PAYNESVILLE, MINN. — Wet flip-flops squeaked as teens filed back into the lakeside lodge, hair still damp from a post-lunch dip in Lake Koronis. It was time to talk more about abortion.
Lizz, the 23-year-old resource and events coordinator for Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, the state’s oldest and largest organization opposed to abortion, sat in back. Her husband, Caleb, took his place up front. He wore a T-shirt protesting Minnesota’s Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that among other things could enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution, and which promises to be the focus of the state’s next big fight on reproductive rights.
The couple codirects this four-day summer camp for a dozen high school students, teaching teens to talk in a sensitive, curious way about this emotional, divisive issue. For Lizz, intimate trainings like this are central to the meaning of her life.
Training the next generation of leaders is of vital importance for the abortion opposition movement as the national dialogue on the issue has shifted. Even as they won their decadeslong battle when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, public support for legal abortion remains high. A Pew Research Center study of national polling shows nearly two in three Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, support that’s steadily been inching upward for nearly a decade.
After the 2022 decision, nearly two dozen Republican-led states banned abortion or restricted it to earlier in the pregnancy than Roe’s standard. But since then, Americans have indicated support for abortion rights rather than abortion restrictions in statewide elections, with conservative states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio explicitly voting for abortion rights. Reflecting a new paradigm where Democrats see abortion as a winning issue, the GOP adopted a platform this summer that abandoned its longstanding support of national restrictions on abortion in favor of leaving the issue to the states.
But Lizz and others at this rural Stearns County camp weren’t focused on how abortion will play in the upcoming presidential election. Instead, they focused on one-on-one conversations, believing individual cultural battles are more important than any legislation or court case.
“The responsibility to protect life is a lot closer to home now,” Lizz said. “We don’t want to just make it illegal. We want to make it unthinkable. We want to make a world where, if somebody is in a crisis pregnancy, we want them to know pro-lifers will do just about anything to help.”