Not long after Obama’s reelection, Marjorie Dannenfelser sought the help of one of her oldest and most trusted allies: Kellyanne Conway. Antiabortion activism was in Conway’s DNA, Dannenfelser would say, encoded from her childhood at a Catholic school in New Jersey. Like Dannenfelser, Conway believed the problem for Republicans wasn’t opposition to abortion but how they sold that view to voters. Their men—Republican candidates—avoided the issue or said the wrong thing entirely, like Todd Akin did. The dynamic was an immediate, and significant, problem: of the 233 House Republicans who would soon be serving in the new Congress in 2013, only 20 were women.
They needed to teach the men.
On a cold day in early 2013, Conway headed to a golf resort in Williamsburg, Virginia, to start their reeducation effort. She was scheduled to appear with two of the party’s prominent male consultants on the first evening of a private retreat of House Republicans to talk about what had gone so very wrong for the party during the 2012 race.
As gigs went, it was hardly inviting. The mood was somber, with none of the giddy optimism of when many of the Tea Party members were still new to Congress two years earlier. The overwhelming focus of the lawmakers were the looming fiscal fights. But Conway came to deliver a different message: abortion could win elections for Republicans—so long as their candidates followed her and Dannenfelser’s advice.
Looking out at the overwhelmingly male audience, Conway didn’t mince words. Akin’s views that rape couldn’t result in a pregnancy weren’t that unusual among socially conservative activists. They were deeply rooted in the antiabortion movement, going back to a book published by John C. Willke in 1985. But to the general public, they were unscientific and immediately cast Akin as a misogynistic dinosaur. In her comments, Conway offered some clear advice to avoid making the same mistake. She spoke from experience. Akin had briefly been a polling client, though Conway resigned after his comment. “Rape is a four-letter word,” she told the crowd. “If your mommy told you not to say four-letter words, remember rape is one of them.”
By this point in her career, Conway was used to lecturing men. Over her two decades working as a conservative pollster, she had learned that delivering these kinds of presentations at Republican gatherings could feel, as she joked, like entering a bachelor party in the locker room of the Elks Club. She had also become what antiabortion activists called the “gold standard” of polling for their movement, arming them with data to craft their messaging and legislation. Conway worked for socially conservative Republicans like Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Pence, who needed help reaching female voters, and for advocacy groups, including the Susan B. Anthony List.
As a girl, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick had been raised in their movement, growing up in a matriarchy with her single mother, grandmother, and aunts in a house adorned with crucifixes and saint statues. Her childhood was cards, church choir, and boisterous Sunday dinners after Mass. Starting at twelve, she worked summers packing blueberries for sixteen cents a crate in the shed of Indian Brand Farm, an operation owned by her parish youth group leader. She didn’t like to lose, eventually winning the New Jersey Blueberry Princess pageant and the World Champion Blueberry Packing competition. That contest was initially called a tie, until she asked for a recount. “The faster you went, the more money you’d make,” Conway later explained to NJ Advance Media. And Conway was nothing if not quick and hungry.
Like Dannenfelser, her career took off in the early 1990s, as the Year of the Woman took off in Washington, and any hope of overturning Roe seemed impossible. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the other newly elected women in the Senate were not Dannenfelser’s or Conway’s kind of women. As action causes reaction, political change prompts political backlash. And 1992—the seminal year for Democratic women who supported abortion rights—sparked a band of conservative women devoted to the opposite.
Dannenfelser and Conway were at the forefront of this new, if much smaller, young sisterhood—fresh out of college, against abortion, and determined to make space for conservative women in politics. Young and idealistic, white and mostly Christian, these women saw themselves as the true champions of women and their babies. They hoped to expand the definition of being a woman in politics, to create a conservative womanhood where professional advancement and abortion rights were not synonymous. They had a lot of work to do. The political power against them—Planned Parenthood, EMILYs List, and other organizations that supported Democratic women who backed abortion rights—started years earlier, giving them a significant head start.
The question was how to push back. Dannenfelser, who had left her job as a House aide to take care of her young daughter, connected with Rachel MacNair, a vegan Quaker in Missouri who led a group called Feminists for Life. MacNair viewed being “pro-life” as also being against the death penalty and nuclear war, and had conceived her son through artificial insemination, something she said her Catholic friends just did not understand. MacNair, Dannenfelser, and others believed the antiabortion cause needed its own version of EMILYs List, so they started a new group to promote female candidates who opposed abortion rights. They named it for Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist, who they believed had once described abortion as “child murder” in an article from 1896. The article was signed only with a single “A.,” and there was no contemporary evidence that Anthony opposed abortion. But she became a symbol to them of a powerful woman on their side.
In 1994, SBA’s first, small class of candidates was lifted into office as part of the wave that swept the Republicans to unified control of Congress. For the first time since Roe, a party that opposed abortion controlled both chambers of Congress. That year became a beginning for antiabortion women, their own miniature 1992.
When MacNair left to pursue a PhD in psychology, Dannenfelser raised her hand to become SBA’s executive director. Dannenfelser turned a closet in her home in Arlington, Virginia, into the group’s office. One of her first actions was perhaps her most consequential: they would no longer support only female antiabortion candidates. SBA would back anyone who opposed abortion, male or female. The cause came first. If a woman who supported abortion rights was running, they would back an antiabortion man running against her.
Conway came on as an early pollster for the Susan B. Anthony List. She hosted one of Dannenfelser’s earliest fundraising events, a tea for the spouses of members of Congress. With Republicans in power, brazen young conservative women were getting their moment. The media couldn’t get enough of them. As Conway put it, they were “Young. Lively. Stylish. Opinionated. Thin.” What they were certainly not was feminists, a phrase Conway and her crew dismissed as outdated, anti-male, and pro-abortion. “You can’t appeal to us through our wombs,” she told The Atlantic shortly after opening her polling firm. “We’re pro-life. The fetus beat us. We grew up with sonograms. We know life when we see it.”
Soon Conway had Washington currency, making regular appearances on cable news shows. Still, it wasn’t always easy. The men at The Weekly Standard dubbed her part of “a new class of Washington-bred cigar-and-martini bimbos,” along with Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and other “policy babes,” as another piece put it. And then there were the unwanted sexual advances from powerful men. Back then it was better to pretend they didn’t happen or were your fault or wouldn’t happen again, Conway later told Cosmopolitan, the women’s magazine. Her political rise, after all, was sandwiched between two seminal episodes of male sexual misconduct in Washington: Clarence Thomas’s alleged harassment of Anita Hill, and Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Conway learned quickly that trying to make some “federal case out of somebody who was in a huge position of power” would only embarrass the woman making it. She wanted power to push her agenda in Washington, and she understood the rules conservative women had to follow to get it.
By the time she addressed the Republican retreat that chilly week in 2013, she had married George Conway, the prominent conservative lawyer and star of the Federalist Society, had four children, and enjoyed a successful career as a political strategist. As the Republican men jotted down her advice in their notebooks, she knew her party’s problems ran deeper than just talking about rape. The Democratic strategy painting Republicans as waging “war on women” had worked. The gender gap in 2012 was substantial, with Obama winning female voters by twelve points—as the autopsy pointed out.
But it was wrong to think that Democrats had won on the abortion issue itself, argued Conway. Yes, Democrats jumped on Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments to cast Republicans as disconnected and tone-deaf. But they used the misstep to bolster a broader, more effective political rallying cry—that they were the party of women’s health care and empowerment. In surveys before the election, only a minority of Democratic and independent voters had said abortion would be very important to their vote. To them, abortion seemed secure. But health care was near the top of their list of concerns. “Part of the hijacking of the lexicon this year has been, instead of talking about abortion, then it was choice, now it’s women’s health,” Conway had said a month before the election, when she sat on a stage with Richards for a panel on the women’s vote in the coming election. What Conway saw was that Democrats had transformed attacks on abortion into an attack on women’s health, a far more energizing issue.
In her own presentations, Conway often argued that women were the “chief health care officers” for their families—the ones who made the appointments and nagged everyone to go to the doctor. They were motivated by health care issues, even if they didn’t think much about abortion. Tying those issues together made for a far more potent message than simply being “pro-choice.” And for the Democrats in 2012, it had worked. Obama was again in the White House.
Unless Republicans reclaimed the issue of women’s health with their own message, their own infrastructure, even their own set of facts, they would lose again, Conway believed. Women should take the lead in delivering the conservative case against abortion. And when their men talked about the issue, they needed to do so with empathy and care—and not be scared to defend their position. Democrats used words like health, freedom, and choice. Conway would work with Dannenfelser to do the same thing, and purge their movement of words like rape.
They took their advice on the road. At the party’s quarterly meeting, Dannenfelser and Conway set up in a discreet conference room at the Peabody Memphis, away from the live ducks in the fountain and the reporters who roamed the ornate lobby. Their sessions were kept quiet, not listed on the event’s public schedule—a secret abortion boot camp.
Candidates and congressmen rolled through, eager to win elections and female voters. The two women offered blunt advice: silence on abortion isn’t an option. Unlike Democratic voters, Republicans were likelier to list abortion as important to their vote. Republicans lost when Democrats attacked them for being too extreme and they did not fight back, they argued. Their party’s silence on abortion allowed liberals to define what conservatives believed.
Dannenfelser and Conway pointed a video camera at each man and asked a simple question: “Why do you believe abortion is wrong?” Then they all reviewed the tape. It didn’t always go well. The men rattled on for too long or struggled to find the right words. Or, worst of all to Conway, they used the “R-word.” Simpler was better, they advised. “Two sentences is really the goal,” said Dannenfelser. “Then stop talking.”
Flip the script, said Conway. Challenge Democrats when they try to trot out their message about women’s health. “Women’s health issues are osteoporosis or breast cancer or seniors living alone who don’t have enough money for health care,” said Conway, not abortion. Polling showed that voters were more supportive of restrictions later in pregnancy, once women were in the second trimester. So ask your opponent, “Exactly when in a pregnancy do you think abortion should be banned?”
These “murder boards,” as Dannenfelser called them, were a central part of a new mission: “Project Lifeline.” The stakes were too high for their candidates to approach a podium or camera unprepared, so SBA offered them a “lifeline.” Major statewide candidates got one-on-one, in-person training sessions. Others could do them online through a password-protected site. Any politician who wanted SBA’s endorsement was required to participate, though the group made some exceptions.
The overall goal, of course, was much bigger than simply fixing how their politicians talked about abortion. It was part of a longer-term strategy to regain power and end abortion. Dannenfelser had transformed her anger in Norquist’s conference room into something more effective: a plan. She envisioned fixing it all. She would reshape media coverage in their favor, with their own experts and testimony. She would push new restrictions as far as they could through the House, where Republicans were in control. And she would win enough seats in the Senate to put an antiabortion majority in control.
They needed data, their own science, to more credibly push back against the statistics coming from what they saw as “hostile sources,” such as the Guttmacher Institute, the research and policy center that originally started as part of Planned Parenthood in 1968. SBA expanded its nascent Charlotte Lozier Institute to become a research arm that hired its own ob-gyns and scientists, people who identified as “pro-life.” (The group was named for one of America’s first female physicians, who died from a hemorrhage after the birth of her third child.) Mainstream doctors disagreed with their findings. But Dannenfelser and the movement now had their own scientific reports and their own experts who could testify before Congress for abortion restrictions and produce research that supported their goals.
They jumped on opportunities to press their case. When Kermit Gosnell, a doctor who ran a West Philadelphia abortion clinic, was found guilty in 2013 of murdering preterm babies after they were born, Dannenfelser used the very public examples of infanticide to push for a federal twenty-week abortion ban. Gosnell’s horrific actions and the gruesome images that emerged in his trial led to broad condemnation, and abortion opponents equated the murdered infants who were born early with fetuses aborted at a similar gestational age. “This is a visual argument that no one would ever want to have,” Dannenfelser told The New York Times. “But if we’re going to have it, let’s go ahead and have it. What are the limits? What are we as a society willing to forbear?”
Dannenfelser realized they could use the shifting media and technology environment to their favor. It was the new journalistic era of the “micro-scoop,” the blog, the tweet. The internet was endless, and media outlets were desperate to fill it with their content. Suddenly, Dannenfelser seemed to be everywhere. Available for lunch or a coffee. Happy to dash off a quote to mainstream reporters, unlike so many others in her conservative circles. Her staff filed Dannenfelser’s quotes in binders by year and outlet: Christian and mainstream and women’s magazines. They piled up in stacks and boxes against the wall of SBA’s small office, a physical manifestation of their expanding influence to reshape the national conversation.
The number of her quotes—her flood of words—gave SBA an outsize voice and concealed the small stature of its actual operation. Even as a majority of Americans continued to support abortion rights, the saturation and digital spread created a sense that Dannenfelser’s movement had more reach and public support than it actually did.
While SBA grew its reach and influence over how the party messaged its antiabortion positions, its allies in states like Texas pushed through the twenty-week abortion bans. When antiabortion lawmakers in the US House of Representatives passed their most far-reaching abortion bill in decades, a ban on most procedures after twenty weeks of pregnancy, they named it the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. SBA and other antiabortion groups furnished the politicians with studies arguing that a fetus could feel pain at twenty weeks post-fertilization.
But the developing science of fetal pain was complex, and most scientists who had researched the issue said those claims were false. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the main association for ob-gyns in the United States, pointed to research showing that a fetus could not perceive pain until perhaps the third trimester. But the antiabortion movement used the still-evolving and disputed science to point out doubt. “I am a bit concerned that if we just say we don’t know, we may be causing quite a lot of suffering. I would rather err on the safe side and say, ‘Well, the fetus may be suffering and so we ought to do something about it,’” said Vivette Glover, a perinatal psychobiologist, whom the Family Research Council, a social conservative group, cited in a pamphlet about fetal pain.
In reality, the bill had no chance of becoming law, given that Democrats controlled the Senate. Instead, it was constructed as a legal and political trap, designed to undercut the viability standard set in Roe and to force Democrats to defend the less popular position of permitting abortion later in pregnancy. The legislation was a continuation of the chipping-away strategy that had long been a template for their movement.
But they knew that seemingly futile bills could become law if they just persevered long enough. Back in 1995, the National Right to Life Committee began to refer to an abortion procedure called intact dilation and evacuation as “partial-birth abortion,” using the language associated with birthing a viable baby to campaign against the procedure. Congressional Republicans took up the cause, crafting legislation that would ban it, and President Clinton vetoed those bills twice during his administration. But in 2003, after eight years, President Bush signed a ban into law. The Supreme Court affirmed the restriction four years later, and intact dilation and evacuation abortions became illegal. The ruling marked the first time since Roe that the court upheld an abortion restriction without an exception to protect women’s health.
So when the twenty-week ban passed the House in June 2013 but failed to advance beyond that, antiabortion Republicans looked to the recent past for proof a win was possible if they just stayed in the fight long enough. In comments to reporters, Representative Trent Franks, who sponsored the twenty-week ban, cited the fight to ban partial-birth abortion as a model. “Everybody said, you know, it’s not constitutional, it can’t pass, it can’t go anywhere,” he told Politico. “It took time to do that and it even had to succeed a presidential veto. But it eventually did.”
In story after story about the twenty-week legislation, SBA was presented as a powerful force, equivalent to its opponent, Planned Parenthood. But in reality, SBA was a minnow in a city of sharks. Its whole operating budget in 2013 was $7 million, according to internal documents. (Planned Parenthood that year would spend nearly $400 million on its programs and operations, excluding the medical services that made up the bulk of its more than $1 billion budget.) Project Lifeline had a budget of about $264,000, according to SBA’s private business plan.
Still, for all the binders of her press coverage, Dannenfelser knew the best way—really, the only way—to claim power and push back on the dismissal of their movement in the autopsy would be by showing the antiabortion message could win elections. SBA needed proof of concept that went beyond its work in smaller House races.
SBA had never run a statewide campaign before. There was no way that the group, with its tiny staff and shoestring budget, could participate in every competitive Senate race. It would have to be selective and pick its best opportunities for success. For now, it would start small, with three statewide elections in 2014. SBA targeted three incumbent Democrats in states with strong antiabortion electorates—Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina—and aimed to make those campaigns directly about abortion policy. Republicans needed to gain six seats to win control of the Senate; Dannenfelser’s three could put them halfway there.
SBA designed a door-knocking campaign, with year-round field offices, to increase direct contact with voters it believed could be influenced to cast their ballots based on their opposition to abortion. It was a tactic learned by studying the Obama campaign’s winning strategy in 2008: start early and use the new flood of data now available about voters online to target those most open to your message.
But to do all that, Dannenfelser needed money. More money than the sisterhood of women volunteering at pregnancy centers and running the local antiabortion benefits for their church could give. Dannenfelser tapped her network of believers in Washington, including the kind of influential conservatives who attended the Falls Church, an evangelical congregation in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Its congregants included Republican power brokers like Marc Short, a close ally of Pence’s from Capitol Hill who was now the head of Freedom Partners, an umbrella organization for donors allied with the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch. The brothers were part of a new class of megadonors whose political operation rivaled the Republican Party itself.
The Kochs and many of their libertarian donors didn’t particularly care about ending abortion. David Koch was open about his support for abortion rights, even boasting about his position in interviews. But Short positioned Dannenfelser and SBA as a force that could drive the party’s conservative base to the polls, a useful tool for the Kochs’ aims of winning a Republican majority that could lower taxes and cut regulation. Freedom Partners would eventually give SBA around a million dollars, a rare seven-figure donation for the small group, according to two people familiar with the donation.
The sum was small by Washington standards. But the symbolism was big. To Dannenfelser, it felt like validation, a sign that their plan to gain power just might work.