It has become common in the three years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade for prolifers to describe the Dobbs decision as a milestone in a longer journey, and in that same time frame it has become clear that we need a better roadmap.

The prolife movement spent decades of work and energy striving toward the goal of ending Roe, a goal so all-absorbing that it was difficult to plan for or even imagine what might come next. There was always a general sense that the next step in the prolife game plan would involve legislation of the sort that was impossible thanks to Roe—gestational-age restrictions on abortion, parental-consent laws, and safety standards for abortion clinics, to name a few examples.

There was also a sense that a post-Roe country would require even more support for pregnant mothers than prolifers were already accustomed to providing. Bolstering the thousands of pregnancy-resource centers across the country would be a top priority. We would need to continue ministries such as sidewalk counseling and community support for families in need. A growing number of prolifers began advocating profamily policy or regulatory and legal changes making it easier to marry and to welcome children.

As clear and commendable as these goals might be, however, three years in a post-Roe world have shown us that building a prolife America is a far more complicated task than these strategies account for. Establishing a legal and political framework for protecting unborn children is essential, to be sure, and support for families—pregnant women in particular—will always be a crucial element of the prolife movement’s work.

But focusing on these goals cannot continue to replace grappling with and responding to the deeper cultural issues fueling abortion in America. Prolifers are fond of saying that our ultimate goal is to make abortion both illegal and unthinkable. The first part of the phrase is straightforward enough. But to understand what it might mean for abortion to one day be “unthinkable,” we must better understand what makes abortion “thinkable” now.

Simply put, our ultimate goal as prolifers is to build a nation where our fellow Americans recognize that abortion is a grave evil, one that should never be regarded as an acceptable solution. In the same way that today we look back on the horror of slavery and wonder how such an evil was possible in our country, will American society one day look back on legal, widespread abortion and wonder how we could have allowed this atrocity? Our present work should be aimed at making that day a reality.

The ultimate goal of the prolife movement is to establish a national consensus that abortion is a grave violation of the dignity of unborn children and that our entire society deserves better than abortion. We desire a world where women know abortion is too harmful to themselves and their children to even contemplate, where men view abortion as an evil that they must do everything in their power to protect women and children from. In short, our work will not be finished until we have a society that believes abortion harms all of us.

At the root of our debates over abortion is the view that while abortion may be an evil, it’s one we can’t do without. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that our primary disagreement centers on what or who is in the mother’s womb: Is he a human being? Is he a person? Does he have rights? Do his rights supersede those of his mother? These top-level questions are smokescreens concealing the true dispute. Some of our fellow citizens—perhaps more of them than we’d care to admit—believe that killing innocent human beings is an acceptable tradeoff for preserving our present social order. Supporters of abortion believe that killing unborn children is acceptable if doing so seems to solve other problems—namely, the problems of adults. They believe that a host of supposed goods, foremost of which is a right to sexual autonomy, supersede the law written on the human heart instructing us that we must not kill innocents. We need look no further than the growing debate over euthanasia to see a similar belief in action. Far too many Americans believe that killing inconvenient, unproductive, or unwanted human beings can be an acceptable solution.

In this context, it is essential to grapple with abortion as, first and foremost, a cultural problem—and therefore a problem that requires a cultural response, one that addresses the problem at its very roots. Recall that when Roe was overturned and dozens of states passed laws to protect unborn children and increase support for families, the number of abortions in the U.S. nevertheless went up. Turning the tide against abortion evidently will require a great deal more than changes in law or policy. Abortion is embedded in our society. It is a symptom of a deep cultural sickness. If we want to end abortion, we have to understand the causes of that sickness, and we have to work to heal it.

Consider an analogy. I have suffered from migraines for most of my life. Readers familiar with the topic will be well aware of how difficult migraines are to diagnose and treat. Until recently, all of the doctors I’d seen had shared the view that it is essentially impossible to understand the causes of migraine because the disease is too complicated, the triggers too unique to each patient. They are quick to sidestep questions about root causes on their way to the far easier project of pain management.

Recently, I encountered a migraine expert who takes a different approach, which she explains this way: “A migraine is like a fire alarm. It’s good to help patients manage the pain of migraines. But simply treating the pain without looking for the cause is like taking the battery out of the fire alarm and thinking you’ve put out the fire.”

It’s like taking the battery out of the fire alarm and thinking you’ve put out the fire. This strikes me as a helpful analogy for understanding how we ought to approach the task of ending abortion. Our current strategies for reducing the abortion rate are like managing the pain of migraine. It is good to protect unborn children via law and policy. It is good to build pregnancyresource centers and offer sidewalk counseling. It is good to support policies that bolster marriage and family life. But these projects are more like turning off the fire alarm than they are like putting out the fire. In other words, they don’t get to the root of why women continue seeking abortion on such a large scale. They don’t get to the root of why Americans across the country continue voting to enshrine radical proabortion laws. They don’t help us understand and heal the cultural sickness that leads to abortion.

In what follows, I’ll offer three broader thoughts for how we might come to see abortion not as a detached phenomenon but as a symptom of this deeper cultural disease, something embedded in the American psyche. Seeking this more complex understanding will enable us to think clearly about how to craft a sophisticated prolife strategy that responds more fully to the present moment. First, we have to understand abortion as part of a deeper network of problems created by a unique alchemy in American thought and public life. Since our earliest days as a nation—and even before that, in the adventurous, independent spirit of the colonists who settled here—we have placed a great deal of value on individualism and self-determination. But in previous centuries, those values were tempered by a shared moral understanding. In a 1798 letter, John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In other words, our government was designed to secure the rights of men and women to exercise their freedom, but freedom understood as being in accordance with morality, consistent with human nature and nature’s laws.

In his 19th-century observations of America, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that the American emphasis on individualism, taken to its extreme, would eventually produce disconnected, isolated citizens. He understood that America’s social and civic institutions, our widespread Christian piety and shared morality, and our Constitution would be the bulwarks of our country’s flourishing, and to lose these would be disastrous to our shared project.

Over the past century, for a host of reasons, our fundamental love of liberty has done just that: become unmoored from the religious and moral values that once shaped our shared culture and our conception of right and wrong. As our country began to grow more secular, it also experienced the series of changes that we call the Sexual Revolution, a worldview that preached total sexual autonomy and explicitly aimed to dismantle marriage and family. A series of legal and technological changes slowly made this worldview part of everyday life: the legalization of no-fault divorce, the invention of the contraceptive pill, Supreme Court rulings such as Griswold and Roe, and consequent shifts in behavior, social mores, and public opinion. Over time, sexual autonomy became a key plank of the American conception of personal liberty.

As we lost our shared morality, Americans began to replace natural law and Christian morality with shallower principles, like the idea of consent or the harm principle, as the primary means of governing our sexual behavior. Slowly, most Americans began to believe that consenting adults should be able to act with complete license, as long as they don’t harm anyone else in the process. Though they might not realize it, this is perhaps the most deeply held moral view of most Americans. We hear its echoes in common phrases such as “Live and let live” or “I can’t tell other people what’s right for them.” We might pause to consider why this morality doesn’t protect the unborn. Does the unborn child consent to be killed? Doesn’t abortion harm him? That such questions fall on deaf ears is more evidence that the Sexual Revolution has deep roots, subtly shaping how Americans conceptualize freedom. We now believe that every consenting adult deserves absolute sexual autonomy and should have access to sex with no commitment, that this access is a fundamental right. Whether or not the unborn child experiences harm isn’t relevant, because we’ve accepted abortion as a necessary evil in order to preserve this status quo. In a debate at the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, feminist writer Jill Filipovic illustrated this mindset:

Sometimes abortion is an act of trying to keep one’s life on its same path. If I had gotten pregnant in my twenties, there is no amount of money you could have paid me to carry that pregnancy to term. There was nothing you could’ve offered me. If I had gotten pregnant in my twenties, I wouldn’t have the career that I have. I wouldn’t have my husband. I would never have met him. I wouldn’t have a life that I think is beautiful and incredible and that I value a tremendous amount. If I had gotten pregnant, it would’ve taken my life in a completely different direction that I would not have wanted it to go in. I am tremendously grateful that I have had the ability to prevent pregnancy where needed and that I would’ve had the ability to end a pregnancy that I know would’ve been the wrong thing for me.

Whether they realize it or not, most Americans have imbibed this way of thinking. Acceptance of premarital sex and cohabitation has taught us that marriage is merely an optional window dressing for preexisting sexual relationships. Divorce has taught us there is no need to promise lifelong commitment even if we do choose to marry. Contraception and abortion have taught us that sex need not include the possibility of children, nor should we accept the responsibilities of parenthood even if we’ve already conceived a child.

Our society now rejects some of the most basic tenets once held in common: that sex has meaning and belongs in the context of lifelong commitment, that faithful and fruitful marriage between a man and a woman is good for us and for society, that mothers and fathers owe their children stability and care—and, importantly, that society and government can require us to respect these realities.

Second, we must consider how this deeper philosophy leads Americans to think about abortion as a political and legal matter. In light of these cultural shifts, we can more easily understand why the end of Roe didn’t lead to a decrease in the abortion rate, even though it allowed for more prolife laws. Our commitment to individualism, paired with a drop-off in religious belief and the rise of the Sexual Revolution worldview, has led Americans to adopt an incoherent set of beliefs about abortion.

Readers will know from experience that most people say one of a few things when asked about abortion. First, many say, “I wouldn’t choose abortion myself” or “I wouldn’t want my girlfriend or my wife to have an abortion”—but then they add, “But I can’t tell anyone else that it’s wrong for them.” Second, when really pressed, many say, “I wouldn’t want to have an abortion” or even “I don’t think it’s right”—but then they add, “But if I were in a tight spot, or if my girlfriend or my daughter or my friend were in a tight spot, I want abortion to be available.”

We might summarize it this way: “Abortion for thee but not for me, and abortion for me if push comes to shove.” This helps make sense of the contradictions in public-opinion polling on abortion. Many Americans describe themselves as prolife but still say that abortion should remain legal. In other words, the number of Americans who consider themselves “prolife” is far higher than the number who say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. This is also why young Americans are more likely to identify as prolife than older Americans but are nevertheless also more likely to say that they’d drive their friend to an abortion clinic.

Americans tend to be uncomfortable with abortion, but we still want loopholes. We are afraid to “tell others what to do,” and we’re afraid to be “trapped” in parenthood ourselves. The idea of abortion as a necessary evil to safeguard adult priorities—to keep one’s life on course, as Filipovic might put it—is a powerful one.

We needn’t look far to see that this shallow morality applies only when it can be used to justify and protect uncommitted sex. Few people will defend drunk driving on the grounds that “we can’t tell others what’s right for them.” We don’t feel ambivalent about condemning convicted murderers or rapists. Virtually no one believes it’s okay for a man to shoot his dog in the backyard because he’s gotten sick of caring for it. But when it comes to unborn children, Americans fear we have no business telling others abortion is wrong, not least because we suspect we’d like to have the same escape hatch available to us or our loved ones. We know in our hearts that it’s wrong, but we suspect it’s necessary to protect our way of life.

The unique alchemy produced by our fundamental need for liberty, paired with the fallout of the Sexual Revolution, has shaped a society in which we believe we are owed sex with no consequences, with maximal self-determination—and abortion is the unpleasant price tag for all that freedom. We have come to believe, in short, that we must be allowed to opt out of the responsibilities that come with sex, even if doing so requires killing another human being. This helps illuminate why, since Dobbs, over and over again, Americans have headed to the ballot box to preserve legal abortion, including in states we might think of as prolife. Nearly 20 times in the past three years, states have considered abortion-related ballot measures, and in nearly every case, a majority of voters opposed prolife measures or embraced proabortion ones. Prolife groups have been quick to blame these losses on having been outspent by the proabortion lobby or overwhelmed by media bias. While these factors certainly make a difference, we simply must be willing to dig deeper. The primary reason for these results is that most Americans have embraced an unspoken creed: “Abortion for thee, because your sexual behavior isn’t my business. And abortion for me, if push comes to shove, because I deserve to control my own future.” The prolife movement will only be treading water until we are courageous enough to acknowledge and address these deeper roots of our political problems.

Finally, we must embrace the reality that making abortion “unthinkable” will require not just arguing against abortion but also offering a positive vision about the goodness of human life and the way we ought to live. Since Dobbs, prolifers have been fond of saying that our ultimate goal is to build a prolife culture. But relatively little manpower has gone into considering what this really means and how it might be accomplished. If abortion is a symptom of deeper sickness, we can’t merely decry it as evil. We must offer a positive, attractive worldview that can heal the cultural disease of which abortion is but one symptom.

At the deepest level, our society believes abortion is acceptable because we’ve come to believe that life isn’t good. In his 2024 book Family Unfriendly, Tim Carney quotes from a number of his interviews with Americans about why they’ve chosen not to have children. In one conversation, a woman shared a sentiment that appears several times throughout the book’s interviews: “In general, do I think people are good? No, I don’t. I think we’re the cancer of the Earth.”

Far too many Americans believe that the universe exists by accident, that human existence is directionless and therefore meaningless save for whatever meaning we might create for ourselves. Thanks to the disintegration of the family brought about by the Sexual Revolution, we have generations of people bereft of that belonging, direction, and purpose that we all need, left to believe that life has no meaning other than whatever meaning we can construct for ourselves. To such a mindset, hedonism becomes quite appealing. If all we have is here and now, we’d better look out for ourselves and enjoy ourselves as much as possible. We can see the people around us living in the existential sadness that comes with believing that the entire world is about me, that its meaning is entirely manufactured by me, and that my happiness is directly proportionate to how often I get what I think I want.

It should come as no surprise that such a society has embraced abortion and won’t let go. If human beings have no ultimate destiny beyond life on earth, there is little reason to consent to being called out of ourselves to care for the vulnerable. Commitment and responsibility require self-sacrifice, belief in a higher good than my own self-interest.

Even in the wake of Dobbs, striving to reduce the abortion rate through law and community support remains an uphill battle. But we have still harder work to do. Prolife Americans must learn to speak to the deep longing in every human heart to believe that we are loved and that life is worth living. We have to begin to see the abortion problem, and therefore the prolife project, as embedded in a deeper debate over whether human life matters, whether we were created out of love by a good and loving God and destined for a life beyond this one. In a post-Roe America, this is what each of us is called to do—not just to find ways to end abortion but also to help those around us come to believe that every life, unborn or otherwise, is a gift.

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Original Bio:

Alexandra DeSanctis is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing writer at National Review.