Pritzker, Dems push to widen abortion messaging beyond ‘social issues’ silo

By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
hmeisel@capitolnewsillinois.com

CHICAGO – Gov. JB Pritzker used part of his eight-minute primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention this week to push his own party to shift its messaging on abortion rights and reframe the issue as an economic one.

The billionaire governor said that when he meets with business leaders, they consistently tell him “they need more workers to fill all the jobs they have.”

“But the anti-freedom, anti-family policies of MAGA Republicans are driving workers away,” Pritzker said of Republican-controlled states that have moved to severely restrict access to reproductive health care in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision.

Read more: In primetime DNC speech, Pritzker leans into role of benevolent billionaire | Illinois Democrats see abortion rights as ‘fundamental’ issue in 2024

“Here's the thing: Americans don't want to be forced to drive 100 miles to deliver a baby because a draconian abortion law shut down the maternity ward,” he continued. “Americans with LGBTQ kids don't want them facing discrimination at school because the state sanctioned it. Americans want to go to their neighborhood grocery store and not have to worry about some random guy open-carrying an AR-15.”

Abortion as an economic issue

Moving abortion rights in particular out of the silo of “social issues” is what Anne Caprara – Pritzker's chief of staff and a longtime Democratic strategist – sees as a path forward for the party. 

"We like to talk about these things as ‘social issues,’” Caprara said, using air quotes to emphasize her point. “They're actually very much economic issues.”

Caprara made the remark during a panel discussion Wednesday put on by Think Big America, the “dark money” progressive advocacy organization Pritzker launched with his own seed money last fall. The group is supporting abortion rights measures in a handful of states, and Caprara pointed to the ripple effects of Idaho’s near-total abortion ban.

Read more: Pritzker launches self-funded nationwide abortion rights advocacy organization

The ban was implemented in the summer of 2022 following the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. It makes providing an abortion a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and loss of medical license, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. 

As of February, Idaho had lost nearly a quarter of its practicing obstetricians while three hospital systems have shuttered their labor and delivery departments, creating massive health care deserts for pregnant women.

“There's a lot of businesses out there right now trying to figure out where to put their headquarters ... trying to attract workers in their 20s and 30s and early 40s,” Caprara said, echoing her boss’ speech from the night before. “They have to go to the places where people want to live.”

Jefrey Pollock, president of New York-based political research and communications firm Global Strategy Group, pointed to recent examples of businesses successfully pushing back on laws advanced by Republican-controlled state legislatures.

In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration earlier this year was forced to roll back the majority of a 2022 law that drew significant criticism from the Walt Disney Company, whose theme parks and resorts net the state of Florida billions in sales taxes annually. 

Disney and DeSantis’ war of words over the “Parental Rights in Education Act” eventually became a complex and protracted legal battle, during which the entertainment juggernaut pulled the plug on plans to build a $1 billion business campus and relocate up to 2,000 jobs from California.

The law, referred to by opponents as the “don’t say gay bill,” still restricts discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity as part of any classroom curriculum. But after a federal appeals court indicated it would likely overturn the entire law, the state narrowed it, once again allowing discussions about LGBT-related subjects on non-classroom time and allowing school libraries to offer books in the same vein.

And in 2016, North Carolina’s business community played a large role in reversing a law that prohibited transgender people from using public bathrooms that match their gender identity. The so-called “bathroom bill” was repealed a year later after PayPal canceled a planned expansion that would have brought 400 jobs to the state while the NCAA and entertainers like Bruce Springsteen canceled scheduled tournaments and shows.

“Businesses, which are very important in North Carolina, stood up and said, ‘Hold on – can't do this,” Pollock said. “And it became a business issue ... because they made it an economic issue and had a voice that was very, very credible.”

But abortion rights advocates also stressed the importance of zooming in on the effects of abortion bans on individual households when messaging reproductive rights as an economic issue.

“Abortion does enable families to set their own course in terms of how many kids they want to have, who can stay in the workforce, how many breadwinners you'll have in the household,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of The Fairness Project, an organization that provides financial and strategic support on abortion rights campaigns.

“What does the household economy look like?” she continued, speaking with reporters after the Think Big America event. “And that really brings home that abortion is not just abortion. Abortion is an economic issue, abortion is a health care issue, abortion is a freedom issue.”

Abortion as a ‘freedom’ issue

Hall’s use of the word “freedom” when talking about abortion rights reflects an intentional shift advocates have made since SCOTUS’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. In the first abortion rights ballot measure campaign following the decision, an abortion rights group that dubbed itself “Kansas for Constitutional Freedom” leaned into the terminology that in recent years has played a major role in Republican messaging against Democrats and “big government.”

Just six weeks after the high court’s decision, Kansas voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have invalidated a state supreme court ruling that found Kansas’ constitution protects the right to an abortion and paved the way for restrictions. 

In the two years since, five other states have voted on abortion-related measures, with abortion rights groups winning each time. And in the 2024 campaign cycle, nearly a dozen states will take similar votes.

Wednesday evening’s DNC programming hammered at the theme of abortion as a “freedom” issue, with Planned Parenthood Action Fund CEO Alexis McGill Johnson telling the story of a Georgia woman who had to fly to California to receive abortion care last summer. McGill Johnson said the woman traveled from her home state to neighboring South Carolina and Florida, but ran up against bans that had just taken effect in both.

“We cannot call ourselves a free nation when women are not free,” she said, noting the woman had to take on travel expenses, in addition to arranging child care.

Earlier in the day, McGill Johnson rejected the notion that abortion access is losing its salience as an issue that drives voters following the initial shock of Roe v. Wade being overturned. At Wednesday’s event, she said voters can “hold two thoughts at the same time,” even as Democrats are fighting off attacks from Republicans centered on the economy and inflation.

Pollock, whose firm recently completed a research project on voter motivation for Pritzker’s Think Big America, said that while voters may not rank abortion as their top issue when talking to pollsters or the media, “that’s the wrong metric” when it comes to actual voter behavior.

“And so even if abortion is fourth or fifth on the sort of important scale, that does not mean that it's not one of the most persuasive messages against a Republican candidate,” he said.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of print and broadcast outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.