3 Aug 2022

In a conference room at the Sheraton in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, people screamed, whooped, cheered and cried as a vote to protect abortion rights in Kansas’s state constitution came down late on Tuesday night. And it wasn’t just Democrats.

James Quigley, 72, a retired doctor and a Republican from Johnson county, sat on his own drinking a glass of white wine after hearing the news. “Abortion is a much more nuanced issue than anti-choice individuals would have you think,” he told the Guardian. “It is deeply personal, sometimes tragic, but also sometimes a liberating decision – and we should trust women, their physicians, and their God on that,” he said.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/03/kansas-abortion-rights-referendum-reaction