Oren Jacobson is a national civic leader, organizer, and reproductive health activist residing in Illinois. Jacobson is a co-founder and the executive director of Men4Choice, an organization founded in 2015 which works to educate male allies and mobilize male participation in the movement for reproductive rights and equality. With President Donald Trump returning to the White House alongside a Republican-controlled Congress, the Brown Political Review spoke with Jacobson to reflect on the 2024 election cycle and the future direction of Men4Choice’s work.
Matthew Kotcher: Can you spend a few moments familiarizing our readers with a brief background about Men4Choice, its mission, how it came to be, where it is now, and what your role is within it?
Oren Jacobson: I’m a co-founder and executive director of the organization. We started out of Chicago in 2015 and are now organizing in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and just this past summer started doing some work in Arizona, as well. What we do is fairly straightforward: We work to bring passively pro-choice men off the sidelines and into the fight for reproductive freedoms.
MK: How does Men4Choice work with other reproductive rights organizations?
OJ: Everything we do is actually in partnership; we always describe ourselves as a “partnership organization.” What the local coalition in a state is working on are the things that we work on. So when we take any amount of direct action voter contact, working on a piece of legislation, etc., it’s never alone. The only program that we run that is just for members of the organization is the fellowship program, which does not engage partners directly.
MK: Okay. So zooming out a bit, what are the stakes for men regarding women’s reproductive health and access to abortion?
OJ: So I think we can talk about this in two different ways. One is, if you’re an LGBTQ+ man, and you live in a state that is attacking reproductive rights—abortion rights and access—you live in a state that’s attacking your rights, too. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the legal framework in this country for the expansion of the LGBTQ+ community is actually originally built on the idea of privacy, which was codified by Roe. Now, if you’re somebody like me or my wife, with one child, you might think about growing your family. If the government has the power to control my wife’s body and the power to control my family, many men across the country are learning the hard way how this impacts their rights.
In many cases, the bans and restrictions on healthcare are making it so their wives, partners, friends, or family members are being denied access to basic and essential health care—in some cases, unfortunately, leading people to lose their lives because of these laws. That’s at the base level. I think at a broader level, once it becomes open in a society for some, it becomes open in a society to roll back rights for all. So I think we should all be concerned about how the potential of that trend continues in other ways.
MK: In the past, you’ve referenced a pie chart illustrating that while anti-choice men and women are outspoken on the issue, pro-choice men are not. What do you think contributes to that dynamic?
OJ: I think the number one biggest thing that we found is that most men don’t fully understand the harm. Number two, they see this as a women’s issue. Number three, they don’t really see an entry point, and number four, they don’t actually know what to say or do. And they know they don’t know what to say or do. So often in situations like that, people just kind of remain silent and on the sidelines for fear of getting it wrong.
MK: So with partisan divides as stark as anyone can remember, do you see a path toward developing a base of support for abortion rights and reproductive justice in the Republican Party? If not, how can abortion rights advance without a meaningful effort at bipartisanship?
OJ: You can already see the answer is “yes.” This actually isn’t a partisan issue in terms of voting. I forget the exact math, but I think seven of the 10 initiatives on the ballot this year passed, including in red states. We saw wins in Kansas and Ohio on this issue. So there really actually is broad bipartisan support for abortion rights and abortion access. It’s also very clear at this point in time that people are willing to vote for ballot initiatives. They’re also willing to crossover vote for state reps and state senators because of this issue. We’ve seen that in Illinois, where part of our strategy to build a pro-choice majority here has been about activating a certain number of Republican voters to vote at the state level on this issue. Where it is obviously more challenging is when you’re talking about the top of the ticket, when there’s a hard partisan identity around it.
There also may be other issues of importance to a person that are also contributing to their decision making. And I think that’s part of what we saw in 2024. In states with these ballot initiatives, the ballot initiatives ran ahead of Kamala, meaning they got more votes than Kamala did and basically won every state. And at the same time, there are other factors when people make those decisions, especially in a presidential year. What that says in the near term is there’s an easier path: at the basic voting level at the state. But also, a lot of states are so gerrymandered at this point that legislation at the local level is going to be pretty intensive, and it’s going to be a long journey.
MK: Abortion was not as powerful a force as many predicted or as it was in the 2022 midterm cycle. Why do you think that was, and what messaging or other factors do you attribute that to?
OJ: Midterm elections tend to be dominated by opposition parties. The 2022 thing that nobody was expecting was that the Democratic Party would do so well because all the voters who were pissed about Dobbs showed up. I think in 2024, it was a much bigger electorate. I don’t remember what the exact number of voters was in ‘22 versus ‘24, but clearly midterms and a presidential year are significantly different. I don’t know that I have a great sense for all of the reasons why a given person does or does not vote beyond exit polling, which right now we don’t have enough real data yet to know that the exit polls are right or wrong. We know people talk about the economy as the number one issue. So I don’t know if I can point to anything that was different.
But across the board, support for this issue has actually never been higher. So I think it can be a false narrative to say that abortion is not a winning issue. It’s winning. What I think is clear is that it’s not the number one issue driving every American to the polls. I think that there was a hope or a thought that it may be the number one issue for enough people to make a difference in the election, but that obviously wasn’t the case.
MK: I know you are no fan of Donald Trump. Do you see his backpedaling on abortion as a sign that reproductive rights activism has moved the needle?
OJ: I should say yes, but maybe the answer is yes or no. I see his decision purely about his calculation, about needing to create distance from the thing he is responsible for as a purely political decision to win an election. So if you want to say yes, because there’s been enough great work by activists to mean that you can’t totally own abortion bans and get elected nationally, then that’s great. But I don’t really see his decision-making as anything more than just short-term political decision-making. And I certainly don’t trust that he’s going to follow through with anything he said between now and then. I think he just realized that the extremism of the party on these issues, with the complete abortion bans that were literally killing women, was deeply unpopular. He tried to distance himself from that which he is responsible for, and maybe he did a good enough job doing that.
MK: Why did so many men turn out for Trump? Is there something progressive spaces can learn from it? And how do these statistics about male voters shape the work ahead for you?
OJ: I still want to wait and see all the final verified voter data that we get usually a month or two after the election to fully understand exactly what happened and where. My gut sense of why: I think there is a cultural thing about him. He watches UFC fights. He shows up at The Ultimate Fighter. He goes to NFL and college games. He has reached into an ecosystem and culture that is beyond what the average Democratic Party politician is engaging with. A lot of these young men are engaging in non-political spaces, and while they’re not coming to those spaces for politics, they’re getting a little bit of politics. When you have a social movement and a lot of people around you going in a direction, it creates a permission structure for other people to go in that direction.
I’m not a sociologist, but I’ve heard a lot of theories, especially when you have a lot of young men who feel adrift, lonely, or lost—like the world is changing around them and they don’t see a future. We have a lot to sort out in terms of our strategy because our strategy has been about creating more awareness on the issue to encourage people to take action, not about trying to be a mechanism to persuade. But organizing requires meeting people where they are. And if the response to the election is just to say, “forget these guys,” then that’s not a good approach to winning people back. I also think it’s really critical to recognize that people aren’t static. They’re always evolving, and they’re always learning. I think for us, it’s just going to be about continuing to expand with whom and how we are engaging, because a lot of these guys are with us on the issue. They just didn’t see the connection necessarily between what he had done and what he will do—what his movement will do—and this issue, and they may have been voting for other reasons. We have to continue to engage them because there’s no other way to win without engaging people who aren’t with you right now.
MK: What do you think is next from the anti-choice movement?
OJ: I think the most likely thing is that we’re going to see them using the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban access to medication abortion, which is how six in 10 abortions happen right now. And then I think you will see them try to use the Comstock Act to ban the shipment and mail of materials used in abortion procedures. That’s what I think is most likely, as well as continued efforts to further restrict at the state level. And I wouldn’t rule out them actually trying to pass some type of national abortion ban as well. In fact, I think it’s more likely than not that they try. We’ll see if they can get the votes, and we’ll see if they can try to push the filibuster away in the Senate.
MK: And do you think those efforts could be successful?
OJ: They certainly could be. All he has to do is appoint an FDA chair who wants to take that action. And they can very quickly and very easily overturn approval of the medication.
MK: I want to bring this back to men on college campuses. What can students do today, at this moment?
OJ: Number one, I would say, don’t close off communication with people who may not have done what you wanted them to do. People are always going to be people who have trust and relationships. And if we throw people away and we throw away those relationships, you lose your ability to influence people as they grow and evolve. Number two, I think everybody needs to take a moment and rest up a little bit. Take a breath, get healthy, rest up so that you’ve got energy for what comes next. At the basic level, we’re going to continue doing exactly what we’ve been doing, just at a larger level of scale, which involves getting more men to talk to their peers about these issues—and hopefully that would activate that network to speak up loudly if and when they try to come after more rights and more access.
MK: How can men on college campuses participate in or support the activism of Men4Choice and the pro-choice movement as a whole?
OJ: The core program we run is a youth fellowship program, which trains young men between the ages of 18 to 28 over a 10-week program. As part of that program, all of the fellows and our organization host smaller, shorter gatherings that are an hour long. That’s the primary way in which people enter into the organization at this point: through those community conversations. That being said, if somebody goes to the website Men4Choice.org, there should be a button that says “sign up” or “volunteer.” One of the things we’re going to talk about as far as organization strategy moving forward is how we can make it easier for more people to get involved, given the fact that our core program is a pretty deep, intensive program. But if there’s a guy out there who really wants to do this work, the youth fellowship program is the best way to do it. It’s great training, great experience, and a great community.
MK: I always like to find a silver lining somewhere, so do you see hope on this issue and if so, where?
OJ: After the election, we brought all of our fellows together in large part to reflect on where we’ve been, what happened, and what we did. We gave guys a chance to talk to each other and talk about how they’re processing the moment. We asked people in a series of poll questions about how they were responding to the moment. One of the questions we asked was, “How do you see your activism around abortion rights moving forward?” And there were three simple answers: “I’ll be less engaged,” “My engagement will stay the same,” or “I need to get more engaged in this fight.” Three in four people said they’re going to get more engaged. So for me, knowing that that’s how our community is responding to this moment—by saying, “You know what, I’m going to do more. This is my fight, too.”—that gives me some hope that there are better days ahead.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.