This past weekend, the New York Times ran a guest essay by historian Daniel K. Williams. In “Dobbs Didn’t Reduce Abortions. The Anti-Abortion Movement Needs a New Vision,” Williams claims that the state-level pro-life laws that have been enacted since the June 2022 Dobbs decision have been unable to reduce the U.S. abortion rate. He argues that strengthening the social safety net is a superior strategy for reducing the incidence of abortion.
There are multiple problems with Williams’s analysis. First, for evidence that abortions have increased in the United States, he links to an analysis that cites the Society of Family
Planning’s #WeCount project. However, there are legitimate methodological concerns with the #WeCount abortion estimates. In its most recentanalysis, it compares twelve months of post-Dobbs data to only two months of pre-Dobbs data. The #WeCount analysts clearly needed to collect more pre-Dobbs abortion data to properly analyze the impact of the Dobbs decision.
Furthermore, pro-life policies resulted in abortion declines before the Dobbs decision. Texas started enforcing its Heartbeat Act on September 1, 2021. Oklahoma started enforcing a heartbeat act in May 2022. That makes the post-Dobbs abortion declines in these states appear less dramatic and complicates the #WeCount analysis.
Methodological concerns about the #WeCount data aside, a growing body of state-level birth data provide powerful statistical evidence that recently enacted pro-life laws have saved thousands of lives. My Charlotte Lozier Institute analysis from November 2022 and an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June 2023 both found that the Texas Heartbeat Act saved over 1,000 lives every month. Also, in an analysis from November 2023, the Institute of Labor Economics compared birth-rate data with 24 states where abortion remained legal with 14 states that passed strong pro-life laws after Dobbs. Overall, it found that pro-life laws enacted after the Dobbs decision have saved over 32,000 lives.
Williams encourages pro-lifers to support comprehensive national programs to provide assistance to pregnant women. He provides some examples of creative public-policy proposals, but there some specific programs Williams fails to mention. For instance, Mississippi expanded Medicaid coverage to new mothers for a full year after their child is born. Florida recently enacted a sales-tax exemption for many items for newborns. Currently, 18 states fund life-affirming alternatives to abortion. Last year, Americans United for Life and Democrats for Life of America launched a proposal to make birth free.
It is disappointing that Williams has bought into the pro-abortion narrative that legislation is an ineffective strategy for lowering abortion rates. His book Defenders of the Unborn is arguably the best history of the pro-life movement before Roe v. Wade. He demonstrates how the right-to-life movement in the 1960s and early 1970s was more ideologically diverse than it is today. Williams is certainly correct that pro-lifers should think creatively about how best to help pregnant women and mothers in a post-Dobbs world. However, he should more candidly acknowledge the real success that pro-life laws have had in protecting both mothers and unborn children.