Pro-lifers have been so understandably preoccupied with the new challenges and difficulties of a post-Roe America that they have insufficiently celebrated the fact that we are now living in that America. For nearly 50 years, the Supreme Court had pretended that the Constitution protects abortion from democratic regulation, notwithstanding the lack of support for that proposition in its text, logic, structure, or original understanding. The justices who renounced that lie in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center exposed themselves to scurrilous criticisms and even threats to their safety. They merit praise for striking a blow for constitutional fidelity and for human rights, rightly considered.
The great danger of that moment was that a political backlash — abetted by a furious media and timorous politicians — would lead to a restoration of the policy of Roe. Had the Democrats won across the board in 2024, they might well have moved to put abortion on demand into national law. Their victory would certainly have been claimed to demonstrate the popularity of that policy. And at that point, many Republicans would have treated the issue as settled.
It didn’t happen. In the first elections held after Dobbs, Republicans regained control of the House. Every pro-life incumbent won in Senate and governor’s races, with the latter group including people who had signed into law major protections for unborn children. In red and even some purple states, politicians can enact such protections and thrive.
The political setbacks that pro-lifers have experienced, tragic though they are, also need to be put in the context of Roe’s effective legalization of abortion at any stage of pregnancy. There was nowhere to go but up. The states that have legislated in favor of abortion since Dobbs largely stuck with the status quo or defeated entirely disorganized opposition. Nearly two dozen other states have restricted abortion to some degree. And even in the states that afford no legal rights to the unborn, it remains possible to persuade voters to change their minds, with no federal mandate for abortion shutting down the debate before it begins.
In every state, pro-lifers should be pushing for the most life-protective regime of law that can be politically sustained. And that must include dispelling the dangerous legal and medical misinformation that supporters of abortion have been promoting. No pro-life laws anywhere in our country require doctors to wait for pregnant women undergoing medical crises to face imminent death before they can provide treatment. Pro-life officials, and juries, need to make this crystal clear to hospitals. Likewise, no pro-life laws anywhere are responsible for women dying from taking the abortion pill without ongoing medical supervision — the fruits of pro-abortion policymakers at the Food and Drug Administration.
Both states and the federal government, as appropriate, should also join churches and private charities in supporting mothers, children, and their families in meeting economic needs. That help can and should take multiple forms, from making catastrophic health insurance available on the market to giving parents tax relief.
Even with Roe gone, the federal government continues to undermine states’ ability to stop the violence of abortion. It entirely refuses to enforce the ban, already in law, on shipping abortion pills interstate, even to states where using them for abortions is illegal. And it has placed far looser rules on those pills than on drugs that pose similar dangers to those who take them. Pro-lifers can in good faith debate how extensive the federal role in discouraging abortion should be. That the federal government should do nothing to subvert states’ pro-life laws should be a point of agreement. In this spirit, states should be permitted to prohibit abortion pills from flowing into their jurisdictions, and no part of the federal government (including the FDA) should interfere with this authority. At the same time, the FDA should at a minimum restore the basic safety measures eliminated by the Obama and Biden administrations.
Pressing forward with this agenda will require some adjustments in the relationship between pro-life activists and politicians. The politicians, far too many of whom would prefer to be done with this issue, complain that the activists make unrealistic demands. The activists, rightly galled by the snuffing out of unborn life, think the politicians overestimate the risks of standing with the unborn. Too often each group is right about the other. This problem can be solved. And the noble cause that unites us requires no less.