Tracking the multi-hydra anti-abortion movement could be a full time job. But, it's a dilemma for pro-choice artists and activists: understanding their tactics and tricks is ultra important to portraying and combating their lies, distortions and falsities. The truth requires unlocking and exposing.
Fortunately, this IS the full-time job of researchers at the Political Research Associates, known as PRA, a group that researches, watches and reports on the Right wing. PRA has just released a comprehensive new online toolkit, Defending Reproductive Justice that provides first-hand examples and analysis of the Right-wing anti-abortion endeavors and efforts.
The poster pictured here, for example, is from the Right-wing Elliot Institute, which has mastered using subjects that concern women in false equations to attempt to whip up anti-abortion sentiment and cause women distress.
The the new release is a 2009 update of an earlier publication from 2000. Both now printed online in a crisp and accessible format.
In a new Overview called "Polished Lenses and Focused Targets: Defending Reproductive Justice," senior researcher Pam Chamberlain describes changes in the landscape since 2000, including ongoing activism, anti-choice legislation and a broadening of Right-wing attacks on contraception, emergency contraception, and a range of healthcare options, as well as abortion.
She writes:
Despite the range of attacks on multiple reproductive issues, opposition to abortion remains a lynch pin of conservative organizing. Whittling away at abortion rights from multiple angles provides continuous opportunities for movement supporters to stay active; there is always another campaign that needs their help. To maintain high public interest and mobilization, anti-choice forces deploy carefully crafted claims asserting both moral superiority and an obligation to act. Their main arguments can be summarized by the following three phrases: 1) The Culture of Life Must Resist the Culture of Death; 2) Women Must be Protected from Harm, and 3) the Fetus is a Person.
Sections then discuss "What the Right Claims," and "Progressive Analysis." A chapter called "Publications" contains a solid list of books on the topic from 2000-2009. My one complaint is the 2009 section called "Resources," which contains some outdated information.
What's great about this new PRA site, though, is it contains virtually all of the Right-wing arguments, organizations, literature and lies in one place. One of my favorite sections in "Primary Sources," with fundraising letters from Right-wing organization, pushing paranoia and fear. PRA dissembles the lies with carefully-researched truths and the back-up for them, too. Yay for the truth: After all, if anti-abortion people are so desperate that they make up science and use debunked studies, like the one that abortion causes cancer, how valid can their cause be?
Posted by Cindy Cooper
Pictured above: Flyer from the anti-abortion "Elliot Institute," posted by Public Research Associates
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