Why the Pro-Life Movement Wasn’t Ready for a Post-Roe World

Dobbs represented a remarkable legal victory, but the anti-abortion cause has struggled to win hearts and minds.

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People attend the 50th annual March for Life rally on the National Mall on January 20, 2023 in Washington, D.C.(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump made a deal with pro-life groups during his 2016 campaign: He’d appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and the pro-life groups would offer him political support. His recent comments on Meet the Press suggest he sees himself as having held up his end of the bargain and is ready to move on. 

In describing Florida’s six-week abortion ban as “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” Trump showed his lack of commitment to the pro-life cause. But his statement also reflects a calculation that spurning the pro-life movement will not cause serious political consequences. And for many social conservatives, the uncomfortable truth in the president’s remarks is that the pro-life cause is struggling when placed in front of voters. 

For half a century, the pro-life movement was forced to rely primarily on a legal strategy to protect the unborn child. The conservative legal scholar Ed Whelan, my colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the Dobbs decision the “crowning achievement of the conservative legal movement.” But that legal victory, while necessary, only put the pro- and anti-abortion forces on a level political playing field. It didn’t win the contest. And since then, the scoreboard is telling an ugly story.

Kansas voters rejected a pro-life ballot amendment by 18 points in August 2022. Three months later in Kentucky, which voted for Trump by 26 points in 2020, a similar measure failed by 5 points. Montana, another red state, voted down an amendment that would have required medical care to be provided to infants who survived an abortion attempt. Two-thirds of voters in California, and three-quarters of voters in Vermont, approved broadly worded amendments guaranteeing an individual’s right to “reproductive freedom.” A similarly sweeping abortion referendum in Michigan passed by 13 points. And most recently, voters in Ohio turned down a constitutional amendment largely seen as a proxy fight over abortion rights by 14 points. 

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  1. Janicewfahy

    If Mr. Brown truly gives a rat's bum about the "unborn," he'll start writing columns encouraging "pro-lifers" to elect Democratic Party representatives at every level of state and federal government as THOSE are the politicians most likely to enact policies that will encourage women to safely have and raise their children.

    In fact, those seem to be the only politicians in our country who are interested in or capable of governing - and passing any policies at all.

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  2. Rockefeller Republican

    Maybe it's as simple as people do not want state-enforced pregnancy.

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  3. Deana Duquesne

    If the anti-Roe brigade is truly pro-life: stop prosecuting women, make birth control widely and easily obtainable, and widen and deepen the social safety net for 18 years of these children's lives.

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  4. Randall Briggs

    Ultimately, changing hearts about the morality of abortion is the most reliable way pro-life legislation will win over the long run—a task made more difficult when opponents of abortion are constantly on defense.

    What also makes it difficult to win hearts and minds is the hatefulness of a critical mass of angry, hateful "pro-life" advocates. Laws that punish women for crossing state lines are what these people want. They want to punish the pregnant woman and they want to punish the doctors. They want to enable citizens to sue a fellow-citizen for receiving an abortion. For some reason, they never seem to advocate punishing the male who contributed his sperm toward the creation of the unborn child.

    These people discredit the pro-life movement they claim to support. But they aren't really pro-life. They seem to be more focused on controlling women than creating a culture of life. Hearts and minds do not respond to hateful arguments. Only anger does, and it responds with more hate, not with love.

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    1. Christopher Lake

      Randall, I am pro-life on abortion (and on capital punishment). I don't want to punish pregnant women for crossing state lines. I don't want to punish pregnant women, period. I care about their lives *and* unborn human lives. I am a "pro-life is for *all* human lives" advocate, and I am not alone, in the pro-life movement, in my views. "New Wave Feminists" is a pro-life organization that exists to actively help pregnant women who might be driven to seek abortion without such help, and there are other organizations and resources in the movement which also seek to actively help pregnant women, during their pregnancies, and after the babies' birth(s) too. https://www.newwavefeminists.com/

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      1. Randall Briggs

        I basically share those views, Christopher. Unfortunately, a loud, hateful group seems to have taken the leadership of the pro-life movement. There does not seem to be within them any joy over the prospect of saving unborn lives.

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    2. Coyneric

      Add to that the hideous, callow festival of ramming in peoples' face the ugliness of statements like "they love killing babies, it's their favorite pastime!!" "They love to celebrate murdering children!!". Never been able to grasp how so many pro-lifers have no problem with that kind of garbage rhetoric and think it's winning to people to their cause.

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  5. Cirujano1941

    With the Dobbs decision, Pro-life advocates celebrated a victory that would allow the states through their legislatures and the political process to determine whether abortion “prior to viability” would be legal.
    What they and the Supreme Court did not anticipate is that in many conservative states delineated in this article either the legislature, or the people, directly through the initiative process enacted laws to preserve a “woman’s right to choose abortion.
    By so doing these states affirmed that the state must protect the personal agency of the pregnant woman to make decisions about her health care and whether or not to continue a pregnancy to full term delivery.
    Exceptions to autonomous agency that restrict abortion before a date certain for 100% fetal viability which have been in place for a generation were also preserved. That date certain for fetal viability expressed as “weeks of gestation at birth or abortion” is 24 weeks. Infants who are delivered prior to 24 week may rarely survive but they do so only with prolonged ICU care and the high probability of multiple disabilities.
    What the people in the politically conservative states decided was that planned abortion of the fetus before twenty four weeks was a personal decision of the mother that the state must respect. By implication it also affirms that prior to twenty four weeks, the state has no compelling public interest that negates or restricts the autonomous choice of the pregnant woman.
    I suspect that the next step for the Antiabortion activists will be to claim these decisions of the people that affirms women’s autonomy are unconstitutional. They will then pursue the same litigation strategy to nullify such laws that they pursued year by year since at least 1980. They simply will never except that a large majority of the American people possess a moral compass that ranks the personhood and autonomy of the woman above the life of a fetus which only after 39 weeks of gestation achieves the status of a “living child”.

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  6. Valerie Thornton

    It seems to me that many fair legislative fixes to the pro-life/pro-choice debates would be accomplished with one adjustment. Make the sperm donor 100% financially responsible for the care of the growing fetus. Living conditions, medical care, protection from harm of the egg donor because any harm to her before birth would harm the fetus. After birth, the sperm donor's responsibilities would not cease. If the egg donor suffered harm from the pregnancy and/or birth, the sperm donor would have to pay for treatment. If the resulting baby needed care, the sperm donor would be responsible.
    After all, we expect all this of husbands of pregnant women. Not too much to ask. But people to who are primarily concerned about the fetus cannot let the fate of the fetus rest on the decisions of the egg donor wrt matrimony.

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  7. Janicewfahy

    50 years of marches and rallies and briefs and arguments and radio shows and podcasts and pictures of fat drooling infants and prayers and editorials and money (oh, sweet baby Jesus, the MONEY) and what has Pro-Life, Inc accomplished?

    I mean, sure, Roe is gone for now, but does anyone really think Dobbs won't eventually be overturned? And even in the aftermath of Dobbs, abortion rates are UP. They started to go up for the first time in decades after American women watched their countrymen install an authoritarian madman in the Oval in order to 'save the babies!' Turns out, hope in a bright future is a necessary condition for many woman to consider bringing a child into this world.

    I am a cradle Christian with 16-years of church school education and a catechist to the youngest in my parish. I can only see the world through the lens of Christ - I'd have to have a brain and soul transplant for it to be otherwise. I love God, my husband and babies (really ALL human beings at any state of development) beyond measure or reason and I find the world that Pro-Life, Inc. wants to bring to the United States morally repugnant and deeply anti-social. For me, it's the sort of grinding fundamentalism that caused such horror in Europe and gave birth to a little idea that some of us are still deeply committed to - America. And in America, the values of 'live and let live' and 'mind your own business' are in our blood and soil. These values make a whole lotta common sense and have allowed our nation to flourish.

    Once upon a time, Conservatives understood that the species is wise. That's the reason hearts and minds haven't changed. Most of us know, instinctually, that it is immoral to shill for laws that take away a woman's agency over her own body and, in fact, THE most important decision she will ever make. Because in order to install those laws justly in the United States, you must accuse a woman who has an elective abortion of some form of homicide and punish her. Only the abortion abolitionists (ie. tomorrow's 'pro-life movement' but likely they will have ZERO political power) are calling for charging and punishing the woman and I bet Patrick T. Brown would vote for a Democrat before he would cozy up to an abortion abolitionist.Show less

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    1. Tamarahedrick

      👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

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  8. Avatar photo
    EmmyCab

    Whenever I read people fighting back and forth over abortion the same old arguments are always presented, and they're the same ones I've heard my entire life. I was born in 1973, so you might say I'm a "choice" survivor, and I guess I'm going to throw my two cents in along with everyone else. For me, the only reason I care about abortion in any way is because I think there's a human baby in there. If someone convinces me there's not a human baby in there, I will be for abortion all day every day until the moment of birth. The problem is, every time a human gives birth, there's always a human baby that comes out. What to make of it all...

    As I read through the same old tired arguments over and over and over, I can't help but imagine what it would sound like if we applied these arguments to the contentious-in-its-day issue of human slavery. What if our country had focused on winning hearts and minds in the pursuit of the voluntary abandonment of slavery? Or maybe we just needed financial offsets to make it "doable" for slave owners to give up their slaves. Actually, I think those things were tried (or at least suggested). None of that worked. "Well I wouldn't have a slave myself, but I wouldn't tell someone else they can't have a slave." Arguing over what number of weeks should be the cutoff point for abortion feels like some modern day three-fifths rule. Like, whatever's in there has "an element of humanity about it" but not enough to really count. After all, it doesn't look the same as I do. Maybe at 8 weeks it's 1/5 human, at 16 weeks it's 2/5 human, and so on. I think it's just sad that 150 years after slavery was outlawed in America, we're still arguing over what it means to be human. I confess I'm just not very politically practical about it all.

    In closing, I really don't care what someone does with their own body, but it bothers me a lot when someone kills someone else's body. And I know I am in the minority. So we'll keep on debating and negotiating and voting on just *how* human the unborn are (or are not), but maybe while we're at it we could give a thought to how our arguments might hold up if applied to the topic of human slavery. Are we as enlightened as we believe ourselves to be?

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    1. Christopher Lake

      I hear you so much, EmmyCab. Born in '73 too here, and I'm also a "choice" survivor. I have Cerebral Palsy and was born just before prenatal screening for physical and/or cognitive disabilities in fetuses became widely available. If that screening had been done in my situation, I'm not 100% sure that I would have been born.... but I'm very grateful that I was allowed to be born, as difficult as life has been at many times.

      Speaking of which, a friend truly amazed me, in one of our conversations, by arguing for abortion in cases where, according to him, babies and children are likely to have very challenging, difficult lives. I asked him, "What about me? You know me. Much of my life has been challenging and difficult. Do you think it would have been better for me to have been aborted?" He replied, "Of course not!" However, I never got a clear answer from him, as to *why* he saw me as an exception to his argument. Could it have just been because he personally knew me? I'm not sure. In any event, I'm 50 now, and I definitely feel the struggles of living in a C.P.-affected body much more keenly at 50 than I did at 15, 25, or 35. Still, I'm glad to be alive, and I'm very glad that my humanity, and my worthiness to be born, didn't end up being judged on the fact of my having a physical disability and/or on the often-difficult, but still very worth living, life that has come with it.

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      1. Avatar photo
        EmmyCab

        Well, I'm glad to have you here with us, both here in the world and here at The Dispatch! God bless you, Christopher, and thank you for sharing your story with us! <3

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        1. Christopher Lake

          Thank you very much for that welcoming reply, Emmy! Sometimes, honestly, I struggle with the comment sections here, as I genuinely try to have thoughtful, respectful discussions, but some of the people I've attempted to engage with (who actually comment here much more than I do) have not exactly reciprocated in the same spirit, seeming to start from a place of suspicion or hostility, simply because we disagree on an issue, and/or because I've had different life experiences than them, and for whatever reason, they actually *don't believe me* about my own experiences... but still, I keep trying to have respectful, productive discussions here. Thanks again for the reply! I'm glad you are here in the world and here at The Dispatch too!

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          1. Avatar photo
            EmmyCab

            I don't comment much here myself. The Dispatch seems to be mostly moderate Dems and Never Trump Repubs. I'm not either of those, but I ended up here because of David French's writings during Covid which I felt articulated better than I could many of my own views on the pandemic. I was heartbroken (and angry, if I'm being honest) to see so many on "my team" dismiss deaths in the elderly and people with comorbidities. For me, pro-life extends to all human beings, not "just" the unborn, and I think it was a deep moral failing on the right to be so cavalier about the suffering and death in these groups. So while my politics broadly are much further right than what is common here, I do appreciate the generally well thought out articles I find here at The Dispatch. I do find the comments section to commonly be a hotbed of anti-Trump sentiment, though many other comments are quite thought-provoking. I'm just not that twisted up about Trump, and I actually really value the overturning of Roe v. Wade delivered to us by his SCOTUS judges. That for me was totally worth the price of admission. I'm in Texas, and when our restrictive anti-abortion laws went into effect after the ruling, we recorded 10,000 more births than expected in the following nine months. That is a major win for Life! Far too often, I think in conservative minds this life-over-death win is overshadowed by "Rude Trump," and that's just not how my own priorities line up. Oh well! lol...

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    Andy Napoli

    Great piece. Fairly and respectfully done.

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  10. Brian The 2nd

    Abortion bans absolutely did prevent treatment for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages, like a week or two into the bans! The news stories were horrifying.
    Why weren’t the -majority- of anti abortion people ready for the new reality? I figure it’s because most of them weren’t really sincere in their purported beliefs, or didn’t think it through in real world terms, just magical thinking.

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    1. Tamarahedrick

      Yes exactly! Dismissing these verifiable effects as “left-wing fearmongering” is disingenuous at best

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    2. Blane

      Brian The 2nd wrote "Abortion bans absolutely did prevent treatment for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages"

      That is not true. This one is often cited (please post others, I'd like to know) https://thelifeinstitute.net/info/the-tragic-death-of-savita#
      But the money quote here is - "Dr. Astbury’s [Savita's obstetrician ] understanding of the law in this case was quite clear – professional medical guidelines, and the law, permitted a pregnancy to be terminated if it was seen that there was a risk to a woman’s life."

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      1. Brian The 2nd

        here's a bunch:
        https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/16/abortion-miscarriage-ectopic-pregnancy-care/
        and:
        https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-abortion-ban-doctors-ectopic-pregnancy
        and:
        https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2023/02/27/doctors-recount-heart-wrenching-stories-in-new-study-on-medical-care-post-roe/
        "Providers told researchers about cases of premature rupture of membranes in the second trimester, Grossman said, noting that the standard of care in these cases is to offer termination, given the high risk of infection and low probability of a live birth.

        “[There have been] several cases where it’s been hard to arrange treatment for those patients in the states where they live,” Grossman said. “And sometimes they just have to follow the patient because the patient can’t travel elsewhere. And they’re just watching the placenta kind of grow through the uterine wall into surrounding structures. It’s really very concerning.”

        https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/opinion/election-abortion-roe-women.html
        “And instead, in these cases, patients were being sent home,” he said. “And then they come back with infection, and several of them developed very severe infection that required very complicated management in the intensive care unit.”

        In August, a woman in Texas who was denied an abortion for an unviable pregnancy ended up in the intensive care unit with sepsis. Another Texas woman, pregnant and in failing health, was recently told she shouldn’t come back unless she had a condition as severe as liver failure or stroke. A woman in Wisconsin was left bleeding for more than 10 days after an incomplete miscarriage just days after the Supreme Court’s decision; a doctor ‌in Texas was told not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured.

        And the classic Molar Pregnancy, the infamous "Wait in the car till you're almost dead" directive. ( you will enjoy this one)
        https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/01/1172973274/oklahoma-abortion-ban-exception-life-of-mother-molar-pregnancy
        "They were very sincere, they weren't trying to be mean," she says. "They said, 'The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.'"

        This stuff ^^^ this is the world you want? seeing as how this sort of information is VERY easy to find, I must doubt your sincerity in not being aware of it.

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        1. Blane

          Brian The 2nd wrote "This stuff ^^^ this is the world you want? seeing as how this sort of information is VERY easy to find, I must doubt your sincerity in not being aware of it"

          That, of course, I NOT the world I want. I don't know anyone who wants to ban abortions for when a woman's life is at stake.
          But I also know that when it comes to abortion, the "pro-choice" side lies a lot. The lies began with Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the founder of NARAL and an early advocate of legal abortion. He later repented of his work for abortion, and in his book "Hand of God" wrote that he and others lied and just made up the number of women who died from illegal "back alley" abortions.
          The first one you listed above was behind a paywall. Myron Michelle Hollis, the subject of the ProPublica article, is now raising her Elayna https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/femail/video-2952021/Video-Mom-shares-video-baby-Elayna-life-threatening-pregnancy.html

          I'll check out the others, but I can tell you that "confusion" of the doctors related to this issue is probably more politically motivated, than medically motivated. Abortionists are secretly despised by regular doctors. It's no wonder, considering that Mengele, the "Auschwitz Angel of Death" became an abortionist in Argentina.

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          1. Brian The 2nd

            "I can tell you that "confusion" of the doctors related to this issue is probably more politically motivated, than medically motivated. "

            Yes! and THAT is the problem. These laws are intended to create confusion and and a chilling effect. Placing a minority view on abortions with confusing laws in between the doctor and their patient, health of the mother comes a far distant second, which it should never be.

            While -you- might be coming at this argument from some idea of morality or religion or what have you, I don't believe that sort of thing is really what motivates these laws. I think that this sacred moral argument angle is a lie. These laws are only about control from people who feel like they should be in charge (but aren't)

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