The Fight for Life Online
Last week, I wrote about getting Grandma on Facebook. Forget Facebook. The pro-life movement needs to start with capturing grandma’s email.
Our activities translate so well onto the web. Pew’s recent Poli-fluential study found that social networking works best for progressive and social conservative issues. Isn’t abortion one of the main social conservative issues? We should be burning up the socnets.
How hard would it be to coordinate activity through blogs, develop an online memorial to the unborn, allow women and families to share their experiences with abortion, create a clearing house of state activities, fact sheets, resources, polls, message boards and meet ups?
What kills me is how highly networked the pro-life movement really is. We operate through churches, crisis pregnancy centers, ministries, Bible studies, local right to life chapters. We know what we’re doing on the ground, but what about that chapter up the street? Why can’t we get them online, talking to each other and mobilizing? Would it be that hard to take these networks and create them on the web?
This isn’t a situation where people question the usefulness of the web. Far from it. It may be biased coming from me, but the web makes the most sense. It’s the one way that we can educate, recruit, coordinate and mobilize. However, there’s a huge learning gap between conservative bloggers and web people and your average prolife activist.
During the grassroots training last week at Real Women’s Voices, the floor was open to suggestions. I encouraged everyone to go home and get involved with their state and community blogs. People were curious, they just don’t know where to start, and the web is intimidating. They hear about Facebook, blogs and YouTube on the news all the time. However, prolife advocates have been in this fight since the late 70s and early 80s. They’re stuck in their individual niches and don’t have the time or energy to decipher these new options.
Prolifers have been working for 35+ years now. The average activist created a niche of what they like to do. Some pray outside clinics, others counsel at their local CPC. Then the battle is also fought in state governments, state and federal courts, and Congress. The problem is coordinating all of those activities and mobilizing those on the ground when they have a need for grassroots pressure.
