There is a lot of fretting these days in the pro-life movement in America. The months after Dobbs revealed a movement unprepared for its victory, and far less able than its adversaries to turn its strategy on a dime to match the pro-abortion cause in fundraising, voter mobilization, and public relations. There is much to be said about the long game ahead and how to win it, or at least make more progress. But as 2022 comes to a close, we should be thankful for the scale of what was achieved against the greatest human-rights abuse in modern America.
The fall of Roe v. Wade was a generational accomplishment, perhaps the single most imposing task set by American conservatives for themselves in the past half-century. We lived to see it, and getting there required the combined efforts of many strange bedfellows for 49 years. Before Dobbs, five people could prevent the other 333 million from doing anything much in law to protect the lives of the unborn. Today, federal law imposes no such obstacle, and in most states, the people’s representatives are free to make laws against abortion.
They have done so, either with new laws or laws newly permitted to be enforced. Depending how one counts the current state of law and litigation, some 21 states now have legal bans on most or all abortions. Two-thirds of those bans are currently in effect, while the rest have been at least temporarily stopped by courts; in other states such as Florida, there remain court battles ahead that could expand the state’s power to ban abortion. Other states have laws that at least restrict the practice more than it could be restricted under Roe. Dozens of abortion clinics have closed across the country, leaving a number of states without one.
Few of these battles are over, but in a democracy, what is? The great hope of proponents of legal abortion was that pro-lifers would face a massive backlash at the polls that would punish those who voted for restrictions on abortion. Surely, they argued, Americans who saw what abortion bans looked like would turn against those who enacted them. The opposite happened. While pro-life candidates undoubtedly suffered in some races, every single governor who signed a pro-life law was re-elected, and every single state legislative house that passed such a law remained in Republican hands. The only loss in that regard was in Michigan, where pro-lifers didn’t enact any new laws but simply refused to revisit a very old pre-Roe law. In short, pro-lifers now have a beachhead, and have not been driven into the sea. From here, we can build. This is a mighty accomplishment that many observers of the American political scene would not have foreseen before Dobbs.
Abortions, which according to some pro-choice sources rose by eight percent from 2017 to 2020 (this is disputed), fell nationwide by six percent just in the two months after Dobbs, a net saving of some 10,000 lives. Those children will be taking their first steps soon. If we have not yet given thanks for that, we need to take a moment to slow down and do so. It has been a very good year for life.