Multidimensional Advocacy As Applied: Marriage Equality and Reproductive Rights

While comparisons between marriage equality and reproductive rights advocacy can be fraught, a multidimensional advocacy framework helps to highlight the shared and distinct features of each. It illuminates, too, the ways in which advocacy strategies might reshape the landscape in which litigation is pursued. This recognition that the litigation landscape is subject to change also reinforces the value for each movement in learning from the other. Just decades ago, reproductive rights, including abortion, enjoyed a level of protection that marriage equality advocates could only dream about. Yet marriage equality likely would not have achieved its current momentum if reproductive rights had never been secured. It may be, just as marriage equality has drawn strength from the strategies and successes of reproductive rights advocates and has sidestepped some difficulties by learning from that experience, so too can reproductive rights advocates now consider whether some of marriage equality’s multidimensional strategies might be useful in reshaping the landscape further still. 13