I met Louis Brown years ago, when he was a young pro-life lawyer on Capitol Hill seeking to make a difference for life and to live his life for Christ. I’d see him at weekday Masses all over town and run into him outside of the confession line. Now a husband and father, his work with his colleagues at the Christ Medicus Foundation offers answers to so much of the darkness that health care is succumbing to — an industry in which doctors sometimes don’t have a fighting chance of treating the whole person with the dignity the person deserves.

Louis, who worked in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the first Trump administration, shares some of his thoughts on the future of Christian health care, which might be the future of health care in general, if you think about how so many of our hospitals were founded. (Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton and other Catholic nuns come to mind.)

Here are some of Brown’s thoughts three years after Dobbs:

On the Dobbs decision’s third anniversary, I am hopeful about recent pro-life gains after initial setbacks, sober about the challenges, and convicted we can take back health care for the culture of life. Three years ago, on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, the pro-life movement was overjoyed by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Unfortunately, the movement was not fully prepared for this victory. In 2022, the pro-life cause experienced serious setbacks in many states. Nonetheless, in 2024, South Dakota and Nebraska voted for pro-life referendums and Florida voters stopped a pro-abortion ballot initiative. Nineteen states have pro-life laws with various abortion restrictions. The second Trump Administration is enforcing the Hyde Amendment’s prohibitions on public funding of abortion and reversing the Biden Administration’s woke abortion coercion. Further, the new administration is strongly enforcing medical conscience rights. We are close to defunding Planned Parenthood.

However, significant challenges remain. First, Americans do not know the freedom and healing of being in relationship with love itself: Jesus Christ. The ultimate answer to abortion is a revival where the love, mercy, and healing of Jesus Christ is shared across society. The second greatest challenge is that the abortion industry and its culture of death dominate American health care. To win the battle for life, the pro-life movement must defeat: abortion, discrimination that violates the right to life of patients with disabilities, passive Euthanasia in which patients are not given the ordinary means life sustaining care, the growing legalization of Assisted Suicide, false diagnoses of brain death, and dehumanizing practices in organ donation.

The pro-life movement has a unique window to launch a national pro-life health-care ecosystem by: (1) bringing millions of pro-life Americans into pro-life health programs to pay for their medical care; (2) delivering thousands of pro-life religious, nonprofit, and private employers and their millions of employees into pro-life health care solutions, and (3) growing pro-life health care institutions and systems. At the Christ Medicus Foundation, we are working in health care to save the unborn, reform bioethics, stop the dehumanization of poor and vulnerable patients, and begin a new era for protecting the life and dignity of all patients. With Pope Leo XIV’s emphasis on human dignity inspired by the renowned encyclical Rerum Novarum, now is the time for the pro-life movement to spark a Leonine Revolution in pro-life health care and bioethics that protects, heals, and cares for all people.