Roe’s End: It Took Everybody

A number of pro-life commentators, activists, and figures have reacted to the fall of Roe v. Wade with something other than celebration. They are engaging in recriminations on the right, or they remain plagued by doubt and disquiet about how victory was achieved and what comes next. A lot of this is just more fighting about Donald Trump, or about whether the current Republican Party is worthy of delivering such a victory, or about wishing that the condition of the country were different in order to receive this monumental win.

In some ways, this is normal. Roe, over the decades, served as a fulcrum over which factions of the right could fight with one another. The factional interests haven’t disappeared even if Roe has. The achievement of any difficult task is often accompanied by that moment of disquiet, especially in politics. How will this change the world? How will it reconfigure alliances and shift priorities? In some cases, how will it change me?

It is normal, but, for pro-lifers, the recriminations and the doubt and disquiet are misplaced. Roe was baseless as constitutional law and a monumental injustice to the unborn. It is good that it ended.

It is true that a whole way of life was built around this injustice. But there is no way of transforming that way of life without ending the injustice first.

Should we be troubled by the role that Donald Trump played in appointing three originalist justices who were willing to overturn Roe v. Wade? No. That’s maybe the one thing we should not be troubled about when it comes to Donald Trump. The pro-life movement and the conservative judicial movement spent decades building their strength precisely to make the personal virtues and convictions of any given politician irrelevant. That’s how mass democratic movements work, by transforming the elite through a combination of outside pressure, reorganization, replacement, or compulsion.

Overturning Roe v. Wade took every pro-lifer’s efforts and then lots more besides. It was the work of generations of people, tens of millions of voters who realigned into (and transformed) the Republican Party. It took building a mass movement so large and influential that it transformed the people inside the Republican Party.

The Bush family provides a nice demonstration. A century ago, Prescott Bush was one of the most important figures in the founding of Planned Parenthood, back when Margaret Sanger was openly promoting birth control and abortion as eugenic tools for controlling the population of ethnic groups she deemed undesirable, alongside the infirm, Jews, and Catholics. His son George H. W. Bush was nicknamed “rubbers” as a congressman because of his enthusiasm for contraception and his work sluicing federal money to Planned Parenthood under Title X. As ambassador to the U.N., he promoted population control. But, in 1980, he at least paid lip service to the Republican Party’s anti-abortion platform. Eventually, he would appoint Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, in order to conciliate social and judicial conservatives angry over the appointment of Justice Souter.

One of his sons, George W. Bush would seek to limit that Title X funding to Planned Parenthood, limit federally funded research on stem cells taken from aborted unborn children, and appoint the Supreme Court justice — Samuel Alito — who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe. Another of those sons, Jeb Bush, completely defunded Planned Parenthood as governor of Florida, promised to do so if elected president, converted to Catholicism, and married a Mexican woman (the kind of woman that Margaret Sanger probably would have wanted to sterilize).

If the pro-life movement could squeeze two fully anti-Roe justices out of the Bush family, it’s not a surprise that, by 2017, it could squeeze three more out of Donald J. Trump, a man who had once vowed to protect abortion at every stage of pregnancy, and who once did a cameo in a Playboy porn movie. Pro-lifers were not so weak that they needed Donald Trump, they were so strong that they could make use even of him. As a measure of the cultural shift, Trump himself became pro-life, decried late-term abortion in graphic terms in a presidential debate, and went on to become the first president to speak in person at the March for Life rally.

The pro-life coalition is bigger than any one faction, and that makes people uncomfortable. My former colleague David French, in “Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready,” questions whether the American Right in 2022 is really committed to the outward-facing altruism, sound judgment, and sacrifice required to sustain a culture of life. He brings up the fact that so many on the right, particularly the Evangelical right, disliked wearing masks during the pandemic or refused to take the Covid vaccines when available. He cites charts estimating that the U.S. suffered more than 318,000 Covid deaths that could’ve been prevented if all adults had been vaccinated. In this view, most of the butcher’s bill is laid on fellow pro-lifers.

Let’s put aside the debates about the efficacy of cloth masks, mask mandates, and the techniques for estimating preventable Covid deaths in a world of Covid variants that are at once weaker and more vaccine-evasive. There’s a strange off-subject nature to the complaint about allegedly preventable deaths from Covid. It would be as if my own response to the end of Roe were to complain that war hawks had variously contributed to it, even though their preferred policies led to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the Middle East over two decades and the ethnic cleansing of nearly 1 million Iraqi Christians. I really do think unjust wars are just organized mass murder. But I have to recognize that my opponents in foreign policy are often my best allies in the fight for life. And that they fundamentally don’t see their foreign-policy choices the way I see them. They genuinely think they are doing something good, just as many people during the pandemic thought, wrongly perhaps, that resisting mask mandates or the vaccine was a component of resisting medical tyranny, or of resisting a culture of fear.

The Republican coalition that ended slavery in the post–Civil War amendments to the Constitution was not made of angels. It was dominated by businessmen and, in the Northeast, filled with the remnants of the Know Nothing Party; it had many bigoted members. Abraham Lincoln himself didn’t run for office as an all-out abolitionist.

And that brings us to the more serious point: the disquieting sense that American society is not ready for a post-Roe world and the culture of life. To that I say, it cannot be. Neither was the post–Civil War world ready for freedmen. Abolitionists were deeply divided over what kind of political and material support freedmen would need. But if you accept that it was a failure of the American government not to provide 40 acres and a mule, that failure was no excuse, or reason, to delay emancipation.

We cannot build that culture of life when abortion is common or given the imprimatur of our chief legal charter. Ending Roe was the necessary and just precondition to the real work that lies ahead. That work could be undone if we don’t grasp precisely what demands this new world will make of us.

But here is the reason to have confidence. That new world is coming now and will make its demands heard. At first, slowly. One plausible estimate is that the legal ramifications of Roe’s fall will result in a 14 percent reduction in abortions across the nation; roughly 84,000 children will be born annually who otherwise would not. That number can grow from there, and over decades it will begin compounding.

Pro-choice activists like to point out that you probably know people who have had abortions. They are your sisters, aunts, neighbors. That’s true. But Roe’s end has other ramifications as well. If normal people have a social circle of 150 meaningful contacts, 500 acquaintances, and about 1,500 people they can at least recognize, then in a few short years every American will know, recognize, and interact with a young person who was saved from abortion by last week’s ruling. You won’t know who they are. In most cases, they won’t know who they are — but they’ll be there. In 25 years, they will be studded throughout your life, going to college, working jobs all around you. They’ll be your kids’ friends and teammates. Someday, maybe their spouses. They may be assisting you in your old-age home. That’s the future that is certainly coming into being. That’s a legacy worth celebrating.