How Pro-Life Doctors Can Go on Offense against the Latest Abortion Arguments

A s tens of thousands of pro-life activists parade past the Supreme Court for the March for Life today, one is reminded of the throngs who gathered there two short years ago during oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe. More than 75 medical professionals, most of them doctors, rallied on the pro-life side in their white coats. The Associated Press decided to call those professionals “anti-abortion protestors wearing doctors’ uniforms,” erasing their credentials. Real medical professionals couldn’t be pro-life.

The medicalization of the abortion movement is one of the most significant and under-covered aspects of the debate. Pro-abortion activists have made stunning gains even in red states such as Ohio by presenting their argument as a matter of medical fact. The common feature of nearly every advertisement in the Ohio campaign supporting abortion was a doctor in a white coat, and these ads began early — a year before the first ballots were cast. We in the pro-life movement tried too late to counteract the narrative, and we failed.

Ohio’s pro-abortion Yes campaign employed two primary arguments in favor of abortion, and both were built on health care. The first co-opted conservatives’ small-government message to “get government out of the exam room,” as Molly Ball recently unpacked in the Wall Street Journal. The second message focused on protection from harm. Women and girls, the argument went, need abortion for the hard cases: the child rape victim, the woman with an ectopic pregnancy, the treatment of an emergency miscarriage. Never mind that Ohio law already allowed for abortion in those cases.

First and foremost, we needed to drive our message home with the right spokespeople. The Yes campaign made a brilliant choice when they had Dr. Lauren Beene, an Ohio pediatrician, as the feature of mailers, palm cards, and television. She was everywhere for months, talking about the tough cases, and it really resonated. We attempted to counteract this with pro-life doctors in Ohio such as Dr. Angela Beale Martin, who told of witnessing a young teenage patient enter the emergency room with life-threatening bleeding after taking abortion-inducing medications without her mother’s knowledge. But the compelling witness from Dr. Martin and other pro-life doctors in Ohio was not as ubiquitous and arrived too late to make a difference.

Second, the Yes on Issue 1 campaign released its strongest broadcast ad, called “Emergency,” in the final days before the election. The ad claimed that “government’s life-threatening abortion ban ties the hands of doctors, . . . putting women at risk.” Images of emergency rooms and hospitals filled the screen. The combination of fear and protecting others from harm, a political classic, worked.

Unfortunately, ads featuring pro-life medical professionals were not released until late October, just weeks before polls closed. Worse, the investment behind them and the campaign’s other advertising was insufficient. In the closing weeks, pro-abortion forces outspent pro-life forces $19 million to $7.7 million on television, nearly a 3:1 advantage. And that’s to say nothing of the “in-kind” contributions from media companies to our adversaries.

Pro-lifers also needed to flex our grassroots muscles earlier. One pro-abortion group, Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, stood up social-media ads in January of last year; by May, medical professional coalitions were running paid ads encouraging Ohio voters to “join thousands of medical professionals” in the fight for Issue 1. By the campaign’s end, the abortion advocates claimed the support of more than 4,000 Ohio medical professionals. The pro-life movement has our own medical professional organizations, such as the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs, which has thousands of smart and courageous members across all 50 states — but most people in Ohio never got to hear from them. The Yes on Issue 1 campaign romped to victory with nearly 57 percent of the vote.

Despite all of this, there is still good news for pro-lifers. For one, medical and scientific truth is on our side, even beyond the foundational fact that life begins at fertilization. There are also centuries of ethical consensus dating back to the Hippocratic Oath that medical professionals should not use death as a form of treatment. We have our own physicians ready and willing to present these truths to the public, but we must deploy them earlier and more aggressively.

The medicalization of the pro-abortion argument that we saw in Ohio is already being repeated nationwide. Pro-life forces must prepare for these fights earlier and marshal the financial resources necessary to cut through the abortion lobby’s lies. But defense is never enough. We must also go on offense to present the arguments that we know work: arguments rooted in medical reality and protecting consensus rights, including parental consent.

Pro-lifers are engaged in a war in 2024. The stakes are human lives. We need the humility to learn from our experience, and we must adapt. Earlier engagement — standing up our state-level pro-life medical-professional groups and amplifying their voices with real resources — will let us compete for the medical-professional lane. Smarter messaging is essential; in particular, we need to find the areas of impenetrable unity and common ground, not partisan point-making. And recruiting capable, brave doctors willing to stand up for life (and, when needed, against their own politicized and partisan credentialing bodies) is essential. We can win, but we need brave and well-resourced doctors to tell their stories and make our case.