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November 07, 2014 02:58 AM UTC

Unpacking “Abortion”: What White Men Don’t Get

  • 18 Comments
  • by: nancycronk

Or, “Why Mark Udall and Amendment 67 Both Lost in 2014”

I was sitting in my living room a number of months ago, when a Udall commercial came on television and our wonderful Colorado senior U.S. Senator confidently and clearly articulated the word, “abortion”. “He’s going to lose”, I told my husband, “Mark’s going to lose”.

White men don’t get it — especially the kind of 30 year old, private school-educated, pea-coat-wearing frat boys who run market research firms and conduct polls and fly back and forth between DC and Denver — the kind who show up in every federal election, advising Senate and Congressional candidate campaigns on behalf of the DCCC or the DSCC. Out of touch and clueless about middle-aged or retired suburban women, or people of color of all ages in CO, they brought down Joe Miklosi’s congressional campaign in 2012, and they just brought down one of the best U.S. Senators we’ve ever had, Mark Udall. Udall’s team should have questioned their advice and trusted local grassroots, boots-on-the-ground opinions instead. They can’t say they weren’t warned.

Although the “frat boys” (as I like to call them) are confident in the answers they receive in their polls and surveys, they ask all the wrong questions. Any federal level candidates in CO who continue to run campaigns without having every important CO demographic represented on their strategy teams will lose in the future (are you listening, Senator Bennet?). If they want to understand suburban, middle class mothers or college-aged people of color, or seniors on fixed incomes, they better have them on their steering committees in similar proportions.

The abortion issue is a perfect example. Research shows the vast majority of women want abortion to be legal and safe (this is not a Democratic secret, folks). For some people (including young men), the battle cry “My body, my choice” resonates with an underlying libertarian “don’t tell me what to do” chord. For many women I have spoken with about this issue, either as a women’s leader, or as a former crisis center counselor, or as an activist/organizer who has knocked on thousands of CO doors over many years, abortion is not a black and white, intellectual issue – it is a personal, very private decision which is frequently not discussed in polite company. For some women, it is a painfully emotional subject associated with layers of spiritual, family and financial baggage. For many women, terminating a pregnancy is a tug-of-war with their heart, and certainly not a subject they are comfortable having bantered about ad nauseum on their living room televisions by a bunch of men who have no proverbial clue what it is like to be a woman. For many women, the entire conversation is off-limits, and the frankness of the political ads makes them feel very, very uncomfortable.

Not only are many women uncomfortable hearing abortion debated while they’re helping their eight year old with homework or collapsing into a chair after a long day at work, their motives to have had an abortion are not always what men assume them to be. For a lot of women, abortion is not about “my life” or “my body” or “my choice”. For many women I’ve talked to, choosing to end a pregnancy is motivated by selfless concern and love for the potential life they are considering bringing into the world. Women are motivated to have abortions for the same reasons they are motivated about organics, GMOs, fracking, education, climate change, gun restrictions and punishing pedophiles –- because they love children and want every child to be wanted, so they can have healthy, happy lives. For many women, termination is a decision made early in a pregnancy long before there is significant fetal growth or sensation, to protect a child from a life without adequate resources (parenting, food, clothing, health care, etc.) or because of quality of life issues related to fetal anomalies and genetic disorders. For many women, abortion is an emotionally painful but completely selfless decision, made with the best interests of another potential human being in mind – not something every frat boy understands easily.

If there is one thing women will fiercely protect more than their own bodies, or their own choices, or their own civil rights, its children — even other people’s children. Mike Coffman’s brilliant marketing team (let’s face it – he doesn’t get re-elected every two years because he is a good congressman) understood this well in 2012 when they watched Joe Miklosi take a stand for Choice, and then they socked him with an ad that associated Joe with pedophiles because he voted no on the straw-man “Jessica’s law”. I’ll never forget the women I spoke with at the doors while canvassing for Joe who said, “I can’t decide if I want to vote for the guy who hates women, or the one who hates children”. In the end, they voted against the man they were tricked into thinking “hated children” by Coffman’s brilliant, yet evil henchmen.

Amendment 67 failed because women want to keep politicians out of their doctor’s offices. Senator Udall lost his race because women want to keep politician’s talking about abortion out of their living rooms. If Senator Bennet wants to win re-election in 2016, he needs to listen to CO middle-class moms directly and include them on his steering committees — and skip any advice from frat boys about messaging — unless it is about messaging to other frat boys.

Comments

18 thoughts on “Unpacking “Abortion”: What White Men Don’t Get

    1. Here's the difference, Andrew — reproductive issues are very important to both men and women, but the delivery of this message was all wrong, making women pawns in their constant banter back and forth. Udall's pollsters and marketers — and I do not blame Mark for this — were not sensitive to that fact because they personally cannot relate to the many reasons women choose to end a pregnancy — only the one reason they could relate to as men. 

      My point is this — Senator Bennet better figure out real quick that unless he starts listening to CO women of all ages and people of color proportionate to the young white men from DC who usually advise campaigns, he is at risk for being out of touch in 2016. I don't want to lose another fine Senator to stupid decisions made by people who don't even live here.

      1. Senator Bennet has been doing a lot of outreach in the last four months. I got the impression that we was one of the many people trying to make up for Udall's lack of outreach to the communities that Democrats need to win.

    1. Yeah, I thought I might be able to grasp it but then I realized that "My body, my choice" resonates with me because I'm a feminist, not a libertarian, and I'm not a frat boy.

  1. Thank you, Nancy, both for writing this diary, and for running an ethical, energetic campaign.

    I've tried to articulate my own "abortion ambivalence" and why it should be included, but not emphasized, in outreach to women. As I've written, I'm one of the 1/3 of American women who have had an abortion. I did it out of economic necessity and to stop  perpetuating a toxic relationship – but I still sometimes wonder wistfully about that child's face, and what kind of person he/she would have been. I think every parent who has terminated a pregnancy wonders about those things.

    In Pueblo, for example, the dominant demographic is Democratic,pro-choice, and Catholic. There are church bells ringing all over the place for Saturday afternoon mass.

    During the recall elections, and during the runup to the midterm, at least 1/2 of the glossy mailers that landed on my doorstep showed sad or grim or angry women telling off the opposition candidate on abortion. And I totally agree with that position! It really is a private decision, and religious principles should not get in the way of autonomous decisions over one's own anatomy.

    But it was way, way, over-emphasized – in Pueblo during the recall, and by Udall's campaign during the midterm campaign. My sister lives in Park Hill – she was getting dozens of mailers a month, and most of them were about abortion or contraception.  She wanted to tell someone, "Look, I'm a woman. I get it. Cory Gardner doesn't want me to have those choices. But give the abortion issue a fucking rest already."

    But it's part of a continuum of issues – wages, opportunity, education, environment, health, safety – any one of which may be more important than any access to abortion. The "frat boys" , as you aptly call them, although they could just as easily be female, don't seem to get that. "We have to appeal to the female voters," they think, and so they resort to an essentially sexist meme of appealing to female voter's control over reproduction. As Bluecat wrote, "We're not just walking wombs". .

    The Republicans tried hard to substitute easy access to  handguns, or recourse to the death penalty, as a way to appeal to women's need for security and safety. But of course, this, too is sexist….women don't have any more need for security or safety than non-females, and most of us have serious reservations about more handgun use or lethal injections.

    I wouldn't over-simplify, though, Nancy – I disagree with you that "Udall lost because women want to keep politicians talking about abortion out of their living rooms". It was a factor, but not the strongest factor. Udall had and has many strengths as a candidate, and in my opinion, failed to run on them. His attempt to market himself as a fiscal conservative also failed. And the opposition ad campaign was apparently effective. And Latinos and women didn't turn in Udall votes in the ways that we had all hoped that they would. 

    So, just as his campaign was over-focused on abortion, we need to make sure that we keep the big picture in mind, as well.

    1. I don't think it was about women wanting to keep talk of abortion out of their living rooms either. At least not those of us who aren't even more senior than I am. I think it was more about the all abortion all the time Udall ads squeezing all the other issues we care about out of our living rooms. It's as if even well intentioned white male pols can't understand that those who are not white males are not a collection of special cases who can only be reached on issues tailored to their limited interests.

      Yes choice is important to most women and immigration reform is important to most Hispanics and yes, Dems need to do well with women and Hispanics in Colorado. But it's not as if most women voters spend all or most of their time obsessing about abortion rights or most Hispanic voters spend all or most of their time obsessing about immigration reform. We've got lives to live, bills to pay,  healthcare to worry about, kids to educate, and need good jobs just like white males do. We care about what's going on in the larger world. 

      There's something inherently condescending about being treated like we're not people with the same broad range of interests that "normal people" (meaning white males) have. Yes, different communities on average have special interests in some issues that are particular to them but there are far more issues that are important to all of us, across all communities. Just give us the whole picture of what you stand for including but not limited to what's supposed to fit the little boxes white male pols think we "others'" are supposed to fit into. We're not aliens from another planet.

      1. Agreed. I know I wrote a number of blogs about this topic over the years (I think some disappeared with the old Pols, maybe?). Here is one I wrote for Huffpo a couple years ago. I get so sick of the congressional and senate campaigns not listening. How many terms do we have to put up with people like Tom Tancredo and Mike Coffman and Cory Gardner winning before they will listen? 
         

        http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-cronk/im-not-just-a-key-demogra_b_1620576.html

  2. Mamajama55, I agree completely with everything you just wrote. Thanks. I am heartbroken we lost Mark in the Senate. We need to make sure we don't lose Senator Bennet in 2016.

  3. Nancy,  I think you said it just right.  I believe strongly that the government shouldn't be making decisions for a woman or a man when it comes to their bodies. And I'm not comfortable with the labels pro-choice and pro-life.  One is too flippant for the decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.  The other is too generous for a concern which only addresses the 9 months of pre-natal existence and ignores the 9 decades of life which follow.   I totally agree with you that 30-something single males are in no position to advise a candidate on how to address this issue.

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