The abortion debate continues to rage on social media. Pro-life activists are trying to engineer boycotts of Trump for being insufficiently in favor of a national ban on abortion. Other, more level-headed pro-life believers wisely understand that Kammunism must be defeated first, and then we can talk about ways to reduce abortion.

But abortion is at its tiny beating heart not, I repeat not, a political issue. It never has been, actually. It is not solvable at the federal, or even state, level. It cannot be eradicated via executive order, law, or any craft we here possess. “Abortionist” is the second oldest profession after “prostitute.” Humans are human. They will therefore sin and keep on sinning until the very end of time. You could sooner ban porn, or gambling, or beer drinking than totally ban all abortion in the United States. Calling for angry boycotts, bans, and legislative fixes, moreover, is all very dry and dusty and angry.

I understand the anger, of course—the wanton murder of fully-formed infants in the womb is a travesty we should all be sickened by. But the key audience to convince here is not the politicians or mass voting blocs. It’s the lone young female who presents herself at the clinic to terminate an unwanted—or wanted, but inconvenient—pregnancy. 

What if the best way to change her mind was not by focusing on votes, elections, candidates, the legality of a 6- or 8-week ban, or technicalities like viability? What if instead of “abortions are bad,” the argument was: “Babies are awesome!” Imagine connecting the clinical concept of “embryo” and “fetus” to “a little human being who will look like you and have the same hair color as you.” 

A friend sent me a link to a disturbing study that involved grafting the harvested scalps of late-term aborted babies onto rats. These “scientists” are literally implanting pieces of human baby scalp onto living rats and regrowing the dead child’s own hair on the rat. Presumably this is some kind of test for curing baldness for men who think they’d look sexier wearing a dead baby’s scalp. (The study also involves fetal thyroid tissues and liver cells, which must be why fully-formed aborted newborns fetch such high prices for livers and thyroids on the market.)

The web page for the study includes nightmarish photos of a baby’s light brown hair growing on a rat’s body. Imagine seeing these images and wondering, “Is that my baby?” Imagine a billboard campaign of these images with the tagline “Is this your baby?” Maybe, just maybe, that message could help connect an inchoate positive pregnancy test to the finished product: an adorable newborn.

Maybe it’s worth a try. Maybe it’s time for babies to get a rebrand. 

After all, babies are designed cleverly by their creator to be as cute as can be. Their entire physical appearance is engineered on purpose to trigger an overwhelming dopamine response in their mothers and, in fact, in most normal people. If babies were not adorable, they’d have a much lower chance of surviving this cruel world. Their toothless grins, their chubby cheeks, those huge eyes in proportion to their heads, those tiny hands. The sweet new baby smell! It’s all a clever magic trick very intentionally perpetrated to help the baby survive. 

But as it is, millions are aborted because they are not cute yet. Ultrasounds of nine-week embryos are not cute. You don’t really get to the super cute stage until birth—sometimes not even until they’re a few months old, when they really start looking around and chubbing up.

I went to a party for a good friend and happened to sit next to a woman who was holding a petite six-month old. Baby Florence was wearing a little cotton flower-print onesie with buttoned overall straps and a matching blue bonnet. Florence took one look at me and unleashed a giant grin. The dopamine jets flooded my brain. What could I do but reach for her and beg to hold her? We became best friends. 

Babies are a powerful drug—even when you’re not the mother. 

Now imagine a pro-life campaign that just showed adorable happy babies. Toothless grins. Magical laughter that sounds like the tinkling of silver bells. A campaign so viscerally cute that it delivers the dopamine hit right through the screen. 

Are people so hardened by the social media scroll that they are inured to this power? Does baby magic still work, even on the most hard-hearted childless cat lady at a Kamala rally?

In the great campaign to save more babies, we’ve given far more airtime to the fetal organ harvesters than those cretins deserve. I think we should try giving the babies top billing for once.