How to Get Rid of Corporations Funding Abortion Bans
Earlier this week, Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter reported that six corporations have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to lawmakers behind six-week abortion bans in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri and Ohio. In an attempt to fight back, consumers across the country began organizing boycotts.
To see a complete list of who took the money and from whom, you should read the entire Popular Information post , but here’s a rundown of the corporations involved and the candidates who accepted the largest donations:
- AT&T: $ 196,600 total, including $ 113,000 for Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and $ 15,000 for Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant.
- Eli Lilly: $ 66,250 total, including $ 30,000 for Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and $ 7,000 for Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn.
- Walmart: $ 57,700 total, including $ 7,000 for Ohio Gov. Mike Devine and $ 10,000 for Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof.
- Pfizer: $ 53,650 total, including $ 6,600 for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and $ 12,700 for Ohio Gov. Mike Devine.
- Coca-Cola: $ 40,800 total, including $ 10,000 for Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and $ 6,600 for Georgia Governor Brian Kemp.
- Aetna: $ 26,600 total, including $ 6,600 for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and $ 5,250 for Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof.
If that’s all you need to hear to boycott these companies immediately, do so, but if Aetna is your insurance company or Walmart is the only place to buy groceries in your area, it’s not that easy. Capitalism is supposed to provide consumers with unlimited choices, but what will you do when all of your choices are bad?
Realistically assess the strength of boycotts
In a capitalist system, it’s almost impossible to make ethical decisions , but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Sometimes, all you can do is spend your money as much as possible, in accordance with your personal code of ethics. In this case, I would place the Walmart or Coca-Cola boycott in the same category as the purchase of non-abuse cosmetics: your personal buying decisions will not single-handedly diminish them (or, say, L’Oréal), but there will always be a choice spending money on products that better align with your morals is the right choice.
If you can’t stop buying from these corporations – or you just feel a little more vindictive – it might be more effective to focus on their reputation rather than their profits. Boycotts tend to work best when they can provide sustained media coverage, according to Bryden King, professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School. In a 2017 interview with the Northwestern Institute for Policy Research, he said “no. One predictor of what makes a boycott effective is how much media attention it gets, not the number of people signing up for a petition or the number of consumers it mobilizes. ” The longer a corporation spends on headlines, the more its stock will fall – and the more likely it is to change the behavior that caused it.
If your goal is to reduce Coca-Cola’s profits, then you need to do everything in your power to keep it in the news as often as possible. One way to do this is to join the ongoing social media call campaign that many people have already done. However, none of the companies mentioned in the Popular Information post have made statements about their donations or their position on the bill.
Let’s look at the big picture
Here’s the thing: every time AT&T wrote Kay Ivey a check, it probably wasn’t intended as a pre-emptive bonus for signing HB 314 into law; it almost certainly had more to do with the fact that she publicly patted AT&T on the back for investing a lot of money in Alabama’s telecommunications infrastructure . No matter how many sympathizers are on the board of directors, huge corporations are not and never have been the driving force behind anti-abortion legislation because there is nothing for them.
However, this does not mean that you should completely discount the contributions of these corporations. Regardless of their intention, they deliberately used their money to support candidates passing incredibly harmful laws, and they must be held accountable. But if you’re going to chase big corporations for throwing a hundred thousand dollars into a $ 5 million or $ 6 million bank – about the same amount of money Kay Ivey raised for her 2018 campaign – you might as well find out who else is involved.
Try to find local donors
Anti-abortion legislation is largely promoted by organized networks of massive anti-abortion groups, which are best addressed with direct action at the local level. To find out who is funding anti-abortion candidates in your state, look at your regional anti-abortion political action committees (PACs) and non-profit organizations . If a candidate takes money from Susan B. Anthony List or the local National Right to Life office, it is clearly because they have pledged to do everything in their power to end abortion.
This is much more difficult to find out than it seems. Banning abortion is a state problem, and each state has different campaign finance laws and its own donation database. (If you’re interested, the National Conference of State Legislatures publishes state-by-state cheat sheets for each electoral cycle, which you can find here .) While PACs must disclose their sponsors, they are very good at dodging. from that specific requirement – and many nonprofits are not required to tell you where their funds are coming from. As the Popular Information team has learned firsthand, this all makes it incredibly difficult to investigate donations to state and municipal campaigns:
Yesterday I spent a few hours on the study of campaign donations documents Kay Ivey, trying to match only the numbers of donations from AT & T newsletter Popular Information ( 113,000 dollars around 2013), OpenSecrets.org and followthemoney.org (both of which were quoted on 85000 dollars 2018). … I couldn’t do it – and I used to be a scam manager. This is not to say the numbers are nonsense, just fact-checking is incredibly tedious.
The bottom line is that if you are willing and able to boycott Walmart or repeatedly tag AT&T in angry tweets, there is no real reason not to. But keep in mind that the anti-abortion movement is mostly a mass phenomenon. Whatever other action you take, it is most effective to donate or volunteer to local reproductive justice groups . No one understands the anti-abortion campaign finance ecosystem better than the people who have organized against it for decades, and no one is better equipped to fight it with all their might.