Introducing *Actually* Pro Life

Exactly 250 years ago, a bunch of white slaveowners gathered here, in Colonial Williamsburg, and in a bunch of other colonies that all allowed slavery, crossed their fingers behind their backs, and wrote and rewrote the following, with a straight face:

Now, some of the co-signers of The Declaration of Independence, like John Adams, were anti-slavery from the jump. Others, like Benjamin Franklin, followed up this historically righteous group project by eventually turning against a trade they’d benefited from their whole lives.

But some of them, like Thomas Jefferson, who in his original draft of the Declaration “called the slave trade “a cruel war against human nature”, in fact kept over 600 very well-documented slaves, including his own mistress, Sally Hemmings, and all the children they had together, his many, many notebooks detailed and organized like a CSV file exported from a Insta-popular Shopify store -- but for people.

The hypocrisy was evident even then.

Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote in his new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written:

Despite this tough but fair TripAdvisor review, the Declaration of Independence would not be the last time Americans used a rhetorical flourish and organized religion to cover for their actual sins — when it was required. If there’s any standard we’ve perfected over the past 250 years, it’s that the masks are optional.

In 1848, 72 years after the Declaration was signed, lawyer, former New York governor, future senator, future Secretary of State, and dedicated abolitionist William H. Seward had had enough.

Holed up in a Massachusetts motel with the tall drink of water that was young Abraham Lincoln, Seward gave it to the future emancipator and his future boss straight,

Lincoln got the message, and because Lincoln got the message, the South eventually got the message, but it took a while, and hundreds of thousands of American lives, and terrible racist sexist misogynist greedy hypocrites never, ever gave up.

In 1976, the Catholic church and its spin-off, the National Right to Life Committee, would co-opt the words of Scottish educator A.S. Neill, intentionally perverting his original use of “pro-life” in — truly — one of the greatest marketing coups of all time, eventually building a massive tent of evangelists and fucking Ronald Reagan and others who in the years prior, couldn’t have given two shits about abortion.

“Pro-life” — a label that became almost impossible to argue with — changed the world, for the worse.

If we cannot agree on what it means to save a life, we cannot agree on anything.

So, today, we’re taking it back. And we’re bringing receipts.

I’m pleased to re-introduce our research platform: *Actually* Pro Life. This is our logo:

While you admire it, I’m going to catch you up to how we got here.

Over the past year, as a gap was opened up beneath all of us and the imperfect institutions meant to protect us, and as we — society — were pushed into that gap, tearing each other to pieces as we fell, unable to agree on almost anything, as the important news moved faster than anyone could reasonably keep up with (and often, that was the point), I stopped writing and stepped back to look at all of our work, our research, our sources, and recommendations, to try and understand how we got here and what, if anything, united it all.

This entire project was born out of the 2018 IPCC climate reports and California fires, the March for Our Lives protests, the Kavanaugh hearings, yellow vest protests in France, the ebola outbreak in the DRC, the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, Xi Jinping’s ascension to President for Life, Greta’s first Fridays for Future protests, and the first Trump administration — and most of us got this news from Facebook, if we got it at all.

Things were both not great and full of opportunity, and I wanted to provide a detour — an antidote — by grounding a news-roundup email and analysis in the most reputable journalism I could afford, by asking deeper questions of the most reputable experts who’d answer my calls, and to, eventually, base our team’s recommended actions on a set of underlying ethics and morals we never put a name on but felt deep inside of us nonetheless.

Like Justice Potter Stewart squinting at hard-core pornography, even I — someone who barely graduated as an atheist liberal arts major one thousand years ago — knew what was important (and not important) when I saw it, because…morals. Basic human decency.

But what good, now, I asked myself, is “human decency”, down here in this very dark gap? Where we’ve each been made to feel alone? Even if we are all, actually, together in this fucking pit?

We need common ground to stand on, if we’re ever going to climb back out.

If we’re going to be neighbors again, even, we have to believe and -- yes -- have faith that there are more of us out there, who hold at the very least the same fundamental principles we do, and who will collectively hold us up as we try to crawl out and fight back.

I realized I needed not only to organize the connective tissue -- the scaffolding -- of everything we chose to cover for all these years, to go deeper on, and to recommend actions for. It took hundreds of hours over the past year to piece it all together, to identify gaps and connections where I didn’t see them before.

But I also needed to put a name on it for the first time, to clarify the complexity of actions required to unfuck the world, to unite those of us that give a shit under a single banner.

To say boldly and clearly what we all give a shit about, table stakes, no matter else we might disagree on.

It’s time for sharp differences of opinion, and bold utterance. It’s time to say the quiet part out loud again.

It’s time to go back on offense and attack bad guys and hypocrites where they live.

I chose *Actually* Pro Life not simply out of spite for actual baby (and women, and minority) killers (and, yes, fine, organized religion, which has excelled at all of these for centuries), and not only because the term “pro-choice” was always going to be reactionary and failed, but also because — when you use it correctly, literally — *Actually* Pro Life is not only intentionally provocative, but actually measurable.

It is deliberative, even, if only for a moment.

Because whatever other weird shit you’re into, all of which I totally respect, these are either your core beliefs, or they’re not.

It’s time again to find our most basic identity — what unites those of us who give a shit at the most fundamental, inalienable level, however you find us — and to go back on offense. To hit back.

And for us, and maybe you, it starts with an inarguable foundation, popularized by Paul Farmer, a man I never got to meet but who’s been a model for all of my work here:

That’s our foundation. But how do we guarantee every life is served equitably? Through our eight Principles.

We hold that every person *actually* deserves:

These Principles are our non-negotiables. Take them all, or get the fuck out.

We believe your Identity is what your Principles are, and even more so, what you’ll do defend and advance them.

How you’ll defend them matters, too. Here’s our Guardrails:

These are built into every action we recommend in our app, and in our newsletters, essays, and podcasts.

If you take them as yours, though, beware -- no hypocrites allowed. I said we’re bringing receipts and that means we’re measuring not only our progress, but your commitment -- through our Positions.

Not goals. Positions. Real world “it’s gonna be this or that” lines in the sand. Thomas Jefferson could never.

*Actually* Pro Life includes 160+ Positions — measurable outcomes like:

But we didn’t choose just any metrics for them. Every single Position must answer to:

There are 153 more Positions to choose from, and since every action in our database is matched to at least one Position now, and each Position matched to a massive re-organization of our hard-earned research and metrics — you can actually tell what you’re working on. What we’re aiming for.

And you can try it out, starting today, through our app, What Can I Do? (with much more detail to come 👀)

To evangelize for a moment --

I think of *Actually* Pro Life as our soul, and What Can I Do? as the body. Of you? Of all of us.

And everything else we make and publish, and everyone we work with, you are our voice, an increasingly wider, more diverse set of people and interests who are fucking done, who can all trace their why back to one; back to a single statement - no life is worth more than another - and set of Principles that are either:

If it’s #2, or it’s not clear, then our community probably isn’t the place for you. As one happy customer said a few years ago, we’re “extraordinarily biased.”

On the other hand, if you read these words and say “Yeah, that’s me, obviously” — whether you’ve ever even had to think about it before — if this is for you — saddle the fuck up.

Because we’re not just reclaiming an iconic phrase — my goal is for it to be a genuine reframe:

From now on, *Actually* Pro Life means contributing to actions and policies that measurably improve and protect lives, all over the world.

But it’s going to take all of us. Or at least, all of you that are on board.

If you’re not, best wishes, we’ll see you out there.

For everyone else who’s still here, we’ve got much more to come on all of this, but for now, remember, it’s

Together or nothing,

— Quinn