NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE O ur country has changed dramatically since we sent Tearing Us Apart to the printer in early 2022. Not much has changed about our conclusions, but they have taken on new detail and dimension in light of the past year’s events. It didn’t much surprise us that the Supreme Court overturned Roe, but while we expected to see an intense backlash to the decision, we couldn’t have predicted the new and frightening tenor of the abortion debate.
After someone inside the Court leaked a draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs, progressive activists staged protests outside the homes of the justices who were reported to be in the majority — and they continued demonstrating outside their homes long after the ruling was released. One man, angry about the possibility of Roe being overturned, went so far as to bring a gun to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood, saying that he intended to assassinate him. A nationwide network of violent activists calling themselves Jane’s Revenge began a coordinated campaign against pregnancy-resource centers, involving vandalism, firebombing, and attempted arson.
The group has threatened even more violence, including publishing an open letter with the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.” At the University of Nebraska’s John Paul II Center, Reverend Dan Andrews found this note apparently from Jane’s Revenge taped to his door: “If our right to abortion in Bellevue is taken away due to the attempt to pass an abortion ban and it gets passed we will shoot up your Newman center with our new AR-14 rifles.”
All of this in response to a ruling that was rigorous, well-documented, and just plain sensible. In his opinion, Justice Alito rightly recognized that neither the text of the Constitution nor its historical sources can plausibly be interpreted to support a right to abortion. As we explained in detail in chapter five, Roe was an ideologically and politically motivated decision, a policy judgment masquerading as law. It was never rooted in a proper understanding of the text or tradition of the Constitution. Even legal scholars who favor legal abortion have admitted as much.
Particularly of note was Alito’s stare decisis analysis, which thoroughly debunked the notion that the Court should let Roe stand — even if it were wrongly decided — because the American public has come to rely on access to abortion. As conservative legal theorists have been arguing for decades, no aspect of Roe could rightly be considered “settled.” What’s more, even proper deference to stare decisis allows for the overruling of cases that were grievously wrong, as Roe was.
Dobbs didn’t speak to whether the 14th Amendment protects the right to life of unborn human beings, but it left room for the American people and their elected representatives to enact laws and regulations to protect unborn children in the wake of the Roe regime. And it left open the possibility of future litigation on constitutional personhood for the unborn.
The 2022 midterms gave us our first taste of how the political and cultural debates will play out in a post-Dobbs context. The results suggest that pro-lifers, and pro-life politicians in particular, have plenty of work to do to convince our fellow Americans to protect unborn children under the law. Some observers on both the left and the right have argued that the midterms demonstrated public backlash to Dobbs. If so, it was a very muted backlash, and a price well worth paying for undoing Roe.
But the claim that the midterm results were a rejection of Dobbs and pro-life laws is likely overstated. Considering that a number of Republicans won reelection handily after signing or supporting protective pro-life laws, it seems that the story of the midterms was much more complicated. Several GOP governors who signed pro-life laws — including in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas — won by large margins, running well ahead of other Republican candidates in their states. This complicates the narrative that the midterms were a backlash to Dobbs; had Americans been voting in droves to rebuke pro-life policies, surely these governors would have taken a hit.
Ballot measures related to abortion were another story. In each case, efforts to protect unborn children failed while efforts to expand legal abortion were successful. In the context of a direct vote, abortion advocates tend to have an advantage because they control the media, are comfortable lying about the issues, and outspend the pro-life movement. As a result, they often dominate messaging battles. Going forward, pro-life politicians and the Republican Party should take seriously the importance of countering the narrative of abortion supporters through successful messaging. If pro-life candidates aren’t articulate and upfront about what they support, abortion activists will fill that vacuum — and the public will believe them.
What we wrote in chapter six remains true: Americans on the whole prefer more protective abortion laws than the Democratic Party is willing to support. This gives Republicans an opening not only to protect the unborn but also to change Americans’ minds on the issue. A majority of Americans are not yet supportive of laws protecting unborn children from the moment of conception, as justice requires. This is, in part, what has made ballot measures so challenging for pro-lifers. If presented with what appears to be a choice between “all or nothing” on abortion, most Americans will choose “all.”
Even so, about three-quarters of Americans want abortion to be restricted either to the first three months of pregnancy or to cases of rape or saving the mother’s life, or to not be permitted at all. Contrast this with the Democratic Party’s position: Abortion for any reason should be legal at all stages of pregnancy and funded by taxpayers. Abortion should no longer be “safe, legal, and rare,” because “rare” implies that there’s something wrong with abortion. States should not be permitted to pass pro-life laws, even to impose safety standards on abortion clinics or to prohibit discriminatory abortions chosen on the basis of the child’s race, sex, or disability diagnosis. Health-care professionals should be required to perform abortions even when it contradicts their religious or moral beliefs or their best medical judgment. Doctors should not be required to care for newborn babies who survive an attempted abortion; that decision should be left up to pregnant mothers and abortionists.
None of these is a popular position, which means that, for the pro-life movement, there is a major opening to achieve incremental policy victories at both the federal and state level, simultaneously working to convince Americans of the value of every human life. Doing so will require forceful and clear articulation of our belief that the lives of both the unborn child and the mother have intrinsic value and deserve protection. In other words, it is not an exception to the pro-life principle to permit medical care to save the life of a pregnant mother, even if that medical care may result in the death of the unborn child.
Pro-lifers — and Republican politicians in particular — should be more explicit about their support for efforts to save the lives of pregnant mothers in medical emergencies. Indeed, though abortion advocates have asserted otherwise in the wake of Dobbs, all current pro-life laws permit medical care needed to save the life of a pregnant mother, even if the treatment will have the unintended effect of harming her unborn child. Too much of the post-Dobbs debate has been dominated by abortion advocates’ claims that pro-lifers don’t care about protecting the lives of mothers.
Meanwhile, we should continue to aim for incremental improvements in abortion policy. Our ultimate goal is to protect all unborn children from abortion, but we can’t achieve this aim overnight. We shouldn’t let that reality stop us from doing what we can even before we arrive at that goal. In the meantime, we will need a combination of state action, congressional legislation, continued litigation (at both the state and federal levels), and pro-life presidential administrations to establish the most politically feasible protections while we continue toward the goal of total abolition.
A crucial aspect of establishing policy wins is persuading our fellow Americans to support and demand protections for the unborn. Abortion is a grave moral evil, and unborn children deserve protections from unjust lethal violence just like each of us, regardless of how people vote; the truth about life in the womb and about abortion isn’t determined by a democratic vote. Even so, the fact remains that many of our fellow citizens do not understand abortion to be a grave moral evil, nor do they see the unborn child as a brother or sister. Achieving lasting political victories will require convincing them of this truth.
This article is adapted from the newest edition of Tearing Ourselves Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.
Ryan T. Anderson Ph.D. is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Alexandra DeSanctis is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing writer at National Review.