Single Issue Advocacy Is Underrated

The habit of requiring every cause to constantly shout-out its support for coalitional "allies" is a bad one

In the late 19th Century, American social reformers started to recognize the harms caused by excessive drinking. This became a cause especially for feminists, who correctly recognized alcohol’s role in domestic violence, abandonment of families, and a number of social ills that harmed women and children. Eventually, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was formed as an offshoot of other feminist causes such as suffragism.

The WCTU is credited with being one of the activist organizations that eventually achieved the temperance movement’s goal of national Prohibition of alcohol. But the WCTU wasn’t the organization that really moved the country. It was a later formed organization, the Anti-Saloon League, that really put in the time. The ASL lobbied state and county lawmakers, promoted pro-temperance prosecutors and judges, and put the issue on the front page.

The ASL, unlike the WCTU, was a single issue organization. Whereas the WCTU advocated for the full panoply of feminist causes, the ASL focused on one thing, Prohibition, and it eventually got it. (Obviously, Prohibition did not work and did not stick, but it would have never been achieved in the first place if it had not been for the single issue advocacy of the ASL.)

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, Franklin Roosevelt, who suffered from a form of infant paralysis, put his considerable rhetorical talents behind the March of Dimes. Depression era citizens sent in their dimes to the charity, which worked singlehandedly on vaccines and treatments for polio. Eventually, the charity succeeded; its funding was crucial for the development of the Salk and Sabin vaccines that eradicated polio. The charity has gone on to other projects and is still a successful charity, but does not enjoy the central role in the public imagination that it held when it was fighting polio as its sole mission.

Successful single issue campaigns redound throughout history, from national organizations like the United Negro College Fund, which sent smart Black kids, historically excluded from secondary education, to college, to local organizations like BUStop, the anti-busing advocacy organization that took control of Los Angeles school board politics in the late 1970’s and stopped mandatory busing.

However, despite this being a model of successful advocacy, for causes good and bad, most activist organizations stay far away from the single issue model, and even those who pursued narrower focuses in the past have now branched out. Take, for instance, this infamous tweet from last spring:

ACLU @ACLU

Abortion bans disproportionately harm: ▪️ Black, Indigenous & other people of color ▪️ the LGBTQ community ▪️ immigrants ▪️ young people ▪️ those working to make ends meet ▪️ people with disabilities Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.

The first thing you have to ask about this is how the ACLU got involved in abortion rights advocacy in the first place. To be clear, the ACLU has done a lot of good work in the area. But its not exactly the ACLU’s bailiwick— there are plenty of organizations, often run by cis women who face the brunt of abortion restrictions, such as NARAL, who do excellent advocacy on abortion related causes. The ACLU, in contrast, is a civil liberties organization, founded by First Amendment absolutists. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not as though the First Amendment no longer faces threats in the modern world. (For instance, just this week, a state government banned drag shows, which strikes me as a pretty clear First Amendment violation.)

The ACLU, of course, still does a lot of essential First Amendment work, but it is also in the process of being supplanted by other organizations like FIRE who claim the ACLU has lost its focus in an attempt to become an all purpose law firm representing Lefty causes.

But OK, let’s concede that abortion is a civil liberties issue— which, to be clear, it surely is. Then we get to the substance of the ACLU’s tweet. Abortion is one of the simplest issues in terms of who it impacts: it impacts cis women of childbearing age. (Just so some pro-lifers don’t yell at me, yes, the other group it impacts are fetuses, but that, of course, is the abortion debate, i.e., whether they have any rights claims that override the interests of cis women.) Further, it impacts cis women of childbearing age of any race, any immigration status, and whether or not they have disabilities. Rich women have abortions as do poor women.

This used to be widely understood on the Left, and informed a lot of pro-choice messaging.

And, while this probably shouldn’t need to be said, abortion is actually not a big issue in what we now call the "LGBTQ community” and used to call gays, lesbians, and trans people. Abortion is a product of heterosexual intercourse. Yes, gays and lesbians do procreate, but their procreation decisions usually involve a great deal of planning and contracts; they don’t tend to have the sort of voluntary unplanned heterosexual intercourse with no intention of conception that result in the bulk of abortions. (To be clear, abortion rights are still important for lesbians because they can be sexually assaulted by men. But as a percentage of the abortion total, this accounts for a small number of abortions. It’s fair to say that abortion is far more of a cis heterosexual woman’s concern.)

And as for trans people, yes, some trans men can get pregnant. But a lot of trans men have had medical treatments that make pregnancy impossible, and the number of trans men who have abortions is, again, a tiny percentage of the total.

So obviously abortion restrictions don’t disproportionately harm the LGBTQ community. The ACLU, an organization I used to work for, contribute to, and dearly love, was, for lack of a better term, lying. They obviously aren’t idiots. They know that abortion is a cis women’s issue.

So why did they say it? Well, they said it because they were trying to be a good coalition member. The rules of activism require that you periodically shout out all your allies. So there they are in that tweet- not only LGBT groups, but also Blacks, Indians, immigrants, young hipster urbanites (that’s what these groups mean when they say “young people”), the poor, and disabled people. It has nothing to do with the cis heterosexual women who bear the brunt of abortion bans— indeed, it’s almost actively insulting of them. It’s about the coalition.

But, of course, from a standpoint of actually persuading people to support abortion rights, that ACLU tweet is a disaster. It makes it look like the movement is afraid to say that abortion is a women’s rights issue (this has become a common problem among activist groups). It makes the pro-choice position look dishonest. It looks like pro-choicers embrace inaccurate information because they want to keep ideologues happy.

And it’s the type of mistake that the Anti-Saloon League would have never made. Plenty of ASL members were involved in feminist causes and sympathetic to the broader goals of suffragists. But to use a famous phrase from the Black civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, they kept their eyes on the prize. An organization that spreads its activism out over a variety of different causes becomes less effective at advocating important causes. Indeed, it can even become counterproductive, as the ACLU tweet shows.

Why does this happen? Well, one reason may go back to Left-wing theory, which is full of concepts like “united front” and “popular front” where a vanguard of activists will lead a broad coalition to work towards a slate of Marxist policy goals. But I’m not sure the people at modern civil rights organizations are that steeped in Marxist theory. Rather, I think the main thing is that this sort of thing is how you avoid headaches caused by your coalition partners. If an abortion rights group says “we’re going to go back to single issue messaging on abortion and how it is central to women’s rights”, that group is going to face accusations of racism, transphobia, ableism, and all the rest. It’s better to just go along and get along even if it dilutes the message.

I also think there’s a psychological issue at play. There’s a tendency for everyone to want to be an activist about everything. You can see how this plays out in public discourse— the same people who posed as experts on pandemic policy two years ago now declaim with an air of expertise on Ukraine or youth transition. It’s more fun to always be relevant and to have a certain sort of celebrity, and you don’t maintain that status by working only on a single issue; indeed, you may have to work in obscurity when that issue is not in the limelight.

But if you actually care about success, this all should infuriate you. Connecting abortion rights to unrelated, sometimes less popular causes is not good for abortion rights. Nor, I should add, should an immigration activist connect her cause to abortion rights, given there are some Catholics who may strongly support immigrant rights while disagreeing with the Left coalition’s position on abortion. Single issue advocacy allows you to maximize your effectiveness. We should get back to it.