Focusing on Hope

How Emphasizing Falling Abortion Rates Enhances Pro-Life Educational Efforts

Rachel M. MacNair, Ph.D.

Is it just a coincidence that abortion rates have been on the decline during the same period of time that there has been increasing public awareness of post-abortion trauma? Or are the millions of women who have had abortions, and years later suffered from the delayed guilt and regret that is typical of post-abortion syndrome, now quietly discouraging their sisters, daughters, and co-workers from taking the “easy way out?”

Whether or not increased awareness of post-abortion problems is the primary explanation for the decline in abortion rates, it is an important explanation that will resonate with Americans. If pro-lifers understand this explanation, and the psychological reasons why the average American wants to believe this is true, we can accelerate the trend away from abortion.

The Need to Understand

Throughout the 1990s, abortion rates have been on a steady decline. The total numbers, rate, and ratio of abortions to births have all been on a downward trend. In fact, if one were to look at only those women getting their first abortion, the drop is even more dramatic.

Reporters, government officials, abortion advocates, and abortion foes are all trying to explain the trend. Depending on one’s partisan position, various explanations are that the abortion rate is declining because of inadequate access to abortion facilities, a shortage of abortionists, better use of contraception, the success of pro-life educational efforts, chastity programs, or the passage of women’s right to know laws, et cetera

It is likely that there are a large number of factors involved in the decline. But for the purpose of this analysis, it is not important to discover the real cause. What is important is the effect the decline is having on people’s attitudes.

For example, on January 16, 1998, in its coverage of the Roe v. Wade anniversary, ABC News examined the decline of abortion rates and reported that 60 percent of doctors who do abortions are 65 or older. Without an infusion of new providers, still fewer abortions might be done in the future. Then, immediately after this segment, ABC anchor Peter Jennings aired a report on the efforts of the Catholic Church doing post-abortion healing with Project Rachel.

What is amazing is that it was a sympathetic report. Women who were being helped by the support groups were interviewed. There was no indication that Project Rachel was anything other than a good program that reasonable people would support for those who needed it.

Such positive reporting of pro-life views, especially on a major network, has been extremely rare. But I would argue that it was not a coincidence that the segment followed a report of a dramatic drop in the number of abortion doctors. A psychological principle, working in an unseen way, even on the ABC News staff, had laid the groundwork for a positive perspective on post-abortion outreach programs.

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

A lot of psychological research has been done on why and how people make decisions. Up until 1956, however, little had been done to study the mind after decisions are carried out. Researcher Leon Festinger took an interest in this, and especially in learning why some people act in ways that do not appear logical. How, he wondered, do people rationalize behaviors and beliefs that are self-contradictory? His answers to these questions laid the ground work for the theory of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a fancy phrase for an easy concept. Any bit of knowledge a person has can be called a “cognitive element.” Cognitive elements can include anything from a specific known fact like “apples grow on trees,” to a vague concept like “Jerry is a nice guy.”

It is the nature of the mind to sort through all of these ideas, looking for patterns in an effort to reconcile them into a single true world view. Most cognitive elements, like the two about apples from trees and nice guy Jerry, have no apparent relation to each other. Their relationship is called “irrelevant.” If the two ideas come together in the mind, they produce neither tension nor stability.

When one learns that lemons grow on trees or that Jerry takes his children to church every Sunday, these new cognitive elements seem to agree and fit well with the previously held ideas. Ideas that fit well together are called “consonant.” They tend to strengthen the stability of a person’s confidence and world view, beliefs, and behavior.

If two cognitive elements (or ideas) are in conflict with each other, however, they are called “dissonant.” This “cognitive dissonance” produces tension. This tension, in turn, will motivate the mind to take some action to relieve this instability, this contradiction.

The mental strategies people use to deal with cognitive dissonance vary with individuals and situations. But this dissonance is a strain and people do try to find some way to get relief from it because they all have a basic need for consistency, stability, and order in the way they see the world. When new information threatens their previous views or assumptions, they feel uneasy or resort to defensive maneuvers of one kind or another.

One set of defensive strategies is marked by avoidance. In this case, the persons threatened with cognitive dissonance simply “tune out” the new information, ignore it, banish it from their minds, or declare it to be irrelevant. The more one is confronted with the new information, however, the more difficult it is to avoid dealing with the ignored conflict.

Alternatively, persons faced with a new idea that creates strong feelings of cognitive dissonance will simply deny the truth of the new information and insist that an older, more comfortably held belief is still more true. They may also try to reinforce prior beliefs by making aggressive, belligerent or even outlandish claims to bolster their more dearly held beliefs.

Finally, the two ideas that are originally seen as being dissonant can become more consonant either by (1) abandoning one of the old ideas and replacing it with the new information which is accepted as true, or (2) reflecting on the two dissonant ideas until one discovers how one or both can be modified in a way that eliminates some, most, or all of the tension.

The most important principle in the theory of cognitive dissonance is simply this: some ideas are more resistant to change than others. Dearly held ideas, therefore, will tend to shape one’s interpretation of new information. Ideas that come into conflict with these ideas are more subject to change. Furthermore, when two dearly held ideas come into conflict, it is more likely that a person will resort to denial and avoidance behavior rather than modify or abandon either idea.

When applied to the abortion debate, the resistance-to-change concept allows us to understand how much cognitive dissonance surrounds the abortion issue and how it can most likely be reduced and resolved in our favor. The most important factor in selecting a strategy is to determine which idea is more resistant to change and to change the one that is less resistant.

Relieving Mental Tension Over Abortion

Everyone holds some contradictory ideas at some times, but if the bits of knowledge that are in discord do not hold much importance, the efforts to deal with them will be minor. Life and death issues are always important, however. This is why the abortion debate produces so much emotional strain and activity among activists on both sides, and so much denial and avoidance behavior by the millions who simply do not want to think about it.

Beliefs touching on self-esteem are among the most important ideas held by all people. For many people, basic self-respect is one of the cognitive elements that is most highly resistant to change. Any idea that threatens their self-respect is likely to be rejected. Conversely, any idea that boosts their self-respect is likely to be accepted.

This is the concept that ties together the rise and fall of abortion rates with cognitive dissonance theory, and my recommendations for improving pro-life educational efforts.

During the 1970s and 1980s, rising abortion rates created cognitive dissonance in American society, which caused widespread denial and avoidance of the issue. The two ideas in conflict were:

(1) The abortion business was expanding. There were more and more clinics, and the number of abortions was climbing or maintaining at a very high rate;

(2) We Americans are a noble and virtuous people.

That first idea was a fact. It was a fact that was impossible to dispute. But the second point, though only an opinion, involves critical issues of self-respect and national pride. That makes it all the more resistant to change. Many pro-lifers may have decided that Americans are not noble and virtuous, but the public in general was (and is) unwilling to abandon this positive view of our national character.

Because both points resist change, the average American could most easily deal with the tension produced by these two ideas simply by deciding that they don’t conflict. In other words, since Americans are virtuous and abortion rates are rising, abortion must be morally acceptable. From this viewpoint, it was not well-reasoned arguments in favor of abortion that convinced the American public to accept abortion as a moral choice. Instead, public acceptance was motivated by the need to resolve the rise in abortion rates with the view of ourselves as a virtuous people.

During the ’70s and ’80s, pro-life efforts to call attention to the rise in abortion rates and the immorality of abortion were perceived as an attack on the virtue of the American people. Within this denunciation of abortion, many people saw pro-lifers as disturbers of the peace who were maligning the good will of the American population. Thus, hostility toward pro-lifers was not only a result of media bias, it was also the result of cognitive dissonance.

But now the situation has reversed. The psychological elements of cognitive dissonance theory have shifted to favor pro-lifers, if we know how to apply it. These are the new cognitive elements:

(1) Abortion numbers are declining, fewer doctors are willing to do them, and clinics are scarcer;

(2) We Americans are a noble and virtuous people.

Conflict resolved.

Once the first point has changed (abortion rates began to fall), it makes sense for people to think that the second point (American’s innate virtue) caused the first.

In the earlier decades, the dynamics were working against the pro-life position. But a great reversal is now underway. Under the new facts, the same dynamic can start to work in favor of the pro-life position.

Recommendations for Framing the Abortion Debate

Most of the public for all these years was highly uncomfortable with abortion. Most people who saw themselves as “pro-choice” were not enthusiastic about abortion, but they saw no alternative other than to accept the status quo. Now that abortion rates are on the decline, most people are inclined to greet this news with great relief.

Most Americans have been wishing that the whole problem would just go away. While we all know that it will not go away completely any time soon, the news that abortion is on the decline reduces cognitive dissonance for those in the middle majority of Americans who have mostly tried to ignore the issue. In many cases, reducing their tension level by showing them the positive trend will also help to draw them out of their shells and give them reasons to support the new trend toward reducing abortions.

The accommodation of abortion never really brought relief of the tension that people felt. But the decline in abortion rates is beginning to trigger a powerful shift in public perceptions. It is powerful because people want it to be true. They want to avoid despair. They want hope. They want to think well of themselves and their society. They want to resolve the decades-long tension produced by cognitive dissonance.

Emphasizing the decline in abortion rates can also have the salutary effect of heartening those who have been working hard at pro-life efforts for years. For the public, a consistent effort to call attention to the declining abortion rate can produce a “bandwagon effect” by establishing a sense of momentum in the direction of our virtuous society moving away from abortion.

Most importantly, if the above analysis is correct, the good news that abortion rates are declining lets people know that is now psychologically safe to let their guards down. By removing the fear that our message will undermine their self-esteem, we enable people to listen to information they deliberately ignored before. By focusing, even momentarily, on this good news, we are proclaiming the success of our inherently virtuous society in rejecting a mistake that will soon be in our past. Instead of our message being a cause for greater tension, alarm, and guilt, it can be heard and accepted as an explanation for the decline in abortion, and even welcomed as a guide for efforts to continue reducing abortion rates.

Discussing the decline also allows us to claim credit for it. That places us in the role of being victors rather than doomsayers. To do this, we should explain that the decline is due to our educational efforts that have helped women to better avoid abortions, which most women never really wanted in the first place.

We should also give credit to American women in general. Thirty years of abortion have resulted in a new generation of women who now know, from personal experience, or from observing their friends, what abortion really is–an ugly encounter with death, grief, and guilt. The decline in abortion rates, we should emphasize, is largely due to this new generation of better-informed women, who are now discouraging their daughters and co-workers from making the same mistake.

These brief points should be made in coffee room discussions at work, in letters to the editor, in printed educational materials, and by every pro-life spokesperson handling a media interview. Preferably these points should be stated at the beginning of the interview or public presentation. Our goal should be to relieve cognitive dissonance as early as possible so as to better prepare the listeners to want to accept and believe the information that follows this good news.

Jumping to a discussion of the declining abortion rate is especially effective when an exasperated interviewer asks if the conflict over abortion will ever be resolved. We need only point out that it is actually already in the process of being resolved. It is only a matter of time before the negative effects of abortion are so well known that few, if any, women will consider it.

Educating the public about the aftermath of abortion is especially important. Most people who have supported a “pro-choice” position understood themselves as supporting something that was good for women. When they find out that abortion rates are declining, that better-informed women are choosing abortion less frequently, and that those who have had abortions are now counseling against it and entering into post-abortion healing programs, it will not be difficult or stressful for them to accept this new information and modify their views to a more pro-life position. This approach allows them to maintain their view of themselves as compassionate both before and after they learned this new information.

We have come a long way since 1973. For nearly three decades the pro-life movement has tried to argue not only the case against abortion, but also the case for our society’s guilt. That most people didn’t want to hear this isn’t surprising.

Today, the situation has changed. Abortion rates are declining. Instead of focusing on guilt, we can focus on hope. If we are mindful now of the task of relieving psychological distress, we will find our task of educating on abortion aftermath to be easier.

Dr. Rachel McNair served as national president of Feminists for Life of America from 1984-1994, and is now director of the research arm of the Seamless Garment Network. She got her Ph.D. in psychology and sociology in 1999 in order to do research.

Author’s Note: This concept is discussed in more depth in the on-line book Achieving Peace in the Abortion War, especially chapters 1, 4, and 17. The book also discusses reasons for the decline, involving the emotional aftermath of abortion for all concerned and the social dynamics which indicate why the downturn may well be permanent. It is available at www.fnsa.org/apaw.