The Way Forward After Dobbs

It has been two years since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning Roe v. Wade. It is worth taking stock of where the pro-life movement finds itself now.

Over the past few months, children have been born, and some have celebrated their birthdays, because Dobbs allowed their states to provide them with legal protections against the lethal violence of abortion. Some of these little ones are already walking, talking, and giggling, thanks to fifty years of work by pro-life activists.

But every time abortion policies have appeared on state ballots since Dobbs, the people have voted against life. Public opinion has shifted drastically in favor of abortion in the past decade. In response, the Republican Party has watered down its platform language about, and weakened its commitment to, the unborn. It took fifty years to overturn Roe, and, for all we know, it may take even longer for us to protect every unborn child in this nation. We need to be committed for the long haul.

In his last major address before his death, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus declared: “Until every human being created in the image and likeness of God is protected in law and cared for in life, we shall not weary, we shall not rest.” Protected in law and cared for in life remains the legal and cultural goal. But it will take time. Our entire constitutional, political, and social order was corrupted by fifty years of Roe. Conservatives are correct to point to the pedagogical function of law—the law is, as Aristotle noted, a teacher. The pedagogical result of a bad Supreme Court ruling, which was allowed to stand for so long, is the darkening of our national conscience. Generations of Americans were catechized in the beliefs that abortion is a right and that unborn babies have no rights—and that we have no duties to the unborn. Though Dobbs did important work to repair part of the damage to our constitutional order, it doesn’t—couldn’t—erase half a century of political and social corruption. And even for those of us who believe the unborn are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, constitutionally entitled to equal protection, widespread recognition of that fact is not going to happen quickly. We need to lay the groundwork for success in the long term.

A majority of Americans, though ambivalent about abortion, think that elective abortion should be legally permitted at least in the first trimester of pregnancy. As the results of state ballot measures over the past two years reveal, most Americans will vote for a radically permissive legal regime if they think the alternative is a complete prohibition of abortion. On this point, pro-lifers tend even to lose a portion of what should be our natural base: In Ohio, internal pro-life polling revealed that one-third of voters who said they go to church at least once a week voted for unlimited abortion in the recent state referendum.

For decades, public opinion had been relatively stable on abortion, and most Americans do support some legal limits on abortion. But since 2016, the public has taken a stark turn to abortion extremism on many counts. Consider recent Gallup polling: Not only do “a record-high 69% say abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy,” but a record-high 34 percent say abortion should be legal under any circumstance. Fifty-two percent say abortion is morally acceptable, ten points above what had been the average since 2001. The change in public opinion over the past decade is hard to come to grips with, but the pro-life movement needs to do just that.

Things get worse when you break the numbers down by party, sex, and age. In 2010, only 33 percent of self-identified Democrats thought abortion should be legal under any circumstance. Today that number has nearly doubled, as 60 percent of Democrats support abortion on demand. Among American women, support for unlimited abortion has grown from 30 percent to 40 percent. As my colleague Mary Hasson has repeatedly noted, women are key shapers of culture—their role as mothers, teachers, counselors, and nurses disproportionately influences the next generation. When 40 percent of women support abortion on demand, it is not just a statistic for today; it bodes poorly for the future. As a look at what’s to come, consider that 63 percent of fifty- to sixty-four-year-olds support first-trimester abortion, whereas a whopping 83 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds do. Kamala Harris’s abortion extremism is in step with the views of her base.

There are many reasons for this shift in public opinion. One is the rise of depression, disconnection, and anxiety in our youngest generations, and among young liberal women in particular. Young people are suffering and very fearful of unwanted pregnancies. Another likely reason is the person of Donald Trump. But above all, there is what Trump at first symbolized and then actualized: the overturning of Roe. Prior to Dobbs, most Americans did not have skin in the game, did not worry about being denied an abortion should the day come when they “need” one. It was easier to affirm the dignity of the child in the womb when the affirmation was abstract and did not imply a threat to anyone’s “choice.” Now all of us, including pro-lifers, have to count the potential cost.

It seems that most Americans, even some who consider themselves pro-life, support four exceptions: rape, incest, life of the mother, and . . . “my case.” Or “my daughter’s case,” or “my girlfriend’s case.” For nearly fifty years, the American people have built their lives around the ready availability of abortion. Even when they know that abortion stops a beating heart, they don’t always care, or when they do care, they aren’t always willing to make the personal sacrifices that follow. In April, Bill Maher said the quiet part out loud to a stunned audience: “They think it’s murder. And it kind of is. I’m just okay with that.” There is a great deal of motivated reasoning—rationalization—in the abortion debate, because deep down people know the law written on the heart. They just aren’t willing to make sacrifices in order to live in accordance with that law.

Yes, there is an economic dimension to abortion, but no one is seeking abortion because of the cost of diapers or of birth. People think they need abortion because they don’t want a child, because they aren’t well positioned to raise a child—and yet they’re engaging in an act that can create a child. Two data points illustrate the real economic factor. Consider who gets aborted and who gets an abortion: Four percent of babies conceived in marriage will be aborted, compared to 40 percent of children conceived outside of marriage. Meanwhile, 13 percent of women who have abortions are married, and 87 percent are unmarried. Nonmarital sex is the main cause of abortion. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life. It wasn’t just the pedagogical impact of Roe in teaching about abortion that corrupted our nation; Roe exacerbated multiple generations of a sexual culture that incentivizes abortion.

There are some people—miseducated by our public schools and media lies about the facts of conception and pregnancy—who genuinely do not know that the entity in the human womb is a human being. But remarkably, one-third of Gallup respondents said that their views are described “at least somewhat well” by both of these statements: “Human life begins at conception, so an embryo is a person with rights,” and “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman.” Teaching the facts of embryology, though important, won’t make a decisive change. How can even those who believe unborn children are people with rights support abortion? The answer is the sexual revolution, a revolution that conservatives have never attempted to combat in a sustained way, despite many one-off campaigns and skirmishes.

So long as nonmarital sex is expected, large numbers of Americans will view abortion as necessary emergency contraception. So long as marriage rates are declining and marriage age is delayed—but the human sex drive persists—abortion rates will remain high. Our primary task isn’t to persuade people of the humanity of the unborn—anyone who has ever seen an ultrasound knows all about that—but to change how people lead their sexual lives. We have a pro-life movement, but could anyone seriously suggest that we have a pro-marriage or pro-chastity movement? New institutions and new initiatives must turn their attention to this battlefield, the real battlefield. But few people want to. Who wants to be viewed as a professional prude?

What should pro-lifers do? We are all incrementalists now: It does the pro-life cause no good to pass a protective law at the statehouse that will be repealed at the ballot box—especially if it is then replaced with abortion on demand throughout all nine months and our opponents do away with even moderate measures such as parental-notification and informed-consent laws. Our goal needs to be not simply the most protective law possible now, but the most protective law that can withstand efforts to repeal it, all to buy time for shaping public opinion in a better direction for future votes. This means that some of our most immediate protective work will need to be done through executive actions and agency regulations. Personnel is policy, and both state and federal agencies can do quite a bit to protect unborn children and serve their mothers. Simply undoing all that the Biden administration has done to promote abortion at the federal level and obstruct pro-life laws at the state level would make a real difference.

But in these incremental efforts, where prudence is required, we need to stop the pro-life circular firing squad. Pro-lifers need to be able to disagree about prudential matters without attacking each other, without trying to outdo one another with purity tests, and without trying to appear bolder in order to win donors. Too often it appears that pro-life groups are competing with each other rather than collaborating toward a common goal. No one person or organization has all the answers right now. We will disagree. As much as possible, we should resolve those disagreements behind closed doors, so that common strategies can be developed and deployed when we do agree. We’ll need to navigate prudential and tactical questions charitably when the path forward isn’t obvious or easy. For when pro-life groups try to outdo each other, it is not just counterproductive. It can result in setbacks for the movement as a whole, as voters regard the pro-life cause, not the abortion-on-demand party, as extreme.

We can’t give up on politics, but neither can we allow the pro-life cause to be a mere appendage of the Republican Party. Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. Every human being deserves the law’s protection. That must be a bedrock principle of any decent civilization, and certainly of a party that claims to be pro-life. Pro-lifers need to insist that our political leaders show courage in advocating the truth, even if we can’t immediately enact all of the truth into law. We can be incrementalist, prudent, and pragmatic without undermining the ultimate goal of the pro-life cause.

We currently face the possibility that the historically pro-life Republican Party will become the not-quite-as-pro-choice alternative to the radically pro-abortion Democratic Party. Dobbs has revealed what many of us in Washington have long known: Political elites in the so-called pro-life party are frequently insincere in their pro-life commitments and unwilling to provide the leadership necessary to shift public opinion.

Even so, there are sincere and committed pro-life politicians who have been essential to pro-life wins at statehouses across the country. Consider this contrast: Though every ballot initiative on abortion since Dobbs has produced a resounding defeat for the pro-life cause, pro-life politicians who have championed the cause have fared well in elections. In fact, the most outspoken pro-life officeholders—senators who championed federal legislation and governors who signed into law state protections for the unborn—have sailed to re-election. Governor Ron DeSantis ran for re-election in 2022 having just signed a pain-capable bill, which protects babies after fifteen weeks. He won by nineteen points and went on to sign a six-week heartbeat bill. In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine won in 2022 by twenty-five points after signing a heartbeat law. Georgia governor Brian Kemp and Texas governor Greg Abbott both won decisive re-election victories in 2022 after signing heartbeat laws. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was re-elected by sixteen points in 2022 after expressing strong support for a fifteen-week federal limit on abortion, even as his Senate colleagues were running for the hills. Pro-life elected officials, especially those who proudly defend their position on the issue, have not paid a price at the ballot box. Not a single pro-life governor or senator has lost an election since Dobbs.

There is a lesson here. When ballot initiatives come before the public, pro-abortion activists and media personalities control the messaging. They lie about pro-life laws, claiming that women will be punished for miscarrying and pregnant mothers will be denied life-saving medical care. Prominent pro-life politicians fail to use their bully pulpits to debunk these lies or rally voters to the pro-life side. (Some national Republican figures—especially Donald Trump—have even attacked certain state pro-life laws.) The pro-life side is consistently outspent by wide margins. National pro-abortion talent and money go up against state pro-life talent and money. For all these reasons, the pro-abortion side will continue to bring ballot initiatives in states that pass pro-life legislation.

Courage has two opposing vices: rashness and cowardice. Some in the pro-life movement have exhibited rashness in insisting on no intermediate steps along the road to abortion abolition. But the main issue facing pro-lifers is cowardice. Too many of our political leaders treat cowardice as if it were prudence. Many are retreating from the battle.

It’s understandable why they are doing so. They see polls showing that public opinion is not where it should be. But political leaders have an essential role in shaping public opinion. Pro-lifers are for the most part locked out of or silenced in every elite sector of society: media, Hollywood, academia, business, athletics, and so on. The one venue in which it is possible to be an outspoken pro-lifer and not pay a price is politics. And outspokenness in the political arena can help shape the future of our country. We need political leaders to speak about abortion intelligently, compassionately, boldly, and persuasively—not abandon it at the first sign of serious struggle.

Recall how Trump, in his 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, gave blunt expression to the moral wrongness of partial-birth abortion: “In the ninth month you can take the baby and rip the baby right out of the womb, just prior to the birth of the baby.” There’s no reason why similar truth-telling could not be done regarding chemical abortions. Unfortunately, those with the opportunity to alter the political landscape by shaping public discussion and shifting public opinion are instead yielding to momentary political incentives.

Personnel is policy, as I said above. In a second Trump administration, there’s no reason why the political appointees in the FDA couldn’t, at minimum, reinstate the chemical-abortion safety standards that were deemed necessary before the Biden administration eliminated them in 2021. Indeed, a Trump administration could undo all of the pro-abortion measures of the Biden-Harris administration. As my colleagues at the Ethics and Public Policy Center have documented, this administration has turned Title X into an abortion-counseling mandate, turned taxpayer dollars into abortion funds, turned emergency rooms and VA hospitals into abortion clinics, turned the United States Postal Service into an abortion-drug delivery service, and turned protections for pregnant workers into an abortion mandate. Undoing all these measures is important in its own right. Meanwhile, if national leaders bolster these administrative actions with effective pro-life rhetoric, they can shift Overton windows and shape public opinion in a pro-life direction.

At the state level, in addition to the usual gestational-age protections, such as heartbeat bills or fetal-pain bills—and especially where such measure are not yet possible—legislators could require that scientifically accurate facts about human embryology and developmental biology be taught in public schools in various grades at age-appropriate levels. Earlier this year, Tennessee passed a law requiring students to watch a three-minute video on fetal development. Live Action has created videos that can be shown in schools to minimize the problem of ideologically driven teachers who resist the state-mandated curriculum. Playing the long game on life will require combatting the various lies about “clumps of cells” and the supposed “mystery” of when human life begins.

Politicians won’t be courageous on abortion simply out of the goodness of their hearts. In 2016, Trump made certain pro-life commitments and judicial promises and spoke boldly about late-term abortion because he needed to win over socially conservative voters. Now he thinks, not without cause, that he doesn’t need to win us over again. He takes social conservatives for granted because he suspects that, thanks in part to the impossible alternative of the Democratic Party, pro-lifers are willing to support him even if he publicly abandons our cause. And though gender ideology and religious liberty are important, we shouldn’t allow good policies on those issues to appease us on the life issue. Pro-lifers must refuse to be cheap dates—and figure out how to do so. We must organize politically and help politicians find paths to success—not ask them to engage in political suicide missions. Again, incrementalism is key.

Other political minorities have exerted outsized political influence because they are organized. Social conservatives need 501(c)(4)s, PACs and super PACs, 527s, and other organizations to engage in direct political action, supporting bills and politicians that are good for life, religious liberty, and human sexuality—and opposing those that do them harm. But for the most part, social conservatives have operated in the realms of ideas (think tanks and journals), law (public-interest law firms and judicial appointments), and religious ministries. We talk about politics, but we don’t actually do politics. There’s a Club for Growth, but there is not a Club for Virtue. The NRA can whip members into voting to protect gun rights, but nothing comparable to the NRA exists for pro-family policy. When it comes to life, human sexuality, and religious liberty, we ask politicians to do the right thing merely because it’s the right thing. We don’t make it painful to do the wrong thing or do nothing at all. The Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project have tried heroically, but they can’t do it alone.

Pro-lifers need to engage more, not less, in politics. But we also need to broaden our vision, both within the political realm and beyond. Right as Dobbs was being decided, Alexandra DeSanctis and I released a book titled Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. Part of our aim was to document all the ways in which abortion has harmed our society. The first chapter concerns how abortion harms—kills—the unborn child. Seven additional chapters focus on seven additional areas of harm, intended to equip pro-lifers to persuade their neighbors. We must help our neighbors see that abortion isn’t good for anyone; it not only kills the unborn, but it harms women, families, medicine, politics, the economy, and our culture as a whole.

As part of this work, pro-lifers must articulate a vision for women and families. Abortion on demand wins at the ballot box partly because voters fear that the pro-life alternative is worse. They don’t trust the GOP to handle this issue well or truly to care about women. The oft-repeated George Carlin line, that pro-lifers only care about the baby in the womb and then abandon that child and the mother after delivery, has been put to rest by concrete public policy from red states—yet many still believe the lie. As my EPPC colleagues document, in the two years since Dobbs, “Every state that has laws on the books protecting life in the womb has passed laws that expand support for pregnant and new moms and their babies; some to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually.” They continue: “Every state, save one, has opted into expanding Medicaid coverage for postpartum women for up to a year after childbirth. Most states have taken steps to expand options for childcare, or increased availability of health services for women. And a number of states have expanded eligibility for safety-net programs or provide direct aid to pregnant and new moms.”

This is important work. Pregnant women and their babies deserve support as a matter of justice, and these policies can make for good politics, restoring trust to the pro-life community and the GOP. But I have two cautions. First, the various pro-mother, pro-family bills can be good, but they must not become the main political agenda or serve as a substitute for persuading people of our duties to the child in the womb. Second, the phrase “can be good” is crucial. Without proper attention to marriage disincentives in program design, we risk further decreasing marriage rates and increasing abortion rates in the long run.

Many of our most successful institutions have long focused on law. While Roe was in place, we focused on undermining and overturning it, winning at the ballot box in order to appoint better justices, then bringing them the right cases. We must replicate the success of Dobbs in other sectors of society.

We now need culture-forming, opinion-shaping organizations. What might this entail? We might task a small group with studying how other groups have succeeded in their domains, and devising a plan for meaningful reforms in new areas. What the Federalist Society did to reform the judiciary, and what Alliance Defending Freedom has done to create a generation of elite socially conservative lawyers through its Blackstone Legal Fellowship, we need to create for other culture-shaping institutions. This is a daunting task. But if the real root causes of abortion are the sexual practices in which Americans have been habituated for generations, then post-Roe America needs institutions to combat the sexual revolution with the same sophistication that the conservative legal movement brought to overturning Roe.

Even at the intellectual level—where social conservatism is perhaps strongest—we’re still woefully under-resourced. Cultural progressives have constructed a massive infrastructure that supports up-and-coming left-wing graduate students, academics, and researchers who are willing not only to teach at all levels, but also to testify, give interviews, write reports, and engage politically to advance their social values. There is no comparable support for socially conservative scholars on the right.

There is no financial infrastructure, and no clear pathway to tenure or professional success, for a graduate student seeking to do research advancing the pro-life cause, supporting marriage, or criticizing the disastrous origins and effects of the sexual revolution. The right has fostered programs, fellowships, post-docs, and research grants to generate scholarship and expertise on economics, jurisprudence, and foreign policy. A handful of conservative programs aim at the humanities. But for the politically serious social conservative, advancement opportunities are few and far between. The next Robert George, Hadley Arkes, Brad Wilcox, Mark Regnerus, or Leon Kass will not spontaneously emerge. They must be sought out and supported.

This project can fit into a larger political and philanthropic cause beyond the pro-life effort. More or less everything that touches on human flourishing and limited government—poverty, education, employment, health, crime—is better served by a strong culture of marriage and family. The root cause of virtually all of our social problems is the collapse of marriage and family following the sexual revolution. Yet so little sustained, organized, strategic effort has gone into responding to this collapse. We must think it through: How can we reach ordinary people who don’t know what the word “anthropology” means and help them reject the lies of the sexual revolution? How can we help people live the virtue of chastity? How can we help people get married and stay married?

We can start with the Church itself. Seventy percent of women who have abortions identify as Christian. More than one-third report attending church at least monthly. Of these monthly attendees, just over half said their local churches had no influence over their decisions to abort. Apart from Respect Life Sunday, when do we hear about life from the pulpit—or, for that matter, about chastity? Consider the statistics on premarital sex. The percentage of Americans who were virgins on their wedding nights is in the single digits, and among Christians the numbers are hardly better. According to my colleague Patrick Brown’s analysis of the latest data from the National Survey of Family Growth, 10 percent of ever-married Catholics under age forty-five, and 7 percent of Protestants, say their first sexual partner was their spouse after marriage. Things get only marginally better when we control for religious practice: Among ever-married Christians who attend church weekly or more, less than one-fifth report having waited for marriage. Let that sink in. Even among married believers who fill the pews every week, the vast majority did not live out the Christian vision for sex and marriage. Meanwhile, 36 percent of evangelical Protestants, 54 percent of mainline Protestants, and 62 percent of Catholics say casual sex between consenting adults is morally acceptable, according to a 2020 Pew survey. Before we try to persuade the secular world of a Christian sexual ethic, we might try persuading Christians. There have been important and good efforts here—projects like Communio, Ruah Woods, and TOBET. But more, much more, must be done to form people in the virtue of chastity and prepare them for marriage.

Some of this work will be intellectual, and conservatives tend to start there: Ideas have consequences. But ideas aren’t the only things that have consequences. So, too, do social practices, habits, virtues and vices, the movies and TV shows we watch, the music we listen to, and the events the youth ministry and young adult groups sponsor. Our cultural incrementalism can be broad-spectrum: new TV shows and movies that aren’t hokey after-school specials, policies to protect kids from the harms of social media and online pornography, effective church ministries. The task is enormous. But we haven’t devoted enough time, treasure, or sophistication to it. We can learn from the fact that America waged a successful campaign against teen pregnancy, but the result wasn’t more marital pregnancies. What would a campaign for marriage look like?

All of this will require funding. The pro-life movement—and any future pro-marriage, pro-chastity movement—is built on the backs of generous donors who make sacrificial gifts to benefit other people. None of the initiatives I describe here have any immediate, tangible, personal benefit to the benefactor. This fact makes them harder to raise money for. By contrast, it’s not surprising that businesspeople who stand to gain from lower taxes or free trade are willing to donate to free-enterprise groups. Philanthropists who believe in the pro-life cause should think carefully about how to prioritize their giving. Let the secular liberals donate to the art museum and opera house. Let the libertarians donate to overturn whatever the next Chevron is. Those with biblical convictions who are blessed with financial means to make meaningful contributions need to support the very few groups that defend the fullness of truth about human nature.

Abortion is already on the ballot in eight states this November, and it could be on the ballot in as many as thirteen. After a seven-state losing streak, pro-life donors should pick the two most promising states (perhaps Florida and Arizona, or Nebraska and Missouri) and stop the bleeding. Pro-life political activists—backed by real money—must prevent down-ticket officeholders and candidates from aping the RNC-platform and Trump-campaign approach to abortion. The moment calls for courageous statesmanship, not convenient cowardice. Policy wonks must devise effective pro-marriage policies. Cultural entrepreneurs must apply the professionalism of the conservative legal movement across our culture-shaping institutions. Most importantly, the Church must devise ministries that will transform lives, because short of religious revival, none of the changes we need will be possible.

Ryan T. Anderson is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Image by Steven Van Elk, public domain. Image cropped.