When the draft majority opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was leaked in May 2022, I can't say I was shocked. I had seen for years how the pro-choice movement appeared frozen in the face of surmounting challenges to abortion rights. However, I was confused; how could one side have the majority of Americans and the other continue to win victories? When the pro-choice movement saved Democrats from a red wave in the 2022 elections, particularly at the state level, I was even more confused. After encountering varying perspectives in this class, I will argue that those who engage in sustained collective action tend to have a deep level of conviction in the cause, feel a sense of urgency to act, and be supported by social networks. These three factors are perhaps best epitomized by the anti-abortion movement, but are also present in other movements like the civil rights movement and Stop Cop City.

It perhaps seems obvious that people who engage in social movements believe in the cause, but what I am arguing is deeper than that. At least for the primary participants, the cause has to be in some way significantly connected to their own lives or fundamental values. While our issues are numerous, time and energy is limited — if someone is going to invest into a movement, it has to be uniquely important to them. The extensive links between social movements and religion illustrate this point well. One example is the anti-abortion movement, which shifted towards a more religious angle beginning in the late 1970s. As Carol Mason notes, abortion warriors “believe they are engaged in a holy war that transcends man's law” (87). Religion has the unique property of transcendence, making it a very powerful motivator. This religious motivation was also seen in the civil rights movement. Aldon Morris discusses how “the black church was the chief institutional force behind the sit-ins” of the late 1950s (230). Although the churches served other purposes, which I'll discuss later, the movement centers in the early 1960s used “black spirituals, sermons, and prayers” to “deepen the participants' commitment to the struggle” (Morris 233).

This isn't to say that religion is the only possible foundation for such a conviction; there are plenty of notable secular forces, albeit they might not inspire the same fanaticism. Mason makes a distinction between the conservative pro-life movement and the liberal right-to-life movement, the latter of which was based in “principles of natural or human rights” (16). More specifically, right-to-life rhetoric presupposes that the unborn are “political equals” to the born, and thus the Constitution also grants them the right to life (Mason 17). This too touches on participants' fundamental values of equality and respect for the U.S. Constitution. A more emotional articulation of this argument is the unequivocal portrayal of abortion as murder or “baby killing” — rhetoric that is so simple and powerful that almost all pro-life organizations now utilize it (Mason 10).

In addition to a strong conviction, participants also need to have a sense of urgency to act, which is often in the form of a perceived significant threat. In the case of the modern anti-abortion movement, this threat was Roe v. Wade. Of course, Roe was significant in itself, but much of the urgency came from a millennialism that prophesies abortion as “a sign of the end times of our national humanity, if not of mortal life itself” (Mason 2). On the other side, the revitalization of the pro-choice movement could arguably only have come from a threat like the overturning of Roe. In Amy Littlefield's opinion article “Where the Pro-Choice Movement Went Wrong,” a common theme was that abortion-rights advocates mistakenly relied on using the courts as a “firewall,” which resulted in inaction rather than collective action to influence state legislatures. I would argue that this inaction was, among other reasons, due to a lack of urgency for major swathes of the population — complacency based on the false belief that abortion rights were safe after they “won” with the courts.

Urgency is not just the result of a danger or a threat, it also implies a belief that one's actions will make a real difference in facing that threat. In their conception of the greater transformation of consciousness that allows a protest movement to emerge, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward assert that a distinct aspect is that “there is a new sense of efficacy; people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to believe that they have the capacity to alter their lot” (71). If people don't feel they have the ability to stop the threat, they will not join a movement; they will just try to do damage control. Saul D. Alinsky identifies many of the benefits of picking a “target” to focus on; one is that a simple target can make a struggle more accessible (227). In the instance of Stop Cop City, people aren't trying to overthrow the entire prison-industrial complex or stop all deforestation or right all the wrongs of American colonialism. These might be their end goals, but Cop City is a manageable yet significant incoming threat that makes their actions feel potentially consequential.

Conviction and urgency might explain why and under what conditions people join movements, but they don't adequately explain how movements are sustained. Of course, there are other important factors, but I would argue it is primarily the support of social connections in the movement that sustains collective action. Particularly important are third places, places other than work and home that facilitate community and conversation. The black church was a center of the civil rights movement not just because it gave participants an ideological basis, but also because churches uniquely served as places for communities to gather — and later, organize (Morris 230). Likewise, the social networks of the people involved matter; Morris identifies, “Leaders of the early sit-ins were enmeshed in organizational networks and were integral members of the black community” (230). Part of the strength of the civil rights movement came from the communication between members of different regions and communities; Morris writes, “Although the early sit-ins and related activities were not part of a grandiose scheme, they were tied together through organizational and personal networks” (232).

A lack of prioritizing social networks was at the heart of the failure of the post-Roe abortion-rights movement. Littlefield blames the losses of the pro-choice movement on how abortion-rights organizations prioritized “federal policy and elections and on defending access through federal courts, while neglecting many fights at the state level.” But this deprioritization of the local level didn't just fail because of its critical fights, but also because it neglects how people often become involved in movements: through their community. When someone feels discouraged about the cause, it might be their family also being at an event that motivates them to attend. When the leader of a movement is also a friend, it establishes an initial level of trust that is difficult to obtain otherwise. A top-down approach is often ineffective because it fails to utilize pre-existing social ties.

While the reasons for why social movements emerge are complex and debatable, I believe that this framework is effective in understanding most movements. So why was the pro-choice movement frozen? Because it's hard to match religious fanaticism, urgency was lost after Roe v. Wade, and organizations opted for a national strategy. But once a generation lived through a post-Roe world, they realized that immediate action was possible and needed, and there was real effort to bring the pro-choice struggle to communities, the movement returned.