“Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.”

—Christina Rossetti, “Up-Hill”

Since I first encountered the poem “Up-Hill” in my teens, these lines never fail to come to mind when life hits a rough patch. In the post-Dobbs, postmodernist, and increasingly post-Christian world we are inhabiting nowadays, I would recommend it to prolifers who may be feeling, if not demoralized, somewhat disoriented and deflated at the less-than-utopian reality of life after the elimination of Roe v. Wade.

For almost 50 years, Roe was the national barrier to legal protection of the unborn from abortion, meaning that the removal of Roe (and its companion case Doe) was the necessary focus of large-scale legal and political action for those defending that preborn life. Those laboring primarily in fields not directly connected with legal and legislative efforts, such as crisis pregnancy support, sidewalk counseling, support for women post-abortion, and prolife education, were attempting to save lives and promote pro-life values and recovery in an environment made potentially toxic for the unborn (and their mothers) because of Roe. But all of us to one degree or another, while attempting to save every possible endangered unborn child in the here and now, looked to the elimination of Roe to remove the great stumbling block hindering and circumscribing all our necessarily intermediate efforts.

That stumbling block was removed by Justice Alito and a majority of the Supreme Court in June 2022, though not with the sweeping completeness of our most daring daydreams. It is probably safe to say that the initial euphoria of achieving a goal almost 50 years in the making has by now dissipated considerably as we, like Rossetti’s questioner, wonder why the road ahead to total legal protection of the unborn looks, in most of the country, almost as steep as it ever did.

Of course, that jaundiced impression is not completely accurate either. To begin with, it is not at all true in many of the redder portions of the United States. There, unless pro-life efforts are hampered by state supreme court overreach or suicidal legislative battles between compromisers and noncompromisers, Dobbs has opened up the opportunity to pass laws restricting many or (in a few cases) most in-state abortions. Yet even in states that currently offer the greatest protections for the unborn, the reality is that the growing percentages of chemical (pill) abortions and the option to dash across state lines to a blue or purple state partially nullify the laws’ intended effects. Nevertheless, after a tumultuous couple of years since the inauguration of the Dobbs era, how individual prolifers are feeling likely depends quite a bit on where they are living and what successes or failures they have encountered there. To that extent, abortion has indeed become the local state issue that it was back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, before Harry Blackmun grabbed the opportunity to promulgate an astoundingly broad national right out of the thin air of constitutional “penumbras.”

A native New Yorker, at the beginning of the Seventies I was already living in a jurisdiction officially deaf to the “silent scream” of aborted children. Like St. Paul of Tarsus, those of us in and around New York City might have prided ourselves on being “citizens of no mean city,” but achieving the title of America’s abortion capital was hardly a proud moment. When Roe was handed down a few years after New York’s legislature had declared open season on embryos and fetuses obstinately inhabiting wombs where they were not wanted, my state was no longer a moral outlier, and prolifers were part of a great national project (however local and individualized our small pieces of the pro-life project might be) to save lives, convert hearts, and recover the national soul.

Over the next 50 years, though tens of millions of unborn lives were lost, many partial but energizing victories punctuated the rising death tolls. Eventually, the dual focus on securing a Supreme Court majority and pushing the envelope on pro-life legislation in the states culminated in Dobbs.

But over those same 50 years, American culture was continuing to change along the same trajectory that had prompted legalization of abortion in a handful of states pre-Roe. Among the attitudes and assumptions that spread and underwent further radicalization in these decades were those concerning the requirements of personal freedom, the necessity for contraceptive backup in an era of sex without consequences, the decline of marriage and of membership in traditional religions, and the escalating reluctance to impose not just religious beliefs but almost any kind of moral absolutes on others, particularly in the area of sex and marriage.

On the one hand, over the years sonograms and pro-life education on prenatal development have proved fairly successful in countering the lie that embryos are only “clumps of cells,” and discomfort with the full nine-month unrestricted abortion reality of Roe remains high. But on the other hand, when push comes to shove—when someone unexpectedly conceives an unwanted child or when a friend or fellow student or coworker confides that they intend to get an abortion—how many ordinary people (the kind we now need lots of to vote state abortion legislation up or down) manage to oppose those real-life situations with uncomfortably expressed feelings and semidigested understandings about what (that is, who) is being aborted? Even many people who tilt sufficiently pro-life to say no to aborting their own child resist trying to convince other women not to do so. That feels judgmental, interfering, maybe some kind of micro-aggression. You have your truth, I have mine. Make the best choice for you. Such maxims constitute our current bank of worldly wisdom, as those of earlier generations (“mind the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves,” “well begun, half done,” “a stitch in time saves nine”) did theirs.

This social tentativeness, combined with our decades-long steeping in a culture of permissive sex, declining beliefs in universal and knowable moral law, and full-throttle abortion on demand, has left us with a moral landscape that would have been largely unrecognizable in 1973. Now, barring an altered Court majority, the right to determine the legality of abortion will remain in the hands of state legislatures (and state courts), but the zeitgeist makes a return to the pre-Roe legislative landscape in most states unlikely. Yes, there are states protective of the unborn—some, such as Texas, quite protective. But back in January of 1973 there were still only a small number of states that did not severely restrict abortion, and even the most optimistic among us do not expect to see a return to that landscape soon.

Because the Supreme Court hijacked the issue in 1973, when most American jurisdictions were still hostile to legal abortion, we did not have to face the social implications of our abortion body count in quite the same way as nations whose legalization of abortion on demand occurred through democratic means. Yes, campaign ads and political speeches identified the platforms of parties and the agendas of candidates in relation to abortion, but candidates are necessarily for and against a lot of things, and therefore even with exit polls we could argue about what voters were really saying about abortion when they voted for a particular candidate. More promising were survey results over the years showing majority opposition to later abortions and fairly large percentages uncomfortable with some of the motivations for abortion. But until Dobbs returned abortion to the states, we couldn’t actually see what these surveyed feelings would look like when applied to the ballot box.

What we see so far is not unrelievedly gloomy, but also falls far short of what is needed for the United States to be a nation supporting the unborn child’s full membership in the human family. Again, part of this reveals the effect of widespread moral relativism: Maybe Citizen A would never choose to have an abortion herself, maybe she hopes her child never will either, maybe she feels a bit sad as she drives past the local abortion clinic each morning on her way to work, maybe she oohs and ahs over her coworker’s sonogram picture of her unborn baby. But even if all these things are true, Citizen A still is accustomed to a world where legal abortion has been a fact of life for a very long time, and unless she happens to be a very committed prolifer, instead of someone with pro-life inclinations and feelings, she will at least be startled by the idea that now her state could make all that go away. Her state could close the abortion clinic she passes on the way to work, and that means the pregnant college student at the university down the road might have to do something that looks slightly drastic with her problem pregnancy, like traveling to a blue state or getting hold of an abortion pill, because otherwise it looks like her state is going to make that student have her baby when all the student wanted was child-free sex. Does that really seem fair? For the state to “make” her go through that pregnancy and have a baby when that was the farthest thing from her mind? Won’t having that baby “ruin her life”? Shouldn’t she have the right to do what it takes to make herself happy?

Long before Roe, there were crisis pregnancies and abortions—and all sorts of other harmful behaviors involving sex, marriage, and family, including fornication and infidelity. One difference then is that most people had inherited a fixed rather than a sliding moral scale to measure the morality of an action. The language we nowadays hear others use to explain away acts that were traditionally labeled wrong both reflects and enables the speaker’s freedom from long-held moral restrictions. And this freedom took a long time to develop. Like an iceberg, most of its development took place under the surface, during the course of centuries, but it began accelerating in the last century, and the pace has picked up much more in recent decades.

Where this has left us is common knowledge, whether you call it “moral decline” or “moral progress.” And therefore, now that it is apparent how far downhill we have traveled over even the last 50 years, we can better understand the uphill climb before us following the reversal of Roe.

I live in Maryland, a reliably blue state. A few minutes’ drive from me is an abortion clinic that has been operating for two generations, and ten minutes further is a recently opened abortion clinic strategically placed adjacent to a state university. And while sidewalk counselors here and across the country treasure their precious numbers of “saves,” and though these saves buoy everybody, everyone knows—you all know—that these form a small minority of each day’s clinic clientele. That takes nothing away from the wonder and joy and hopefulness spread by a photo of a now-born baby who almost didn’t make it, but there is no denying that Dobbs has not yet ushered us into a Promised Land of protected embryos and fetuses.

So all this brings us back to the bedrock reality that we have more or less known from the beginning: We will need to change minds and hearts—ultimately, huge numbers of minds and hearts, meaning the whole “culture of death” threatening social well-being in its many forms—in order to roll back the large-scale practice of elective abortion in our country. This will be hard, and it is likely to take a very long time. And even if we—or our children or grandchildren—see this happen, in order to keep the culture of death rolled back, we will always need to be promoting and fostering a culture of life. As T. S. Eliot reminds us, “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause”—all are vulnerable to loss again.

Still, there is something steadying and almost comforting about recognizing that where we are as a nation in relation to abortion is more or less where we are in relation to all the other cultural and human life issues. It is all of a piece. So beyond and in addition to legal and legislative gains (or losses) is the need to propose a truthful and attractive alternative vision of society that recovers the understanding of what it is to be a human being created to live in society with other human beings, forming families and rearing children, working to build up and support an entire community, rather than living in a miserly fashion for self—making decisions based only on their effect on oneself, seeking happiness cannibalistically through the sacrifice of the happiness of others. So although the primary victims of abortion are clearly the unborn, and the secondary victims are those undergoing abortion, there is a third much larger class of those victimized by the toxic state of the culture that has spawned the demand for abortion.

In the earliest years following Roe, some (perhaps many) prolifers were tempted to concentrate almost exclusively on the threat to unborn life, with much less sympathy for the often young, desperate, and confused women in crisis pregnancies. Partly to blame perhaps was the abruptness of Roe and the magnitude of the horror prolifers were suddenly confronted with. Within a very short time the number of abortions per year in this country had soared above a million—a stupefying death rate to absorb in such a small window of time. The brutality of abortion and the staggering body counts overwhelmed the imagination and the emotions, and unfortunately some in the movement were initially tempted to regard the aborting mother with horror too.

This was not only counterproductive but blind to the real desperation, intense pressure, and lack of support many of these women experienced. But even in the earliest days there were also many prolifers whose hearts went out to these women too, and who sought to address their needs—witnessed by the explosion of crisis pregnancy centers in the years immediately following Roe. Over time, the movement as a whole came to better understand that, in the graphic words of Frederica Mathewes-Green, these women were often choosing abortion “like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, trying to gnaw off its own leg Abortion is not a sign that women are free, but a sign that they are desperate.”

The pro-life movement also came to recognize the effects of abortion on clinic workers and on abortionists themselves. The conversion of New York abortionist and abortion activist Dr. Bernard Nathanson in the mid-1970s was an early but not unique example; then in 2009 former Texas Planned Parenthood worker Abby Johnson’s turnaround directed more attention to abortion clinic workers. Johnson’s organization And Then There Were None, which works to help clinic workers leave their jobs, has publicized the financial pressures that discourage some employees from quitting. I know many prolifers, especially sidewalk counselors, who pray consistently and sincerely for the clinic workers they see regularly, and for the doctors who perform abortions. Seeing each other week in and week out, sidewalk counselors and clinic employees occasionally even develop relationships reminiscent of those that soldiers on opposite sides of a battle can have with one another. Post-Dobbs, it is apparent how very long the road to a truly pro-life culture may be. There are a great many ways to enact a societal death wish, and given the self-loathing that many of our contemporaries exhibit in multiple aspects of our culture, from gender and identity issues to labeling our species a cancer on Planet Earth, those contemporaries seem to be running the gamut of them. Our fellow citizens are not likely to recover from the particular form of death wish that is legal abortion without also being drawn out of other forms of that death wish. Therefore, to protect the unborn from abortion, we must ultimately convert the culture.

That’s a tall order, but not quite impossible. It has happened before, in our own civilization’s distant past. Consider the initial small communities of Christians, living lives different from those around them and subject to periodic gruesome persecutions by the Roman Empire, yet willing to sacrifice themselves for their non-Christian neighbors, to care for them during plagues, to rear their orphans and rescue their abandoned infants, to pray for the wellbeing of their rulers as Peter and Paul exhorted them to do in epistles we still read today. Of course, it took several centuries to reach a tipping point, and then many more centuries for the mass of society to marinate in a Christian understanding of men and women as created in the image of God and commanded to love God and neighbor as themselves (and therefore be drawn out of the prison of their own egos). Whether this process would be longer or shorter the second time around is unclear, but that part of it is not really under our control.

So, how positively or negatively should we regard our current situation? As good news or bad news? Well, the “bad” part of it is not exactly news, since we have lived with a toxic culture for decades now. The “good” part of it is that, apart from the necessary but always insufficient pro-life business of electioneering, lobbying, and undertaking court actions, we all still have a role to play, whatever the state we live in. But to play this role, we need to cease regarding the neighbors and fellow citizens and family members who oppose us as the enemy, but more like people in thrall to a particularly nasty spirit of the age. They have been co-opted and are now suffering from a kind of Stockholm syndrome. That doesn’t mean they are volition-less automatons or lack responsibility for their choices; it does mean they have wandered a long way down a wrong turn, and (whether or not they yet realize it) they need a better GPS.

Our response to this larger social challenge arises not as the exercise of a designated pro-life part of ourselves, but through living a certain kind of life. As St. Peter told his own small group of Christian supplanters of the overwhelmingly pagan culture, we are to “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence, and keep your conscience clear . . . For it is better to suffer for doing right, if that should be God’s will, than for doing wrong” (1 Peter 3:15-17).

Not many of us are slated to be very important people, and most of us directly influence only a rather small private sphere (though even those with a larger public role cannot neglect the private sphere of influence with family, friends, neighbors, co-workers). But we can speak truly and non-aggressively when the opportunity arises, and we can be perhaps one among relatively few offering an authentic alternative to the ugly, empty, and depleting way of living, thinking, and feeling that surrounds us.

Christian apologist C. S. Lewis concluded almost a century ago that, where modern morality differs from the traditional Christian variety, particularly in sexual ethics, what is needed is to first convince the unbeliever of the objective reality of the moral law—its universality and knowability—and of the God who established it.

Abortion, precisely because it is such an egregious act of violence against the most innocent of human beings, is to some degree an exception, because it is still possible, though only sometimes successful, to discuss one-on-one the right of an unborn member of the human race to be welcomed into the human community. There are many who see or feel or both see and feel the poignant injustice of cutting off the life of a fellow human before he or she has had the opportunity to love and be loved and pass from youth to adolescence to adulthood.

But when it comes to arguing about legislation or legal protections, both reasons and emotional appeals often fail in the long run with those who do not recognize the objective claims of a universally applicable moral law laid down for us by our Creator. Someone who does not recognize objective morality—ideas of right and wrong that are not merely invented by us and therefore cannot be altered and adjusted to fit the fashions of the time and the particular tastes of individuals—will shrink from “imposing” a ban on abortion or even radical restrictions on it. The same imaginative capacity the believer draws on to identify with the plight of the endangered unborn can just as easily prompt the unbeliever to sympathize with the choice of the aborting mother in a crisis pregnancy. In such circumstances, happiness will appear to be a zero-sum game, available to one or the other, mother or child, but not both, no matter which choice is made. So it becomes easier for someone uncomfortable with the idea of moral absolutes to leave the abortion decision up to the mother, whose unhappiness is already on display rather than concealed by the womb.

In a way, then, it is easier as well as more effective to persuade someone about the whole traditional Christian worldview—where each piece interlocks with the others, and each supports and explains the others—than to try to jimmy a pro-life piece into someone’s very subjective and self-serving world view, where it is unlikely to properly fit and may threaten to jam his machinery.

At least, so it seems to me, after living through 50-plus years of efforts to preserve the unborn in a society in free fall—rather like trying to catch a baby when you are both plummeting to earth without a parachute.

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Original Bio:

Ellen Wilson Fielding, a longtime senior editor of the Human Life Review, is the author of An Even Dozen (Human Life Press). The mother of four children, she lives in Maryland.