The world spent June 2022 watching and waiting for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. But you wouldn’t have known it from following Planned Parenthood’s social media. It’s not like the abortion giant didn’t have time to prepare. The nation’s highest court agreed to take the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case more than a year earlier. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on December 1, 2021. And by early May, Politico had published a leaked draft decision indicating the court would overturn Roe.
Planned Parenthood only managed to keep its eye on the ball for a couple of weeks. The organization held nationally coordinated “Bans Off Our Bodies” rallies on May 14, with a website and a social media hashtag to go with them. But by the end of the month, references to Roe and the Supreme Court all but vanished.
How could a juggernaut like Planned Parenthood become so ineffective at persuasion — especially with its hands on the political, media, and technological levers of power?
With the court poised to throw Planned Parenthood into a fight for its very survival, the abortion empire barely posted about Roe. It did, however, have much to say about all kinds of other supposed social justice issues that aren’t exactly central to the abortion chain’s core product:
Salaries for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team players
Immigrant Heritage Month
A “safe space playlist”
Juneteenth
Gun violence
Ending the “stigma” of sexually transmitted infections, featuring a link to an article that describes how to reduce one’s risk of contracting HIV while sleeping with or sharing needles with someone who is HIV positive
Planned Parenthood posted about abortion, too, but those posts didn’t exactly convey the urgency of the moment. There was little evidence of any sort of a coordinated campaign to respond to the imminent reversal of Roe. Once the calendar turned to June, the “#BansOffOurBodies” hashtag disappeared entirely until June 23 — the day before Roe fell.
By all appearances, Planned Parenthood’s social media staffer went on a three-week vacation and lazily auto-scheduled posts highlighting an assortment of flavor-of-the-week progressive causes.
But Planned Parenthood’s social justice cause-du-jour approach to the most fraught month in its history wasn’t merely the work of an incompetent social media director. The Twitter/X debacle was just one symptom of an existential crisis years in the making.
Inescapable activism
Longtime Planned Parenthood president and CEO Cecile Richards announced her resignation in January 2018. Throughout her dozen years at the helm, Richards built Planned Parenthood into a political heavyweight. Her presidency saw the organization more than quadruple its volunteer and supporter base.
Richards successfully prevented Congress from defunding Planned Parenthood. And she helped Planned Parenthood escape largely unscathed throughout David Daleiden’s 2015 undercover exposé revealing that Planned Parenthood had been trafficking body parts harvested from aborted babies.
Richards’ departure was a big blow to Planned Parenthood and one that appeared to catch the abortion business by surprise, as it took eight months to name Dr. Leana Wen as her successor. While Richards — the daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards — made her name in the political world, Wen was chosen to highlight Planned Parenthood not just as an activist organization but as a medical institution.
It didn’t take long for buyer’s remorse to set in. Hiring a young, technocratic physician sounded good on paper. But Wen’s approach to running Planned Parenthood wasn’t a good fit for an organization rooted in radical politics.
“The emergency physician and former Baltimore health commissioner had tried to position the organization as a nonpartisan health-care institution, but its board wanted to double down on its progressive, pro-abortion advocacy,” wrote Anna Medaris in Business Insider.
The friction led to Wen’s ouster after less than a year on the job. “I wanted to emphasize total women’s health,” Wen recounted. “They wanted to double down on abortion rights.”
Planned Parenthood tapped former board member Alexis McGill Johnson as acting president and CEO and, nearly a year after announcing a search for a permanent president, removed the “acting” tag in June 2020.
There was no danger of McGill Johnson being insufficiently zealous when it came to pitching abortion. A retread who served as Planned Parenthood’s board chairman, PAC chairman, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund board member, McGill Johnson is “a long-standing champion for social and racial justice, a respected political and cultural organizer, and a tireless advocate for reproductive freedom,” according to her official biography.
Be careful what you wish for.
Failure to persuade
McGill Johnson’s call for a more “intersectional” pro-abortion movement explains the mission drift that led Planned Parenthood’s Twitter account to focus on every leftist cause under the sun even as Roe was collapsing. And it also explains why Planned Parenthood has struggled to adapt to the post-Roe world.
At first glance, Planned Parenthood seems to be doing OK. The abortion industry successfully leveraged the machine Richards built to raise money as well as to win elections and referenda in the wake of Dobbs. But a peek beneath the surface reveals an organization in crisis.
While media elites in Manhattan and San Francisco fawn over Planned Parenthood brass emphasizing intersectional politics, local Planned Parenthood staff have bigger fish to fry. Even as McGill Johnson pals around with Kamala Harris, Jen Psaki, and Al Sharpton, local facility managers are trying to figure out how to deal with pro-life sidewalk counselors, undercover investigators, and an exodus of employees.
Clumsy, hastily developed myths are no match for the truth.
The disconnect between Planned Parenthood headquarters and local Planned Parenthood facilities helps explain why more than 260 abortion workers have experienced conversion and left their jobs in response to 40 Days for Life vigils and more than 600 have walked away with the help of former Planned Parenthood employee of the year Abby Johnson.
Planned Parenthood has also failed to win the hearts and minds necessary to build a lasting movement. The pro-abortion marches and rallies that sprang up immediately after the Dobbs leak and decision quickly tapered off.
“In interviews with more than 50 advocates, analysts, abortion providers, and legal experts, what emerged is a sense of the movement being forced to reckon with its mistakes,” wrote Amy Littlefield in the New York Times. “Chief among those mistakes was the relative neglect of grassroots groups.”
Teen Vogue took its disenchantment with the abortion industry even farther, arguing that “the mainstream reproductive rights movement … no longer deserve[s] the bulk of our money, time, or attention.”
How could a juggernaut like Planned Parenthood become so ineffective at persuasion — especially with its hands on the political, media, and technological levers of power?
“One of the critiques of the abortion-rights movement is that we put too much faith in the law, believing that it would protect the right to abortion,” said American University “reproductive rights scholar” Tracy Weitz.
Planned Parenthood is bad at persuasion because it never needed to persuade under Roe. With its five-decade judicial protection racket in the dumpster, Planned Parenthood is desperately trying to build a new post-Roe narrative based on manufactured talking points that simply don’t correspond with reality.
Don’t let the abortion industry off the hook for being unprepared for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Clumsy, hastily developed myths are no match for the truth.
Editor’s note: This article is an adapted excerpt from “What to Say When 2: Your Proven Guide in the New Abortion Landscape – How to Discuss, Clarify, and Question Abortion in a Hostile Culture” (September 10).
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