Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization, has a new name: Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, or SBA Pro-Life America.
“The ‘list’ aspect of our name has really outgrown us,” Mallory Carroll, vice president of communications, told CNA on Wednesday. “SBA Pro-Life America highlights our past as well as our development into the policy and political muscle that we’ve become.”
The organization was founded in 1992 as a counterweight to EMILY’s List, which works to elect Democratic pro-choice women to office, by giving pro-life women a political voice.
“Thirty years ago, the loudest voices in politics belonged to the abortion lobby and America’s pro-life women were seldom heard,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of SBA Pro-Life America, said in a press release. “Today, women are at the forefront of historic life-affirming change in state legislatures and in Washington, and the pro-life movement is at the threshold of a new era.”
The move is also “anticipatory of the opportunity that we’ll have in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead with the judgment in the Dobbs case,” or the Supreme Court case that might overturn Roe v. Wade, according to Carroll. If Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion across the country in 1973, is reversed, abortion legislation might be left to the states.
She added that the group is “expanding at the state level to be able to replicate what we’ve done at the federal and statewide level in elections and policy, heavily investing in elections and then leveraging that success into policy wins for the unborn and for their mothers.”
“The arc of the history of our organization and the history of our pro-life movement and the history of abortion jurisprudence in this country made now the right time to move forward with this change,” she told CNA.
According to Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review, the new moniker is a rebuke to NARAL Pro-Choice America. When challenged about the name similarities, Carroll told CNA that the name of NARAL was not a factor in her organization’s selection.
“We really see ourselves as countering the whole pro-abortion lobby, not just political entities like EMILY’s List, but the abortion industry itself, and pro-abortion research entities like the Guttmacher Institute and pro-abortion grassroots movements that are working to expand access to chemical abortion,” she told CNA.
She explained that the organization accomplishes this through “all of our institutions,” including its research arm, the Charlotte Lozier Institute, its program to empower pregnant women in need (Her PLAN), as well as its super PAC and campaign fund.
“We’re trying to meet the needs of the movement in every way,” Carroll told CNA.