Propaganda Strategies of Anti-Abortion Conspiracists

The final speaker at this AoIR 2023 session is Zelly Martin, whose focus is on the female spreaders of health disinformation. This is also in the context of the US Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the right to abortion in the United States, which is part of a long history of activism against abortion, birth control, and female reproductive rights. These in turn are motivated in part by the racist fear that white people in the US are going to be replaced by people of colour, which sees reproductive rights as a vehicle for this so-called ‘Great Replacement’.

Such conspiracy theories connect populism, participatory disinformation, the democratisation of propaganda, and situated knowledge; the communities engaging in them may be stigmatised by mainstream culture, but have real and substantial damaging consequences. Zelly’s project gathered a range of disinformation content relating to anti-abortion agendas, which also connected to health and political disinformation and other forms of conspiracist content.

Such content would question the safety of abortion medicines (alongside the safety of COVID=10 vaccines and other medicines); would spread political disinformation on the World Health Organisation or the US elections; and would thereby also encourage conspiracist ideation relating to black and LGBTIQ+ communities and other common targets of such conspiracies. Conversely, they would also seek to frame the anti-abortion movement as more inclusive (to prevent the abortion of LGBTIQ+ babies) and paint the pro-choice movement as exclusive and white-dominated. Prominent pregnant celebrities were also drawn into this propaganda, very much against their will.

The visual style of such content aimed (not always successfully) to portray a young and cool image in order to overcome the perception of anti-abortion activists as churchy and conservative. It democratised propaganda and disinformation by involving small-scale political influencers, women, queer people, people of colour, and young people and thereby also encouraged the spread of other conspiracy theories. This is a kind of embodied propaganda that seeks to usurp established communities to further aims that do not necessarily align with the genuine interests of the communities these people belong to.