Four years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversing the reign of Roe v. Wade, results for pro-lifers are mixed. Abortionists, trafficking in the misinformation that always surrounded Roe, have “codified” that decision into several state constitutions. Their campaigns sold the amendments as “moderate,” but, once enacted, their absolutist, “no compromise” character became evident.  The current ground zero in that debate will be efforts to insert an abortion amendment into the Virginia Constitution this fall.

From a practical perspective, the building up of a thick local support network for women facing crisis pregnancies remains a top priority. But, from a legal perspective, the detritus of Roe — that abortion is a matter of “privacy” of no interest to anybody but the pregnant woman — still infects American thinking. Its simplest expression is the attempt to silence half the population by saying, “If you don’t have a uterus, you don’t have a vote.” (I’d say, “If you’re not a woman…” but that term baffles some Supreme Court justices, even those selected because they are women).

From the perspective of law, however, the false flag of “privacy” continues to distort abortion debates, even after Dobbs hauled that standard down. Here are three examples.

First, the “abortion pill.” Proponents of mifepristone and misoprostol have promoted the miscarriage drugs as “privacy” manna from heaven. In the abortionists’ lexicon, pharmaceutically induced miscarriage lets them use the mail to subvert pro-life states’ laws. No need for visible (and profit-taking) abortion infrastructure such as clinics; just do a “telehealth” consultation from a pro-abortion sanctuary state, mail the “patient” death pills, and leave it to her.

Pro-life states that have pushed back on the abortion pill point out that they have to bear the costs abortionists have sloughed off. In the event of complications, for example, one doesn’t call one’s “telehealth” provider four states away. One goes to the local emergency room and, in the case of poorer women, the cost falls upon the pro-life state.  Recently, 14 pro-life states’ attorneys general asked the Environmental Protection Agency to review the amount of residual active ingredients in mifepristone and misoprostol being discharged via sewer systems into public waterways. If they make their way into water tables, do those drugs endanger other pregnant women? Do they affect normal sexual development in teens? In other words, the “abortion pill” is hardly just a “matter of privacy.” It is a matter of public health.

Second, parents. Within four years of Roe, the Supreme Court also imposed its own constitutional invention by insisting that parents did not have the right to stop their minor daughter from obtaining an abortion. If parents did not consent, Harry Blackmun insisted the state had to create a vehicle by which a judge could “bypass” them and allow the abortion. Parents in states across America still need to sign consent forms for their high schooler to get an aspirin, but not an abortion — and, as we’ve seen in various places, schools or individual faculty have even secretly facilitated them.

With the fall of Roe and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recovery of robust parental rights, a Florida appeals court in May 2025 struck down that state’s bypass law as violating parental rights. While pro-life legislatures may repeal such statutes, expect pro-abortion states to continue to provide “access” absent parental consent or even knowledge. Pro-lifers in states such as New York and New Jersey need to file federal lawsuits to strike down these “bypass” provisions (including state constitutional amendments in places such as California) as violations of parents’ federal constitutional rights to guide the upbringing of their children. Aggressive litigation across judicial circuits may bring such a case to the Supreme Court for a robust affirmation of parental rights.

Third, fathers. Finally, a major — though often undiscussed — casualty of Roe remains the legal exclusion of fathers from life-and-death decisions about their unborn children. Stripping fathers of those rights was the other foot of Planned Parenthood v. Danforth’s subversion of parental rights. With the death of Roe, Danforth is no longer controlling. So why are states hesitant about legally reaffirming a father’s consent in an abortion decision? Two people made this child; why does only one have a say in the child’s continued existence? The fallout has been a confused jurisprudence, further distorted by practices of artificial reproduction: The upshot has been that one side can unilaterally end a child’s life (or leave that frozen embryo on ice), but mutual consent is required to keep the child alive. What’s wrong with that picture?

Four years after Dobbs, states are in incomparably better positions by being able to regulate abortion without the constant scrutiny of federal courts setting abortion policy. But there’s a lot of room to go legally until we reach the day that civil rights and social justice both demand: where abortion is illegal in law and inconceivable in thought.