In class, we had a brief discussion about framing and its importance in social movements. I thought it would be important and helpful to expand on this conversation, given the re-framing that the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) Pro-Choice America has recently gone under.
There are two concepts to define before getting into the discussion around NARAL’s re-branding: framing and movement capacities. As identified by Almeida in Social Movements: The Structure of Collective Mobilization, framing is how a movement and it’s opponents’ portray their ideologies and grievances to the public, keeping them engaged with and informed of their claims. Almeida explains that there are three framing tasks a movement has, which include diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, and motivational framing. Diagnostic framing is how a movement defines the problem and who to blame. Prognostic framing explains the proposed solutions to the issues. Motivational framing is the movement’s call-to-action.
Movement’s hold three kinds of capacities, as outlined by Tufecki in Twitter and Tear Gas. These include narrative, disruptive, and electoral/institutional capacities. Narrative capacity is the framing aspects of a social movement; disruptive capacity is how the disruptivity of a movement can increase/decrease their power; and electoral/institutional capacity is how much impact a movement can have in elections while trying to keep their issues in the narrative.
Now, onto NARAL Pro-Choice America name change. NARAL has changed its name to Reproductive Freedom for All (see it on their website). Originally, their message surrounded spreading pro-choice messaging and federal assurance of abortion rights. However, given the drastic decision to overturn Roe stripping abortion rights away and tossing the decision to the states, it was clear that this messaging was no longer applicable. How can an organization continue to tout pro-choice messaging when a wide array of reproductive rights are being threatened in each and every state? Reproductive rights ranging not just from abortion, but decisions around childbirth, birth control accessibility, and even court decisions around who can even be a parent. They understood that they needed to broaden their message to be more inclusive, and to showcase the importance of exactly what is at stake with the overturn of Roe. The grievance was no longer about providing more secure abortion clinics, destigmatizing abortion, and ensuring abortion rights, but is now ensuring all of the aforementioned reproductive rights for parents in every state. The blame changed, the claim changed, so the framing had to change so that NARAL could keep their narrative capacity.
Written by: Lily Philbrook