What went wrong in Michigan?

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Abortion legislation.

Last Tuesday, five states voted on abortion-related initiatives with disappointing results for the pro-life movement.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Michigan, California, and Vermont passed amendments that will add a right to abortion to their state constitutions.

Voters in Kentucky considered an amendment that if approved would have stated, there is no right to abortion in that state. Kentucky voters turned that down. And Montana voters rejected a measure that would require doctors to give life saving care to babies born alive during abortions.

EICHER: WORLD reporter Leah Savas attended an election night watch party in Michigan. She reports on the reaction from pro-lifers—and what went wrong.

LEAH SAVAS, REPORTER: The streets of East Lansing were alive at 10 p.m. on election night. Just down the street from Michigan State University, college students wearing cowboy hats stood in line outside of a bar playing loud music.

AUDIO: [Street]

Pairs stood chatting on the sidewalk.

But the real place to be that night was the Graduate Hotel.

Multiple election night watch parties were going on there.

Tucked away in an upstairs corner conference room with bright green carpet, a group of about 50-70 mostly younger pro-lifers watched election returns for Michigan’s Proposal 3. If approved, the amendment would add a right to abortion to the state constitution. Most of the people there were staff and volunteers with Protect Life Michigan. That group was a part of the campaign that opposed Proposal 3. Outside of election season, it's focused on educating people about abortion in cities and on college campuses.

By 10:30, 20 percent of the votes were in. The results hovered around 55 percent yes, 45 no. For prolifers, not great so far. But the young people were still talking and laughing.

Melinda Movius: I would say all of our volunteers are just happy to be here.

That's Melinda Movius. She's a 24-year-old blonde who works as the director of operations at Protect Life Michigan.

Melinda Movius: We did everything that we could. And so no matter the outcome, we're very hopeful. And we're very grateful to have been a part of it.

Movius said she personally knocked on about 600 doors to campaign against the initiative, but that's a low number in this group. She said some knocked on thousands.

The conversations that stuck out to her the most were with people who called themselves pro-choice but saw the problems with Proposal 3. Pro-lifers warned that the amendment would allow late-term abortions in the state. It could also allow minors to get abortions or sterilizations without their parent’s consent. It could get rid of other health and safety requirements for those kinds of procedures.

Movius: It was always just such a pleasant surprise to me, to hear them say that they support abortion access, but they understood how dangerous proposal three was...

Earlier that day, I talked to people outside of a polling location in the Grand Rapids area.

Mark is a middle aged red-headed man with a beard and… wouldn't give his last name. He said he didn't have a strong opinion about abortion but that he voted against proposal three.

Mark: As a parent, I like to kind of keep the rights of parents in the house. more private. So that's kind of where my thinking was at for proposal three.

I also spoke with Barb Miller. She's a woman in her late 40s carrying a blue polka dot purse.

Miller: I'm actually pro choice. And I voted No on Prop three. And that's because there's a lot in this proposal that is tied in there, that is what I feel is a threat to parents. And a lot of people don't understand that there's 41 laws that are actually being disrupted, that are there for protections that are kind of covered up with that proposal.

Barb and Mark seemed to get the message about the dangers of Prop 3. But, votes in favor of the pro-abortion proposal maintained a steady lead throughout the night. At midnight, the Protect Life Michigan staff told the roughly 40 people still in the room that things didn’t look good. Soon after that, the pro-abortion side claimed victory. The amendment won with just under 57 percent of votes.

I talked to Movius on the phone the next morning. She said she and her teammates were in shock.

Movius: To see that so many people supported it was really disappointing to me. We worked really hard to, you know, make sure that that wouldn't happen because we know that women deserve better than proposal three, but Michigan decided that that was what they wanted.

The same thing happened in California, Vermont, Montana, and Kentucky. Votes on ballot measures in all of those state swung pro-abortion.

Kristan Hawkins is the president of Students for Life of America.

Hawkins: The people that really wanted the state referendums are usually the people who make the ads, print the signs, do all the ad buys. That's that is the sad brass tacks of safe referendums, these fights really came down to money. They came down to media power, and neither one of those things were on our side.

But last Tuesday’s pro-abortion wave doesn’t just come down to money. It’s also a problem with the voters.

Klusendorf: And I'm not at all surprised that these measures went down.

That’s Scott Klusendorf. He’s known in pro-life circles as a top pro-life apologist. He trains people to defend the position for life.

Klusendorf: Our fundamental problem right now is not the press. It's not judges. It's that the American people, by and large, do not agree with us. The worldview assumptions that make abortion plausible to millions of our fellow citizens are deeply ingrained in our deeply entrenched in culture. And they're not going to go away anytime soon.

To Klusendorf, the big takeaway in these results is that more pro-lifers need to start proclaiming the pro-life message loudly and intelligently to cut through the lies from the other side.

In our Wednesday morning phone call, Movius with Protect Life Michigan said the same thing.

Movius: But our society right now is too comfortable with the status quo, too comfortable with their, quote, unquote, right to their bodies, and, and being able to take the lives of innocent children. And so we're gonna keep having these conversations in Michigan and across the country until people understand that this is just not something that a civil society should support.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leah Savas in Lansing and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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