The Third Way Culture Project
July 20, 2006
TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Rachel Laser, Director of The Culture Project
SUBJECT: Talking Points for the Child Custody Protection Act
Majority leader Frist has indicated that the Child Custody Protection Act (“CCPA”)
will be up for a vote in the Senate imminently. Last year, the House passed a similar
bill, the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, in April 2005.
First, to summarize, the Child Custody Protection Act makes it a crime, punishable
by up to a year in prison and a fine, for any person other than a parent to help a teen
cross state lines to obtain an abortion unless the teen’s home state’s abortion parental
involvement requirements were already met.
This bill is not intended to reduce the number of abortions in America (I’ll get to
that later), but to win a political debate. In the 1980s, the pro-choice community
developed a winning strategy based on the “Who Decides?” campaign. This campaign
cast the decision to have an abortion as between a woman, her doctor and her family
versus the government. This message had the effect of unifying pro-choice
progressives with anti-government conservatives.
After several years on the losing end of this debate, the pro-life community
commandeered the “Who Decides?” message by taking specific types and instances of
abortions and forcing politicians to affirmatively answer the question of who decides.
How about if the woman is 8 months pregnant? How about if the woman is a
teenager? Thus, the pro-life movement became more about abortion regulation than
abortion bans and the pro-choice side was left to fight dozens of battles on the
abortion issue—most of them on territory where their tried and tested “Who
Decides?” message was no longer the antidote it had once been.
We will not mislead you: when asked, about 3/4 of voters support a law requiring
women under 18 to get parental consent for any abortion. So opponents of this
measure have an uphill climb. But our own polling shows that nearly 70% of voters
oppose ab