The abortion industry has hit on hard times. Over the last two decades, the number of providers and abortions has fallen by 33 percent and 25 percent, respectively.

For a billion dollar a year enterprise, that's a lot of lost revenue; and if recent polling is any indication, the slump hasn't hit bottom yet.

According to data released by the Pew Center in August, the gap in public sentiment about legalized abortion has closed. After years of supporters enjoying the clear edge, "now Americans are evenly divided on the question." Pew also reports significant gains in attitudes that abortions should be not only fewer in number, but more difficult to obtain.

Remarkably, this was registered during the most pro-choice administration in history, despite 40 years of pro-abortion legislation and marketing and lobbying by powerful, well-financed special interest groups.

Times are tough and they're getting tougher, but with over 1 million U.S. abortions annually at risk, industry stakeholders will waste no time applying their energies to reverse the downturn. One strategy that has worked well in the past is "controlling the terms of the debate."

Rights and choice

In the court of law, the pro-choice lobby pitched abortion as a constitutional right of individual privacy. In the court of popular opinion, it was promoted as an issue of sexual equality and reproductive choice ("My body, my choice"), with assurances that what was being destroyed was not a human being, but a clump of cells, a mass of tissue.

Then, when medical science confirmed that a genetically complete and unique human being was created at the moment of conception, the distinctive was switched to "persons"—the category of beings entitled to rights by virtue of abilities possessed in a measure deemed sufficient by (pick one): the State, the physician, the mother, (?).

But as the abortion industry grew, something was happening in clinics across the country that signaled its inevitable downturn...  Continue reading here.