Unlike the public at large, Review readers are likely aware of the months-long violent response to the Dobbs decision. Still, Julia Duin’s “Crisis Pregnancy Centers Suffer Record Attacks” may hold surprises. It did for me. I didn’t know, for instance, that in July the home of Thomas More Center founder Thomas Brejcha was splattered with “indelible green paint” while police—who warned him his house would be attacked that day—“just remained in their cruisers, watching the whole thing.” Brejcha’s group is representing CompassCare Pregnancy Services, “a medical clinic in Buffalo employing 22 nurses and five doctors” that sustained $530,000 in damages “after being firebombed on June 7.” By the end of the year, Duin reports, “at least 39 churches and 60 crisis pregnancy centers and medical clinics” had been attacked, vandalized, or threatened. As of this writing, there have been two arrests. Anti-abortion activists who disrupt and damage clinics to save condemned babies—by gluing locks, breaking windows, disabling vacuum machines—expect to be arrested. In “Always a Helper,” Brian Caulfield profiles Monsignor Philip Reilly, a priest of the Brooklyn Diocese and “an early participant in Operation Rescue.” But after being jailed for blocking an abortion clinic entrance, Reilly “came up with an idea that led him to begin another frontline action against abortion.” One, the priest told Caulfield, that would encourage prolifers to work with police, who, he believed, were “their natural allies” because “many are pro-life.” Since its founding in 1989, his Helpers of God’s Precious Infants has “conducted prayer vigils and sidewalk counseling” all over the country, saving thousands of babies by being there to help “the many young women who turned around near the doors of a clinic.”

Do the young women who don’t turn around have any idea of what awaits them inside? In “What’s Said and What’s True,” Marvin Olasky, the Human Life Foundation’s 2021 Great Defender of Life and co-author of the new book The Story of Abortion in America, refutes deceptive abortion memes the press has pushed for decades, one of the most insidious being that abortion is a decision made by a woman in concert with her doctor. “Delve into documents,” Olasky counters, “and you’ll find that it’s rare for a woman climbing onto an abortionist’s table to have seen him before . . . the clinic abortionist is an assembly-line worker.” Nor is it true that “the woman makes the decision by herself,” another familiar meme. Studies, routinely ignored by the media, have shown “that the most ardent abortion proponent is often the male partner.”

Even when abortion studies do make the news, findings are often misrepresented. “A recent report on global abortion rates,” writes sociologist Anne Hendershott in “Promoting Marriage as an Anti-Abortion Policy,” was “spun by some media outlets” to give readers the impression that “most abortions were procured by married women.” The report, however, clearly noted that “in North America, the majority of abortions are obtained by unmarried women”—86 percent in 2019—a qualification the New York Times failed to acknowledge. “In fact,” Hendershott reports, “the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and the Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) suggest that marriage is most likely the best way to prevent abortion.” It’s time, she insists, now that “the ability to shape abortion policy has returned to the states,” to focus on ways “to encourage marriage and family formation.”

Deception, misinformation, fake news—these permeate the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton opinions as well as the legal machinations behind the cases themselves. “Close scrutiny of the cases by a range of activists and scholars,” writes Raymond Adamek, “clearly shows that they were intentionally crafted to permit abortion-ondemand and bolstered by false data to achieve that purpose.” Adamek, also a sociologist, has been observing the anti-abortion movement since the beginning—his first article for us was in 1977. In “Destined to Be Overturned,” with the economy and precision characteristic of those at the top of their game, Adamek pulls together people and arguments, firmly establishing that, “rather than being grounded in scientific data and a thorough consideration of current philosophical thinking, Roe and Doe were based on biased ‘evidence’ to bring about a social policy desired by a few.”

It is “a delicious irony,” says Wesley Smith in “How Assisted Suicide Advocacy Overturned Roe v. Wade,” that “the precedent the Supreme Court established [in its 1997 Washington v. Glucksberg ruling] would years later become the hammer that shattered the constitutional right to abortion.” In Glucksberg, nine justices rejected the argument that assisted suicide was a fundamental liberty interest, ruling that its legislation was properly the business of the states, not the Court. In this informative article, Smith, who has covered end-of-life issues for over three decades, shows how Justice Samuel Alito unexpectedly used Glucksberg twenty-four years later to anchor the Dobbs decision and declare Roe “bad constitutional law.” Dobbs, Smith concludes, “hit the country like an earthquake” and vindicated “the great democratic struggle to reverse the great injustice of Roe.”

Mary Ziegler is a law professor (now at the University of California-Davis) who has written extensively on the legal history of abortion. In “Campaign Finance and the Right to Life,” Jason Morgan reviews her “important new book,” Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment,” where, he writes, “Ziegler more narrowly focuses on how the pro-life groups’ various attempts to get political parties and politicians to act on protecting the unborn and their mothers may have worked to debilitate, for better or worse, the longstanding liberal consensus guiding American political discourse and practice.” In a chapter-by-chapter analysis, Morgan examines “Ziegler’s core argument . . . that, in trying to change finance laws so prolifers could overrun the GOP instead of trying to control it from the outside,” a conservative lawyer named James Bopp Jr. “set the stage for the party’s collapse.” It is a “turbulent history,” and Morgan’s review offers an enlightening look at it.

What to say about “Evelyn Waugh’s Displaced Persons”? Edward Short, like our senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding, is an accomplished essayist who provides a splendid literary finish. Here he scrutinizes some scenes in Waugh’s Sword of Honour, a panoramic trilogy set during World War II that is, he writes, “about the workings of Providence in a fallen world.” It is the British writer’s “crowning masterpiece,” in which “Waugh deploys one of his best female characters, Virginia, a prodigal, promiscuous, ingenuous creature . . . who finds herself not only broke and alone but saddled with an unwanted pregnancy.” Short observes that Waugh’s portrayal of Virginia “desperately searching wartime London for an abortionist” exhibits “not only his shrewd understanding of character but his even shrewder appreciation of the dignity of human fallenness—even at its most absurd.”

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“Prolifers have a stronger intuitive-spiritual sense for outlier possibilities,” writes Joe Bissonnette (“Black Swan in the Pro-Life Personality” in From the HLR Website), “for things that are beyond the conventional imaginative horizon. We know that some big gamechanger is coming. Someday.” Meanwhile there are smaller “gamechangers,” as when an abortionist renounces baby-killing and joins a prolife practice (see Maria McFadden Maffucci’s review of Dr. John Bruchalski’s Two Patients in Booknotes). Could the overturn of Roe be the kind of Black Swan event Bissonnette anticipates? We’ll see. It did bring joy to last October’s Great Defender of Life dinner, where, in the words of the Foundation’s Board Chairman James McLaughlin, we gathered “to celebrate a great victory, to renew old friendships, to make new ones, to revivify our commitment to the cause, and most of all,” he told the room full of loyal supporters, “to thank each of you.” We include in this issue honoree introductions and speeches, and photographs we hope will convey some sense of this special evening. But I would encourage you, if possible, to watch the program online (https://humanlifereview.com/special-event-great-defender-lifedinner-2022/). Join guests in the dining room of the Union League Club and listen as Gerard Bradley provides a roadmap for where the pro-life movement goes from here. And as Nicole Miller, the director of Pregnancy Help, tells us that while “it is still dark” in blue states like New York, “since the end of Roe v. Wade, there’s been a change in the hearts of the women who are calling.”

Many of us never expected to outlive Roe; many of those who labored alongside us in the anti-abortion vineyard didn’t. Ray Kerrison, the long-time New York Post reporter whose columns were reprinted in the Review for years, died on December 18 at the age of 92. One of these, titled “Death Takes a Stubborn Defender of Life,” appeared in the Post on Oct. 22, 1998, five days after the death of J.P. McFadden, our founding editor. “It was a privilege to have known him,” Kerrison wrote. Copy that. (For both men.)