Content note: this page quotes signs that call abortion murder, mentions films and placards showing aborted fetuses, and refers to the murders of doctors who performed abortions.
What it said
Each side compressed its whole argument into a word the other could not easily oppose. One said life. The other said choice. Neither word names a statute, a week of pregnancy, or an exception, and that is why both worked.
The anti-abortion signs at the 1978 March for Life spoke for the fetus in the first person: Abortion is murder / Save my life / I want to live
, beside a fetal photograph captioned Life
and Death
, and Abortion clinics breed death
. Six years earlier, the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition's poster for Abortion Action Week, 1 to 6 May 1972, put a banner over its marchers reading Women unite: abortion is our right!!
under concrete demands:
Repeal all abortion laws and restrictive contraception laws and end forced sterilization!
The word "choice" did not arrive by accident. In 1972 Jimmye Kimmey of the Association for the Study of Abortion wrote a memo looking for an answer to "Right to Life," and concluded: Right to Choose would seem to do the job.
On the other side, the phrase "partial-birth abortion" was worked out in 1995 in a meeting of Representative Charles Canady, the bill's drafting lawyer Keri Folmar, and National Right to Life Committee lobbyist Douglas Johnson. Both coinages were deliberate. Both did what they were built to do.
By 2022 the frames had not moved much. On the day Dobbs came down, 24 June 2022, a heart-shaped Live Action sign outside the Supreme Court read Love them both
. That summer the Kansas amendment to remove the state's constitutional abortion right was named Value Them Both
, and some of the ads against it called it a government mandate
. Neither phrase uses the word abortion.
Who made it and why
Against abortion. The National Right to Life Committee began under the Catholic bishops' conference and went independent in 1973, after Roe v. Wade. In May 1971 Jack and Barbara Willke published the Handbook on Abortion, with photographs of aborted fetuses; it sold about 1.5 million copies and the photographs became handout brochures. Nellie Gray led the first March for Life on 22 January 1974; organizers claimed 20,000 people. The Silent Scream (1984 to 1985), narrated by Bernard Nathanson, showed an ultrasound of a 12-week abortion and described the fetus as opening its mouth in a silent scream
; Crusade for Life mailed videocassettes to every member of Congress and to the justices. The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform's Genocide Awareness Project set fetal photographs beside images of the Holocaust and of lynchings. Pregnancy centers, in their own account, offered women help and alternatives to abortion.
For abortion rights. NARAL was founded in 1969 as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, with Nathanson among its founders. It renamed itself the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1973, NARAL Pro-Choice America in 2003, and Reproductive Freedom for All in 2023. "My body, my choice" was a rally chant by 1970. The coat hanger became the movement's emblem of death by self-induced abortion. In 1985 NOW president Judith Goldsmith called The Silent Scream fraudulent
and emotionally exploitative,
and Planned Parenthood answered it with a booklet arguing that a 12-week fetus cannot feel pain or move with purpose. Between 1991 and 1996 Bill Clinton said abortion should be safe, legal and rare.
On 19 September 2015 Amelia Bonow and Lindy West started #ShoutYourAbortion for women to tell their own stories. On 21 January 2017 the Women's March dropped the anti-abortion group New Wave Feminists from its partner list, saying its platform is pro-choice and that has been our stance from day one.
Government on both sides. Officeholders did not stay neutral. Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed on 5 November 2003, the ban built around the "partial-birth" term; the Supreme Court upheld it 5 to 4 in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). In 2024 the Biden White House issued a social card reading More than 27 million women of reproductive age in the U.S. now live in states with abortion bans in effect
and calling on Congress to restore the protections of Roe once and for all.
The card gives no date, no definition of a ban, and no source for the figure.
What it got right or wrong
Most of this is what self-government looks like. Marches, petitions, books, films signed by their makers, lobbying, lawsuits, ballot campaigns, and women telling their own stories under their own names are open advocacy. A reader can disagree with every word and still recognize a free people arguing in public. The question for this site is narrower: where did someone hide who was speaking, or put a number or claim in front of the public that was false?
A figure its own source disowned. Nathanson, after he turned against abortion, wrote in Aborting America (1979) and said later that NARAL routinely used 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year from illegal abortion and that he knew the numbers were false. The CDC counted 39 deaths from illegal abortion in 1972. Historians such as Leslie Reagan say official counts missed deaths and estimates vary widely. The archive's sources do not settle the true number. They do show that a co-founder said the advocacy figure was not a count.
A film its critics disputed. Critics of The Silent Scream said it read a scream and an attempt to flee into movements that a 12-week nervous system does not support. That is a dispute about interpretation of an ultrasound, made by the film's opponents. The record does not contain a finding that settles it.
Misleading health claims. A report released 17 July 2006, prepared by the committee staff of Representative Henry Waxman, then the senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, found that 20 of 23 federally funded pregnancy centers contacted gave false or misleading health information, such as a link between abortion and breast cancer.
Deception in gathering, judged by a jury. From 2013 to 2015 Center for Medical Progress staff posed as buyers from a fake tissue company, BioMax, and secretly recorded Planned Parenthood staff, then released videos in 2015. In 2019 a federal jury found CMP and David Daleiden liable for fraud, trespass, breach of contract, and illegal recording, with damages of up to about $2.2 million. Daleiden said he would appeal; his lawyers describe the staff as investigators exposing wrongdoing. The videos themselves went out under CMP's name.
An unsigned message. Before the 2 August 2022 Kansas vote, voters received unsigned texts saying women were losing their choice on reproductive rights
and that a yes vote would protect women's health
, when a yes vote would have removed the state's constitutional abortion right. The Kansas Reflector tied the texts to former Representative Tim Huelskamp's Do Right PAC; Huelskamp later denied sending them, and the Value Them Both Coalition said it was not involved. The amendment failed, 59 to 41 percent.
Taken together: the anti-abortion side's record includes the CMP cover company and the unsigned Kansas texts, both of which hid who was speaking or recording, and the misleading health claims found by the Waxman staff. The abortion-rights side's record includes a death figure that one of its founders later called knowingly false. The archive's sources did not include an unattributed campaign on the abortion-rights side. That is a difference in the record, stated as found, not a verdict on either cause.
Violence is not persuasion
Violence is not persuasion. On 10 March 1993 Michael F. Griffin murdered Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola. Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot dead at his home in Amherst, New York, in 1998; James Kopp was convicted in 2003. On 31 May 2009 Scott Roeder killed Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his church in Wichita and was convicted of first-degree murder in January 2010. The National Abortion Federation, a providers' association, counts 11 murders, 42 bombings, and 200 arsons against providers since 1977. After the draft Dobbs opinion leaked in May 2022, pregnancy centers and anti-abortion offices were vandalized and set on fire, with some attacks claimed under the name "Jane's Revenge"; in Florida three people pleaded guilty in 2024 to a federal civil-rights conspiracy for spray-painting centers, one message reading if abortions aren't safe then neither are you
. The sources the archive used found no killing connected to the abortion-rights side. Every one of these acts was a crime against people exercising lawful rights, whichever side they were on, and none is a technique of open persuasion.
Compelled speech cuts both ways. California in 2015 required pregnancy centers to post notices about state abortion services. In 2018, in NIFLA v. Becerra, the Supreme Court held 5 to 4 that the rule likely violated the First Amendment. NIFLA said the law forced its members to promote a message they oppose. The libertarian reading here is straightforward: the state may answer a pregnancy center's claims with its own voice, and fraud remains fraud, but the government should not script a private speaker's walls, whichever message the script carries. On that reading, the same principle would weigh just as heavily against a rule making an abortion clinic post the other side's material.
Disclosure is the citizen's tool. The two clearest failures on this page are the ones where the speaker was hidden: a fake company and an unsigned text. The remedy the Constitution prefers is not a speech office deciding which slogan is true. It is the ability to know who is talking. The White House social card, by contrast, was signed; its weakness is that a government account offered a large figure with nothing to check it against. A President may argue a policy. A public office that argues should show its work.
Where honest people can read the record two ways, as on whether "life" or "choice" better describes the question, this site takes no side on the underlying moral dispute. It takes the side of the voter who wants the policy stated plainly: which law, which week, which exceptions.
Its legacy
The Associated Press now tells reporters to write "anti-abortion" and "abortion-rights" and to keep "pro-life" and "pro-choice" to quotes and proper names. Each movement also has a label for the other, "pro-abortion" and "anti-choice," that the other rejects. After Dobbs, the coat hanger returned to signs, and some doctors and abortion-rights advocates asked that it be retired. The argument moved from the Supreme Court to the states, where Kansas showed that the decisive messages may be the ones that avoid the word at the center of the fight.
The test that outlasts the debate is the one any reader can run. Swap the sides and see whether the judgment holds. A virtue-word name is the same device whether the word is life or choice. A harm figure its author disowned is card-stacking whichever cause it served. An unsigned text that borrows the other camp's key word would be scored the same if the other camp had sent it. That symmetry is not neutrality about the stakes. It is fairness to the citizens on both sides who argued in the open and under their own names.
Sources
- FRAME case study "The US abortion debate: persuasion campaigns on both sides since the 1960s," for the chronology, quotations, and court and jury outcomes, with the sources it cites (including the Kansas Reflector, 2 August and 10 September 2022; the Washington Post on the Waxman report, 17 July 2006; the San Francisco Chronicle on the 2019 verdict; Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124 (2007); NIFLA v. Becerra (2018); the National Abortion Federation; and the U.S. Department of Justice and Florida Attorney General on the Jane's Revenge cases).
- FRAME collection records "Abortion Action Week, May 1-6, 1972" (Women's National Abortion Action Coalition; Library of Congress item 2016648123), "'Right to Life' demonstration, at White House and Capitol" (23 January 1978; Library of Congress item 2016646416), "Protests in front of SCOTUS after Dobbs" (24 June 2022; John Brighenti, CC BY 2.0), and "More than 27 million women of reproductive age in the U.S. now live in states with abortion bans in effect" (White House social card, 2024).