The only way to reduce the number of abortions performed in America is for pro-lifers to practice, and succeed at, the art of persuasion.
The only way to reduce the number of abortions performed in America is for pro-lifers to practice, and succeed at, the art of persuasion.
W hen the U.S. Supreme Court last year terminated the constitutional right to an abortion — which was in its 198th trimester — pro-abortion-rights advocates immediately began ranting at how unjust the decision was because of abortion’s popularity.
Of course, whether a person growing inside a pregnant woman is a human being should not be subject to the whims of a Pew poll.
But, as pro-life advocates had spent a half century explaining, the entire point of overturning Roe v. Wade was to send the issue back to the states, thereby subjecting it to the political process. If the right to an abortion was as popular as its advocates believed it is, it would be codified in states where an alleged groundswell of voters would rise up and demand that women be allowed to abort their unborn children on demand.
You want to keep abortion legal? Persuade people.
In many areas of the U.S., the opposite of what the pro-abortion-rights camp predicted has happened. Since Roe was overturned, 17 states have moved to restrict abortion. Incumbent pro-life Republicans around the country were reelected in November, even though the GOP’s hopes of national electoral success collapsed under the weight of a slate of terrible conspiracy-loving candidates.
But in other areas — even those considered more pro-life — voters are moving toward protecting access to abortion. In August, voters in conservative Kansas, for instance, affirmed a right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Courts have further temporarily blocked anti-abortion “trigger laws” (which banned abortion immediately after Roe’s demise) in states such as Indiana and Utah.
In fact, given the mixed bag of abortion laws we are now seeing, America is still very much where it was before Roe was overturned in June of last year. And that is a problem for the pro-life movement.
Even before the Roe reversal, it was clear that overturning the law wouldn’t cause the number of abortions in America to collapse. Only 13 states had trigger laws. Women seeking abortions in progressive states such as New York and California would continue to have full access to abortion-on-demand as allowed by their state’s laws.
Of course, women in states with abortion restrictions in place could always travel to states where it is legal. And they could end their pregnancies through other means.
According to one study, the number of abortions in Texas dropped by only 10 percent after the state implemented a law prohibiting abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, at around the sixth week of pregnancy. This was because women either traveled to other states that allowed abortion, had an abortion before the legal cutoff, or found a way to obtain abortion pills.
Further, even in states that now have active anti-abortion laws on the books, it takes people in power to actually enforce those laws. In Wisconsin, which is bound by an 1849 law banning abortion, Democratic governor Tony Evers said his administration would not enforce the law. Democratic attorney general Josh Kaul and several of the state’s progressive district attorneys similarly said they would not prosecute anyone for performing what they considered to be a legal abortion. Both Evers and Kaul were reelected in November.
Wisconsin’s 174-year-old abortion law has once again been thrust into the limelight in the state’s election for a supreme court seat, with liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz advancing this week to face conservative Dan Kelly in the April general election. In normal times, judges are coy about signaling how they might rule in cases that come before them, but Protasiewicz has burst through that formality like the Kool-Aid man, declaring in one of her television ads that she “believes in abortion rights.”
If elected, Protasiewicz would tip the balance of the state supreme court to the liberals, who would almost certainly overturn the 1849 total abortion ban. The only thing that might save portions of the law from a liberal court majority is the possibility that the Republican-led legislature and Evers strike some sort of deal on a new law that, say, caps abortions at 20 weeks or so.
All this is to say: Despite the hysterics about how abortion would effectively be illegal after Roe’s demise, and even with questions left to the states as to whether and how the procedure should be restricted, the total number of abortions occurring in America will actually drop very little.
PHOTOS: March for Life 2023
We knew this even before the Supreme Court threw abortion law back to the states. A pre-Dobbs study by researchers at Middlebury College, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Guttmacher Institute estimated that overturning Roe would reduce the number of abortions only by around 13 percent, given the number of states where they would remain legal, the ability of women to travel to get them, the ability to obtain them through pills sent by mail, and the refusal by local politicians to enforce laws banning them.
The Handmaid’s Tale, America is not.
But this is why, for the pro-life movement, overturning Roe is not the end of an effort to outlaw abortion; it is the beginning of the real work of convincing people that abortion ends a human life. Only based on this understanding will public opinion, and laws that reflect it, follow.
Of course, that means convincing voters to support pro-life candidates. For decades, pro-life politicians have boasted of their anti-abortion credentials; now they are responsible for backing up their rhetoric.
But more important, as we are now seeing, even when politicians keep their word and enact abortion restrictions, the overwhelming majority of sought-after abortions are still going to happen. If one state’s legislature passes a law protecting abortion, it effectively renders all the laws restricting abortion in nearby states useless.
That is why, just as it was before Dobbs, abortion remains above all else a cultural issue, not a legal one. The only true way to actually reduce the number of abortions performed in America is to convince pregnant women that what’s growing inside them is a human being who deserves a right to live. For those pregnant women, abortion is a question of conscience, not a question of availability.
To reduce the number of unborn children callously discarded, pregnant women must also be persuaded that they have the support of a society willing to help them as they bring a new life into the world.
Overturning Roe was the proper legal decision and will no doubt save the lives of untold numbers of unborn children. But to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, pro-lifers asked for democracy, and they are about to get it good and hard.
Now that the Supreme Court has returned the matter of abortion to the democratic process of persuasion, it’s time to start persuading.