WDN Releases Case Study on Reproductive Rights Messaging Project

Women Donors Network and the Communications Consortium Media Center (CCMC) released a new case study describing a joint initiative called Moving Forward that they began in 2005. Moving Forward was — and is — an ambitious project to create messages and communications strategies that can win policy debates on behalf of women and deepen public understanding of women’s reproductive health needs.

When the initiative first began, its goal was to reframe the national conversation on reproductive health — first to clear anew channel for public discourse, and then to galvanize support for policy change that reflected broad-based public opinion. In the past seven years, it has succeeded in furthering this goal in many ways. Through passionate engagement, careful groundwork and targeted collaboration, Moving Forward has been able to affect public policies and help block extreme opponents of women’s health and rights in their attempts to roll back advances in those areas. Some of Moving Forward’s successes include:

• Leading an effort to recast the language of the reproductive health debate in a way that can reclaim the center and resonate with a very large and bipartisan group of Americans;
• Contributing to the defeat of several pernicious ballot initiatives, such as Colorado’s 2008 Amendment 48, a “personhood” initiative that sought to give constitutional rights to fertilized eggs;
• Helping to “out” the real agenda of extremist abortion opponents: ending access to birth control and legal contraceptives;
• Helping to shape the health care debate that led to important preventative services for women and families in the 2010 Affordable Care Act;
• Promoting the 2011 “well-woman” regulatory standards at the DEpartment of Health and Human Services that embedded contraception and family planning in the critical and cost-effective basic preventative care that health insurance plans must provide for women across their lifespan; and
• Providing a persuasive way to assure policymakers that the public overwhelmingly supports comprehensive sex education and birth control.