The Human Life Review editors invited the participants on the following pages to contribute a reaction to the statement below:

In the decades between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, most prolifers believed that Americans were more or less opposed to legalized abortion on demand because a) this was the case in 1973; b) it was imposed on us from above by “raw judicial power,” rather than legislated; and c) surveys repeatedly showed substantial percentages of Americans being disquieted by abortion, especially when you got beyond the hard cases and the earliest weeks of pregnancy.

In the first year or so following Dobbs, prolifers got a reality check through legislative defeats even in some reddish and purple states. We can say (what is true) that massive amounts of pro-abortion money peddling scare-mongering lies played a role in such defeats. Still, it has become clear that even the non-blue states are less pro-life than many believed, particularly if we understand the term “pro-life” to include the willingness of people who would never have an abortion themselves to legally deny other women the right.

In light of this, pursuing legislative and judicial pro-life victories, while important and even necessary, seems clearly insufficient to transform America into a nation where the unborn are valued and protected by society. It seems that only a long-term campaign to convert minds and hearts not only to personally value human life from conception to natural death, but to acknowledge the objective value of the unborn’s life according to something like the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” will suffice. In other words, for most people a conversion to belief in an objective morality that applies to everyone and therefore does not derive from political institutions or authorities but from a transcending authority—let’s say it, from God—is necessary for the pro-life cause to succeed nationally.

 

Gerard V. Bradley ♦ Alexandra DeSanctis ♦ Wesley J. Smith ♦ Jack Fowler ♦ Monica Snyder ♦ George McKenna ♦ Helen M. Alvaré ♦ Joseph Bottum ♦ Anne Hendershott ♦ Victor Lee Austin ♦ Charles Camosy ♦ Cecily Routman ♦ David Mills ♦ W. Ross Blackburn

 

Gerard V. Bradley:

We Americans are, indeed, “less pro-life than many believed, particularly if we understand the term ‘pro-life’ to include the willingness of people who would never have an abortion themselves to legally deny other women the right.” Ample proof of the fact would include the sad results of recent state referenda, as well as the unwillingness of the national “pro-life” party— the Republicans—to entertain serious restrictions on abortion. The decisive evidence, however, is probably the firestorm backlash over the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that the state’s “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act” applies to “all unborn children without limitation. And that includes unborn children who are not located in utero at the time they are killed.”

The deep, deep red Alabama legislature rushed to reverse the court’s decision. President Trump has “promised to advance IVF and help American families with the associated costs so American families can have more babies”—even though everyone knows that each IVF procedure produces many more embryos than will ever be implanted, and eventually born. These tiny persons are either frozen indefinitely, or destroyed outright. At least abortions kill just one tiny person at a time.

In light of these (and other) data, is it true that, while “pursuing legislative and judicial pro-life victories” is “important and even necessary,” they are “insufficient to transform America into a nation where the unborn are valued and protected by society”?

Well, it’s complicated.

For one thing, there may be a faulty premise in the question. The Dobbs decision did not recognize the unborn as “persons” with a right to life. It is an “important,” but still qualified, “judicial pro-life victory.” The Justices returned decisions about abortion to the states. We have seen how that went. But let’s imagine that sometime soon the Supreme Court holds that the unborn are constitutional “persons,” thus effectively outlawing abortion. No one should think that ruling would end abortion, any more than our present laws about homicide have ended murder. Just seriously curtailing abortion in our era of mail-order abortion-by-pill would require an enormous law enforcement exertion. It is an effort that some states would not make. Perhaps the federal government itself would not make enforcing the Court’s decision a high priority. Even with maximal enforcement, many women would continue to have abortions, and no one would be punished for it.

One might then think that it makes little sense to have sweeping protective laws unless we first conduct a successful “long-term campaign to convert minds and hearts . . . to personally value human life from conception to natural death.”

Not so. For one thing, when it comes to killing, the overriding objective is not conversion or goodwill of any sort. It is to stop the killing. We can move on from there to helping people to get their minds right.

Another thing: There will always be some—perhaps many—abortions, so long as many people who have no interest in having children have sex. Our degraded sexual mores work powerfully to rationalize these abortions. That rationalization is not so much personal, singular, insular. It is (and will continue to be) more part and parcel of our whole culture. All we can do is try to “convert” as many hearts and minds as possible. But in the meantime we must try to stop the killing.

Third thing: In our society there is no realistic prospect of changing hearts and minds if we do not restrict abortion legally as much as, and as soon as, possible. In fact, the situation after, say, a Supreme Court ruling similar to that in Alabama—everyone counts, born or unborn—would be much like the situation after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. There the Justices held unanimously that, in the field of education, “separate is inherently unequal.” So began a decades-long battle to actually desegregate public schools, especially but not only in the South. Enormous law enforcement efforts and no little political courage were essential to finally killing Jim Crow. Brown was the indispensable engine of change.

The central argument of the segregationists in the Brown case was a “hearts DeSand-minds” story about judicial restraint where a population was largely arrayed against what the Court might rule. That argument was wrong in 1954 about racism, and it is wrong now about abortion.

Francis Cardinal George, in a brilliant 2003 law review article called “Law and Culture,” wrote:

When it comes to abortion and other sanctity of life issues, we should not suppose that our choice is between reforming the law and working to change the culture. We must do both. The work of legal reform is a necessary, though not sufficient, ingredient in the larger project of cultural transformation. Yes, we must change people’s hearts. No, we must not wait for changes of heart before changing the laws. We must do both at the same time, recognizing that just laws help to form good hearts, and unjust laws impede every other effort in the cause of the gospel of life. Teaching and preaching that gospel, reaching out in love and compassion to pregnant women in need, all of this “cultural” work is indispensable. Without it, we will never effect legal reform or, if we do, the laws will not bear the weight we will be assigning to them. Even as these endeavors go forward though, we must work tirelessly for the legal protection of the right to life of the unborn child. It is not “either/or”—“law or culture”—it is “both/and.” Efforts in each sphere presuppose and depend upon the success of efforts in the other.

Lastly, what about religion? Is it true that, for the pro-life cause to succeed nationally, we need a widespread “conversion to belief in an objective morality that applies to everyone and therefore does not derive from political institutions or authorities but from a transcending authority—let’s say it, from God”?

Logically? No. Practically? Not necessarily: One could and many do believe that persons with rights come to be at conception without benefit of religious belief. But practically, at scale? Yes.

The Supreme Court in the infamous Casey decision (which re-affirmed Roe) justified abortion rights by rejecting God. The Justices wrote that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” In other words, there is no transcendent source of meaning and value. Each one of us is his or her own source of truth—or, I suppose, “truth.” Repudiating this repudiation of God may not make certain that our society will recover its lost respect for each human life from conception until natural death. But we will almost certainly languish in this abyss if we don’t.

—Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.

 

Alexandra DeSanctis:

We might summarize the most common American attitude toward abortion as something like, “I wouldn’t get an abortion myself, but I can’t tell others that it is wrong for them.” Or perhaps it is this: “Abortion is probably wrong, but if I’m in a difficult spot—or someone I love is in a difficult spot—then abortion should be available.”

The typical American arrives at these positions reflexively, as if they were self-evident articles of faith available to all of us. In truth, these statements betray the bizarre sort of tension that underlies a crisis of conscience, brought on by having wrapped ourselves in a web of lies. We know abortion is wrong, but we feel uncomfortable saying it; we are reluctant to look the truth in the eye.

But the human heart cannot overlook forever what is written on it. There is no moral defense for abortion, only rationalizations. We cannot outrun the natural law, so we invent our own twisted morality to shout down the whispers of doubt: Abortion not for me but for thee; abortion for me if push comes to shove.

Faced with these incoherent propositions, some of us might feel an impulse to get to the root of why abortions keep happening. We don’t understand how anyone could countenance it, so we grasp for explanations and solutions.

Many women don’t have the support of the child’s father, so we should encourage or require paternal involvement. Many women believe motherhood would derail their education or career, so we should help them “have it all.” Many women lack community support, so we should build up pregnancy resource centers and maternity homes.

All well and good. But if we wish to get to the root of what causes abortion, we must dig deeper still—into our own hearts. Huge numbers of people have taken it upon themselves to resolve difficulty and inconvenience by killing innocent, dependent human beings. Much of our society is implicated in promoting or otherwise supporting this practice; most of the people around us conceive of this killing as a purported solution to societal ills. We are engaged in policy fights not over an issue about which reasonable people might disagree but over the worst kind of moral depravity, what we might once have felt comfortable calling “sin.”

The deepest cause of abortion is, ultimately, the fundamental brokenness that dwells in each of us—the desire to control the stuff of life, to get what we want at the expense of others, to make ourselves like God.

But even those of us who realize this have ceased to say it. Out of a sincere and well-placed desire to empathize with and support those around us, we slip into rhetoric such as, “Women face such difficult circumstances,” or “If only men would step up and support mothers and children,” or “Perhaps profamily policies or community aid would help.” None of these statements is mistaken, and yet they cannot take the place of calling the guilty conscience to look at its own brokenness. This is a call intended not to evoke shame but to point the way toward repentance, mercy, and conversion, to invite others to attune their ears to the voice of conscience.

To a properly formed conscience, the dependence of a baby evokes—indeed, demands—responsiveness and care. Something fundamental has gone haywire if our response to a baby’s helplessness is to enact violence against him to suit our own purposes. Presented to a well-formed human heart, the neediness of the vulnerable calls forth love. That it no longer does so for many in the case of the unborn is evidence of a wide-scale deformation of conscience, prompted by a disinclination to admit the evil that has been done. We accept abortion as the price of doing business in the real world and yet we refuse to look in the clinic waste bin lest we find something that looks a bit too much like a baby.

We are determined to ignore or shout down the law written on the heart, because that law condemns us. And yet it continues to whisper: “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” As J. Budziszewski put it in a memorable article about conscience in this very journal, “Therefore we can be certain that every woman carries in her heart what she has cut from the dimness of her womb, and every man wears around his neck what he has refused to carry in his arms” (“What We Can’t Not Know,” HLR Fall 1996). The evil of abortion demands confrontation and redemption. But without embracing objective morality, without belief in God, we are left with the dreadful sense that we can never recover. The first step in healing wrongdoing and reforming the conscience is to admit our need for forgiveness. How can we face up to our guilt if we have no conception of mercy—or of the God who is mercy itself?

Each of us harbors the instinct to double down on our errors and kill our conscience, while lurking in our hearts is the damning knowledge of our faults. We struggle to admit, even if only to ourselves, that we’ve done wrong. Acknowledging our fundamental brokenness becomes possible only when we believe that the wrongs can somehow be righted, that those we have harmed are open to forgiving us. Indeed, we must believe that something called forgiveness exists and might be available to us, that wrongs outside our power to rehabilitate can nevertheless be healed.

While some of us might muster the strength to forgive one another imperfectly, none of us can offer perfect mercy to those who have sinned, for we too are sinners. True mercy, forgiveness, and redemption are impossible without God. Perhaps this is why so many former abortionists say embracing Christianity was the necessary first step in admitting that they had done wrong; they first had to believe that forgiveness was possible. Likewise, some of the most effective pro-life ministries for post-abortive women, such as the Sisters of Life, take mercy as their starting point.

In a 1984 letter to Jim McFadden, founder of this publication, President Ronald Reagan wrote, “Respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply ingrained in the hearts of our people to remain forever suppressed.” This much is certainly true. What remains to be seen is whether we can relinquish our hearts broken by sin into the hands of the One who can heal us.

—Alexandra DeSanctis is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

 

Wesley J. Smith:

The pro-life movement has always been closely associated with belief in God generally and in Christianity specifically. Indeed, explicit religiosity is one of its greatest strengths, infusing prolifers with energy, goodness, and courage as they unyieldingly pursue an often-unpopular cause.

But that isn’t the end of the pro-life story. Explicit religiosity is also one of the movement’s greatest weaknesses in the wider society, and indeed, may be the primary reason why in recent decades pro-life views haven’t attained majority support among the American people.

A 2024 Gallup poll illustrates the problem. It found that 54 percent of respondents “identified” as “pro-choice” versus 41 percent who embraced the “pro-life” cause. Of these prolifers, only 12 percent believed that abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances.” In contrast, a depressing 35 percent of those who described themselves as pro-choice believed that abortion should be legal “in any circumstance.”

Gallup poll findings also illustrate Christianity’s ongoing decline in the United States. Last year, 68 percent identified as “Christian.” That may sound good, but that is down from 87 percent in 1973. The importance of religion in peoples’ lives was also measured, with an anemic 45 percent of Americans saying that religion is “very important.” Notice how this “very important” response tracks closely with the 41 percent of those who identify as pro-life. It seems to me these figures indicate that people who are devoutly faithful likely already support the pro-life cause.

So, how do prolifers persuade people beyond the already convinced to care about abortion, assisted suicide, radical reproduction technologies, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, biotechnology, medical conscience, et al., in an era in which Christianity and religious belief are in decline? I wish it were otherwise, but I don’t think it can be accomplished by further binding pro-life advocacy to religion or “God’s” natural law.

And if pro-life principles are about “natural law,” how many hours-long symposia will activists have to sponsor just to explain the concept? How many podcasts will they have to produce? How would that deep subject be discussed in a five-minute television interview? And, at a time of social media-driven shrinking attention spans, how many people would even pay attention to such pedagogy? No. Practicality must be the watchword. And that means agreeing on the best way to reach and persuade liberals, conservatives, the indifferent, and everyone in between.

Toward that end, I think the movement’s focus should be on universal human rights, a secular concept and principle that still holds sway in a society riven by deep political division. Indeed, this was the late, great prolifer Nat Hentoff’s approach. He became pro-life after coming to understand that unborn babies—as a matter of science—are human beings and on hearing civil rights leader Jesse Jackson equate pro-choice belief with pro-slavery advocacy. These two understandings caused Hentoff to switch sides at great cost to his own career, writing in the Human Life Review: “I have learned the most fundamental human right is the right to life—for the born, the unborn, the elderly who refuse to give up on life.”

The successes achieved over the last few decades in impeding the assisted suicide juggernaut demonstrate the wisdom of this approach. After Oregon legalized assisted suicide in 1992, most observers thought it would sweep the country. But it hasn’t. Yes, ten states and the District of Columbia permit doctor-prescribed death. But even many of the most liberal states have—so far—refused to join the death parade.

Why? Because prolifers understand that while their influence holds sway in conservative parts of the country—prolifers, for example, just passed a constitutional amendment against legalizing assisted suicide in West Virginia— in progressive states their visible opposition could push people bitterly opposed to pro-life advocacy into the pro-assisted suicide camp. In those cases, wise pro-life leaders have willingly assumed a less prominent public role to make room for activists who are more acceptable to politically liberal voters. This has usually meant relying on disability rights activists, who (generally) are fiercely secular, politically progressive, and not pro-life on abortion. But they understand that the euthanasia movement targets disabled and other vulnerable people for death, so they have fiercely engaged the issue—while prolifers shored up cultural conservatives. That coalition of politically strange bedfellows works brilliantly, to the distinct frustration of assisted suicide ideologues. This model has also been deployed successfully by prolifers working alongside feminists to prevent the legalization of commercial surrogacy. So, it seems to me that this should be the model going forward: finding people who might not even identify as pro-life to participate in coalitions of the willing (if you will) on an issue-by-issue basis based on human rights principles, not religion.

The issues prolifers engage are symptoms of a profound nihilism that has infected society. And I do agree that religious revival is the only solution to that crisis. But restoring religious faith to the center of society is not the purpose of pro-life advocacy. Rather, the goal of the movement must be to save lives, not souls, which will be best achieved through an explicitly human rights perspective.

—Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.

 

Jack Fowler:

The terrible thing about abortion, beyond the dire bloodshed and the psychological trauma it exacts, beyond how it changes the nature of our society to one now aptly described as embracing a “Culture of Death,” beyond how the acceptance of abortion pays demonic dividends, such as the tolerance of, and the advocacy for, infanticide and euthanasia and the disappearing of those with Down syndrome and other infirmities that surely imbue those so burdened with a special closeness to the Almighty—the terrible thing is abortion’s relegation to the confines of politics and courts.

Stay in your lane!

It seems the Churches have embraced this diminishment, this demotion of the most pressing moral issue of the last half century.

My own experience, as one who attends church weekly (and then some), is that the clergy have largely gone silent—or confined themselves to whispering—on abortion. I cannot recall the last time I heard a distinct sermon on its evils or, on the flip side, a thorough articulation of why life is sacred, why it must be protected and cherished, and why it is our duty to help those women and families in crisis.

In Catholicism, my tribe, October is Respect Life month (and the first Sunday of the month Respect Life Sunday), with the expectation that homilies will jibe with the theme. However, the designation, which seemed a positive thing when it was made in 1973 (Hooray! We’ve got our special month!), maybe lapsed into being remanded to a . . . ghetto. A message that needed regular—not annual—repeating was actually minimized in importance by being relegated to one month.

What if your leans-liberal pastor—allergic to this particular “controversial” subject (maybe permanently stung by an angry pro-abortion parishioner who stormed out of Mass during a sermon)—checked this box (a former one of mine did) on that assigned October Sunday by making a barely tangential “pro-life” reference in a homily (of otherwise gobbledygook). Such as: “Pregnant women should not eat fish caught in the Long Island Sound because they may get mercury poisoning.”

This indeed happened. Not the rallying cry you hear at the March for Life. Whither the pew sitters, padre, who consist of sinners, who will face occasions of? There are single women (pregnant), married men (side hustling, impregnating), the faithful (among them elementary school girls whose future should not involve getting pregnant in high school), young men (unattached, intent on wild-oats sowing, oblivious to the biological aftereffects), couples in financial doldrums (and the pregnancy test was positive), or the middle-aged bemoaning the obligations brought on by infirm, in-dotage parents (I visited Mom last Christmas)—all these people, and all people, deserve from their pastors regular, repeated articulation of the love God has for the unborn (the thee He knew in the womb), the aged (“gray hair is a crown of splendor”), and all who fit in between, and about life’s inherent sanctity, and about our very real obligation to know this, and to act upon it.

There is no excuse for any pulpit passivity and timidity here.

Political matter? Judicial matter? True, but abortion has always been even more a cultural and societal matter—the province of our moral leaders. Those who claim as their life’s role societal engagement, especially through churches and from pulpits, need to drop the shame, fear, and de facto embarrassment that widely persist among them and fulfill their duty to address abortion.

For abortion and those varied behaviors that lead to it are very real realities—in the case of abortion, bloody ones—dealt with by those sitting in emptying pews, that dwindling flock that nevertheless depends on Father’s or Reverend’s or Rabbi’s guidance in life’s grim and difficult matters.

Of course, it is hard to make a cultural dent in abortion when those pews continue their emptying—this is the colossal challenge facing all of our churches and houses of worship.

What to do while awaiting the next Great Awakening? Let us turn to the TCM channel.

When Father O’Malley comes to Saint Dominic’s in Going My Way, the pastor, Father Fitzgibbon, chides him for being lax in visiting parishioners. Say what? Priests actually visited the homes of their parishioners as part of their S.O.P.?

Maybe this quaint practice of yore could stand a reboot in 2025.

The customer—or the parishioner—may be fickle, an oh-ye-of-tenuous-faith believer. But then small things, little things (mustard seeds!), do mean a lot, even in matters of faith. Maybe especially in those. The pastoral call—We miss you—or the Monsignor’s unscheduled Saturday morning visit—I just want you to know I care and invite you to come back, we are incomplete without you—to the home of the absentee parishioner is the kind of concrete, intimate, direct action needed to play a role in returning many to practice and worship. Quite viscerally, people want to know they are known—and wanted. It matters that their spiritual leader cares, that he might even be quite aware that I no longer go. That he actually cares for my soul. So . . .

There is a redux. They show up. The flock unscatters. And then . . .

More people are in pews to hear uncowering sermons—not necessarily marked by fire and brimstone (there is something to be said for attracting more with honey than vinegar)—about life’s profound sanctity; sermons that come with greater frequency than the Leap Year or the Great Pumpkin, for how else to call upon a world where there are over 70 million abortions annually, and a country that allows over a million of them per year, while its states incubate the growing movement perversely branded “Death with Dignity”—to return to a culture of life.

If this seems a tall order, it is. But it is a feasible strategic plan—with the cooperation of the ordained.

Unless this happens, how can the political and judicial succeed? Can we expect pro-life referenda to prevail, and laws to be passed, and suits to be upheld, if the people who populate our Republic know no better, and are untaught by their moral teachers?

Will we succeed? That’s God’s assignment—it is in good hands. Our job is to aid and abet, through our own families and community, with the full participation of our houses of worship. Preach!

The reigning culture of death no doubt is having its long moment. But with heartfelt articulation by believers of the reasons why abortion is not only bad, but abhorrent, why euthanasia is not only bad, but repugnant, and why life is not only good, but sacred, death will experience its own sting.

—Jack Fowler is a contributing editor at National Review and a senior philanthropy consultant at American Philanthropic.

 

Monica Snyder:

It’s true that people who believe humans are made in the image of God have a compelling reason to value humans. It’s not true that belief in Imago Dei is necessary to value humans, including our prenatal children.

There are strong correlations between being a practicing Christian and opposing abortion, and likewise between being an atheist and being pro-choice. According to Pew Research, Catholics who attend Mass at least weekly are vastly more likely to say abortion should be illegal than those who attend less often. At the same time, 80 percent of those unaffiliated with religion (including 95 percent of atheists) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Both Christians and atheists have argued that these data indicate that belief in God is necessary to oppose abortion. I disagree.

I’m an atheist and I oppose abortion. I’m also the Executive Director of Secular Pro-Life (SPL), an anti-abortion organization led by atheists and supported by people of a wide variety of religious backgrounds (atheist, agnostic, Wiccan, Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Buddhist, and many more).

I’ve been with SPL since its founding in 2009. In the ensuing years, countless non-religious people have told me their stories of moving from pro-choice to pro-life, all while remaining secular. SPL began publishing these testimonials once a month in our “Ask an Atheist” series. Examples:

“As someone who has had a tough life and spent time in foster care, I was disturbed by pro-choicers making eugenicist arguments that ‘unwanted’ people like me would benefit from abortion. I still believe my life matters and I’m so thankful for the opportunity to be alive and experience the world.”—Brandon, pro-life atheist

“[I became anti-abortion with] my first pregnancy. The moment I felt him move and saw his little foot slide across my stomach, like a little ‘Hello my darling, hello my ragtime gal’ alien, I realized exactly what fetuses are. Before that I was mega prochoice.” —JW, pro-life atheist

“I started to be pro-life when I was a theist. As I grew less and less convinced of anything supernatural, I became more convinced of my pro-life stance. Abortion indisputably kills a living human and I don’t believe it’s justified homicide whatsoever.” —Dylan, pro-life atheist

“My wife and I lost our first child due to a miscarriage at 15 weeks. Up until this point, I had been pro-choice, not really giving much thought to when life truly began. This all changed for me when the doctor came to me and asked if I wanted to hold my son to say goodbye.” —Ryan, pro-life agnostic

“Over the last few years, I’ve moved from being neutral or nominally pro-choice to being anti-abortion, in part due to a relationship with a strongly pro-life [atheist] friend who got me thinking about the issue.” —Jesse, pro-life atheist

Over the years, many Christians have expressed curiosity and confusion when I talk about atheists who oppose abortion. They often assume atheists think morality is subjective, and further assume that people who think morality is subjective have no strong reasons to oppose abortion. Both of these assumptions are mistakes.

First, many non-religious people think morality is objective. Philosophers such as Erik Wielenberg, Shelly Kagan, and Michael Huemer, among others, have all argued for non-theistic moral realism. It is a mistake to assume nonreligious people, by definition, believe morality is subjective.

We can see this perspective within the abortion debate. Recent Pew Research polling found that about 1 in 5 non-religious people say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, suggesting they oppose abortion not only personally but politically. The other 4 often view abortion itself as a human right, specifically as the manifestation of the right to control who can access and use our bodies. They typically defend bodily autonomy not as a subjective ideal but as an objective moral precept.

Second, even people who think morality is subjective still usually conclude that human beings have value, and their rights should be protected by law and societal norms. We can see this when we look at other human rights issues outside the abortion debate. For example, non-religious people regularly defend politics and policy supporting LGBT people, immigrants, and racial minorities. Subjective morality is the idea that values are based on individual or cultural perspectives; it doesn’t require believing all actions are permissible. We don’t have to persuade people to believe in objective morality in order to get them to oppose abortion. We need only relate opposition to abortion to the values they already hold dear.

The pro-life movement does need to convert more hearts and minds. We want all people to value embryos as our prenatal children. But we don’t have to convince others to believe in God to believe the pro-life message. Prioritizing religious conversion places Christian framings at the center of the abortion debate, which can sometimes help but often backfires. A more effective approach is to understand pro-choice audiences—their language, priorities, and perspectives—and communicate pro-life messages within those contexts. This is where non-traditional prolifers (those who passionately oppose abortion but deviate from Christianity or political conservatism) can serve as translators. We’re a key resource: ambassadors bringing the pro-life perspective to social circles the larger movement rarely connects with.

At SPL we have found that discussions of post-viability abortion, early fetal development, abortion coercion, and grief over miscarriage are all points of entry into a broader conversation. Framing the debate around equal access to motherhood, opposition to medical ableism, and the promotion of equality and nonviolence can also give people pause.

There are many paths that lead people to oppose abortion. We just need to invite them to take a few steps down the nearest one.

—Monica Snyder is Executive Director of Secular Pro-Life.

 

George McKenna:

Let’s start with the good news. In 2022 the United States Supreme Court in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that our country’s Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. The previous cases on this issue, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, were overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion was returned to the people and their elected representatives in the several states. Abortion, then, is no longer a federal right. The question of whether to allow it is back in the hands of the people—where it was before the Roe and Doe decisions of 1973. This was a promising event for the pro-life movement.

But unfortunately, Dobbs did not culminate in a nationwide ban on abortion. In some places abortion may even have strengthened its hold. It was on the ballot in five states in 2024, and in all five, abortion advocates won, even some states thought to be reliably pro-life. More worrisome, it appeared that abortion had found favor with growing numbers of young people.

Before we despair, let’s dig deeper by examining an important feature of American public opinion: its fluidity. In 2020, when Biden was declared winner of the presidential election, Trump claimed that it was stolen and encouraged his supporters to “peacefully” protest by marching on Washington. That set off four years of congressional investigations, FBI raids, and courtroom dramas, all culminating—in what? In a second term for Donald Trump! Now his approval rating is higher than ever: He attracts crowds of worshipers in bars, baseball parks, neighborhood cafeterias, and even the Waldorf-Astoria. But I’m not primarily interested in the merits and defects of Donald Trump. My focus is on the volatility of public opinion in American politics, how quickly the pendulum can swing from praise to scorn—and back again—in short order. In 1973, at the time of Roe v. Wade, many prominent Democrats were opposed to abortion. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy insisted that the right to life begins at “the very moment of conception.” At that time it was more likely that it was Republican politicians, like Nelson Rockefeller, who were the champions of “abortion rights.” Within a 20-year period, both parties had flipped—in two opposite directions—on the abortion issue.

At the beginning of his first two runs for the White House, in 2016 and 2020, Trump must have realized that he probably wouldn’t get many votes from hardcore abortion supporters, so the smart move would be to throw in support for their arch-enemies. Which he did. In his televised debate with Hillary Clinton, he found just the right moment when the debate moderator asked whether late-term abortions could ever be justified. “Well,” he said, “I think it’s terrible. If you go with what [Clinton] is saying, you can. . . rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby. Now you can say that that’s OK and [Clinton] can say that that’s OK—but it’s not OK with me.” I had never before heard any candidate, Democrat or Republican, talk like that. It clearly rattled Clinton, who accused Trump of “scare rhetoric,” but it may have helped to bring to the polls many dedicated prolifers who might otherwise have stayed home.

On the eve of the 2020 election, perhaps because he looked back on that 2016 debate with Clinton and remembered how it had gotten her on the defensive with his talk about ripping a baby out of the womb, Trump announced that he’d support a nationwide ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy. (Later, perhaps under pressure from abortion lobbyists, he moved it up to 16 weeks.) But 2020 marked the election he lost. He blamed it on Democratic cheating and spent the next four years fighting off Democrat “lawfare” aimed at putting him into jail. But Trump wasn’t just fighting Democrats during those four years. He was also courting groups he had won over back in 2016. One of them was the pro-life community. It played an important role in Trump’s 2024 reelection. Trump wasted no time in continuing his friendship with prolifers. He left a prerecorded video message at the annual March for Life thanking pro-life activists for their “tireless working and devotion across five decades,” and standing up for “precious little babies who cannot stand for themselves.” He sent his VicePresident there in person to deliver his own rousing speech of thanksgiving. Shortly before those speeches Trump pardoned 23 pro-life activists, some of them serving long prison terms, for blocking access to abortion clinics. He also issued executive orders enforcing the Hyde Amendment, which bans any use of federal funds for abortion, and has sought to cut funding of Planned Parenthood. From a pro-life standpoint this is all good. But what happened to Trump’s national ban on late-term abortions? It disappeared. It’s gone, at least for the time being. But . . .

Let’s start to put our cards on the table. At some point between four and twelve weeks after sexual intercourse, a woman may discover that she is pregnant. How pregnant? Let’s say four weeks. A four-week child in the womb doesn’t look much like a baby, but wait: Eleven weeks after that, the same child, now fifteen weeks old, doesn’t look like anything but a baby. Now, let’s say its mother suddenly decides she doesn’t want that baby. Well, she can relax, because eight states—mainly in the East and the far West— have no time limits on killing children in the womb. Not surprisingly, abortions at 14 weeks have been known to produce live babies. I will spare you a physician’s account of what can happen then. Anyone interested can find it in my article in the Spring 2020 edition of the Human Life Review.

Nevertheless, I remain optimistic about the future, and here is why. People can’t continue to lie about reality. I mean they can, but they can’t without seriously damaging their thinking apparatus. Show me a color photograph of an eight-week-old fetus and tell me it’s not a human being. I would laugh at your ignorance because I know for certain that it is. It may not be as pretty as an already-born baby (though that’s arguable) but it’s unmistakably human. Long ago I learned that you’re not supposed to kill innocent human beings. It’s as simple as that, so simple that I can imagine a time in the future when people will ask, “Did they really do that? And to children?”

—George McKenna is professor emeritus of political science at City College of New York.

 

Helen M. Alvaré:

The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center decision ripped open the curtain that had been concealing nearly 50 years of evolving U.S. opinion about legalized abortion. What appeared was often disheartening. It seems that abortion’s ready availability for decades has accustomed many Americans to it. Consciences have darkened. Hearts have hardened.

Self-described pro-life lawmakers, accustomed to having their hands tied—that is, unable to pass protections for the unborn due to Roe v. Wade— suddenly feared self-described feminists claiming that legal abortion is the sine qua non of freedom and happiness for women.

And then citizens in places like Ohio—Ohio!—enacted constitutional amendments going way past recklessly pro-abortion. And I don’t use the adjective pro-abortion lightly. My lawyerly self usually sticks to “pro-legalabortion.” But these laws deserve it. For example, in Ohio, it is legal to obtain an abortion for any reason up to birth. “Health abortions” for any reason a doctor can imagine must be permitted even after fetal viability. Parents of minors and fathers of the children to be aborted have no say whatsoever over the lives of their children, with the law prohibiting actions that “directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with” “any individual” getting an abortion. I remember hearing about constitutional provisions like these long before voting day and thinking “No sweat—we’re not talking about California for goodness sake! This is Ohio.” I was so wrong.

Is there a way forward? Of course, there always is where truth is concerned. But how to discern this and move forward in an organized fashion?

My dream is to excise the abortion issue from the current “categories” in which it’s presently mired and to insert it in a new framework that might gain a more favorable hearing. Currently the categories dominating people’s reflections on abortion are these: empowered; freedom-loving women; Democrats, and rational, nonreligious persons are “pro-choice”; clueless Neanderthal men, Republicans, and irrational religious fanatics are “pro-life.”

These are not categories that provoke thoughtful conversation let alone a readiness to embrace a pro-life worldview. So I propose rather to frame the abortion issue differently—as one of the constellation of questions that Americans pose themselves when asking: “How are we doing as a nation?” How are we living up to our founding history and ongoing boast about being a beacon of mercy and freedom? For welcoming all kinds of people—no matter their age, race, circumstances, or condition? For being a place where everybody is given a fair chance to realize the inalienable right to a dignified life? For being a place where the thought of having a baby doesn’t send a woman into a stone-cold panic because she can’t imagine how a baby could mesh with her need to earn a living?

Why should abortion be such a subject? Because of what it is, frankly, as brilliantly limned by Pope Saint John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae. This is not pretty to say, but legal abortion is a state-issued license for one family member to arrange for the killing of another. And the one empowered to arrange for or perform (via the abortion pill) the killing is not just any family member, but the mom—the person nature-made to be the primeprotector. And the one whose life is taken is not just her child, but a person at one of his or her most vulnerable possible moments in life, before (as John Paul II highlights) he or she can even cry out or struggle. Why shouldn’t this constellation of facts frighten those who worry about “where our country is headed”? Are children not our future? Is our society, our economy, so structured that motherhood is nearly impossible? Have we lost our moral appreciation for innocence? Is killing no longer naturally repugnant?

And to add insult to injury, proponents call abortion a “human right” as if the human on the killing end of the instruments is not there. They call abortion a necessary means to women’s financial and social freedom. They fight to hide pictures of the unborn child from the mother, as if they don’t respect her intelligence or can’t risk her emotions. And while they’re at it, they ridicule and denounce any effort to help post-aborted women heal emotionally and spiritually.

The accumulated insults—to intelligence and human decency—of these aspects of legal abortion are not sufficiently countered when we resort to the usual language about the right to life of the unborn. This fails to evoke all that is morally at stake in the case of every abortion: family bonds, especially the mother-child relationship, the intensely vulnerable condition of the child, and the question whether motherhood is an insurmountable burden in one of the richest nations on Planet Earth. Hard as it is to be the person who uses the word “killing” in a conversation about abortion, I believe that this new framing of the issue could help put abortion alongside other markers of our success or failure as a nation that might resonate more deeply and more emotionally in a nation that has heard about the “right to life” for a very long time.

—Helen M. Alvaré is a Professor of Law and the Robert A. Levy Chair in Liberty and Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University.

 

Joseph Bottum:

In 1983, in a speech at Fordham University, Cardinal Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, argued that issues of life and death form what came to be called a seamless garment—a claim that Catholic moral thinking points toward a consistent life ethic, uniting public concerns that might otherwise seem unrelated. Bernardin was not the originator of the idea, nor was he the first to deploy it in the abortion debate that had roiled the country since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. His Fordham speech, however, brought the seamless garment to wider public notice and gave the idea of a consistent life ethic a prominent place in Catholic moral discourse in the United States. Unfortunately, that effect was mostly baleful. Yes, Bernardin himself was solidly opposed to Roe. But over the next decades—in the hotly contested middle portion of the nearly 50 years of the Roe regime—pro-life Catholics became divided into two camps. On one side were the seamless-garment types, who folded abortion in with capital punishment, nuclear armaments, euthanasia, and social-justice issues. On the other (and much larger) side were the anti-Roe types, who kept abortion—then occurring around 1.5 million times a year—at the focus of their opposition.

To many of these anti-Roe activists and writers, the consistent life ethic looked like a way to diminish the significance of abortion. The death penalty, whatever one thinks of it, has taken 1,605 lives since 1977, when the Supreme Court walked back its essential ban in Furman v. Georgia (1972) and began allowing capital punishment again. No one has died from the deployment of nuclear weapons since 1945. In 2022, medically assisted deaths were estimated to have reached over 5,000 total since 1998. Meanwhile, over 63 million babies were aborted under the Roe decision from 1973 to 2022.

Worse than this numeric imbalance, the seamless-garment argument required equating prudential judgments with absolute judgments. Poverty may be a life issue within a certain way of understanding Catholic moral teaching, but the question of how to alleviate poverty remains open. The best way to prevent worldwide thermonuclear war—a real concern in 1983— may well have been what America’s 1991 victory in the Cold War suggests it was: by maintaining an unused nuclear arsenal, rather than by unilateral disarmament. To many in the pro-life movement over the Roe decades, a demand for a consistent life ethic seemed a dodge—a way of paying lip-service to abortion while speaking to Catholics, but even more a way to maintain liberal credentials while speaking to Democrats in an era in which abortion was rapidly becoming a Republican preserve. Abortion was dissolved in a general leftist sea.

Then came Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022. The nationalizing of abortion under Roe, the raising of the issue to the level of a constitutional right, damaged American law in fields as distant as free speech, and the Supreme Court, now with a Catholic majority, had finally had enough of it. The pro-life movement’s insistence on fighting Roe, nurturing generations of pro-life legal figures, had succeeded.

Like the dog that at last caught the car it was chasing, the pro-life movement then faced the question of what to do with the overturning of Roe. The effects since 2022 have not been what anyone who is pro-life would want. The number of abortions in the United States has gone up by over 10 percent, after more than twenty years of general decline. State after state added access to abortion to its state constitution. Abortion is generally thought to have eliminated the large Republican gains predicted by pollsters for 2022, and ten states had pro-abortion referendums on the ballot in 2024 (with only three—Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota—defeated).

To some degree, this was anticipated. As pro-life figures from James McFadden to Richard John Neuhaus knew, Americans always say they want change, and then react badly to the change when it arrives. Over the 49 years of Roe, polls showed pro-life support rising among the general public when pro-abortion law seemed to gain ground and falling when opposition to abortion made some small legal advance. But the effect of Dobbs has been particularly bad, and the question of how we should proceed is urgent.

The answer, I suggest, may lie in revisiting the thought of Cardinal Bernardin, particularly as developed in his 1988 book, Consistent Life Ethic. This is difficult for someone like me, and there are passages in that book, particularly about the Cold War, that make one cringe at their datedness and lack of awareness that the Soviet Union’s eastern European empire was about to collapse. But perhaps an undated vision of a life ethic is possible—and if it is possible, then this may be the path that should be followed by newer generations of those who are pro-life.

Certainly some of the life issues have already grown entwined. It’s easy to forget that in the 1990s there were prominent commentators (Wesley J. Smith and Leon Kass among them) who were opposed to euthanasia without being fully against legalized abortion, and yet now I know of few, if any, who separate them morally. And if euthanasia and abortion can be joined, then why not other objective moral judgments?

Legalized abortion on demand licenses a crime that cries to heaven, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade has left our culture still ankle-deep in blood. Having won the fight against the claim that abortion is a right at the highest level of law, we need to take the fight to the states—and we need to make converts for that to happen, since abortion has become the political fight that the Supreme Court preempted in 1973. And for persuading others of objective moral judgment—born not of positive law, a gift from government, but transcendental authority, a gift from God—the consistency of our vision of life becomes the key element.

—Joseph Bottum is the 2025/2026 Visiting Scholar of Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado and a founder of the Substack newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Anne Hendershott:

In 1997 pro-life obstetrician Dr. John Willkie and his wife Barbara, a nurse, published Why Can’t We Love Them Both? Questions and Answers About Abortion. The Willkes, generally considered “founders” of the prolife movement, were adept at messaging and imagery. They were the first to use the phrase “unborn human” and, at a time when abortion advocates were talking about “clumps of cells,” they understood the power of fetal images to verify the humanity of the unborn child. Even before Roe was decided, they had developed effective educational tools including slide sets, brochures, billboards, and videos, which have been used throughout the world to counter disingenuous claims about abortion.

The Willkies have died, but their legacy lives on in Life Issues Institute, the non-profit they co-founded (with Bradley Mattes) in 1991 and whose many pro-life educational effortstoday include daily radio commentaries. Carried by more than 1,300 outlets, these thoughtful one-minute messages, focused on “what it means to be pro-life in post-Roe v. Wade America,” reach all 50 states and 18 million listeners each week, over 900 million listeners a year. The reach is impressive, but it is unlikely the spots are reaching the TikTok generation—young people just beginning to form their opinions on the unborn while being bombarded with pro-abortion messages on social media. This generation is not listening to the radio. Or even watching TV.

Social media is where we can reach them. Using visual imagery that captures the beauty of pregnancy and the promise of new life, prolifers can tell young people that we can protect both mother and child, that we can indeed “love them both.” Social media—including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram—can convey relatable “Choose Life” messages to women—and men—facing unplanned pregnancies. Personal stories, inviting visuals, and respectful outreach will foster empathy for unborn children and openness to information about abortion alternatives. An unemotional approach that appeals only to the intellect isn’t enough to effect the beginning of a paradigm shift on abortion.

The pro-abortion side knows the persuasive power of emotion. They have spent the past fifty years using inflated statistics and graphic images to convince us that before Roe v. Wade thousands of women died from “coat-hanger” or botched illegal abortions. The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a one-time abortionist who later denounced his advocacy and converted to Christianity, debunked the inflated statistics years ago. In his 1973 book Aborting America, Nathanson revealed that he and other activists had made up the numbers to alarm the public and stir up abortion support.

The truth hasn’t stopped pro-abortion propagandists from continuing to use Nathanson’s deliberately inflated statistics on abortion-related deaths before Roe. These data are often accompanied by an oft-published gruesome photo of a woman named Gerri Santoro who died in a dirty motel room in 1964 from a self-induced abortion. In 2022, Ms. Magazine used the photo to accompany an article warning of what would happen if Donald Trump were to become president again.

This “death-of-countless women-from-abortion” narrative is a familiar one on TikTok and YouTube. It is enhanced through enlisting the testimonies and warnings of pro-choice celebrities like Amy Schumer. The comedian gained fame when her online “abortion tourism” video—in which she attempts to convince women living in states with abortion bans to travel to states like Colorado to end their pregnancies—went viral. The ad, in which Schumer, wearing a cowboy hat, frolics in a mountain-framed meadow, was designed to be entertaining. In it she reassures viewers that traveling across state lines for an abortion can be fun—just like a vacation.

The pro-abortion side has had the advantage in social media, but the prolife generation can also make ads that are creative and engaging—by telling the truth about pregnancy and motherhood. My own students at Franciscan University of Steubenville can generate this kind of content. They just need to be encouraged to do so and provided with some direction. I can envision them doing “Ask Me Anything” sessions on social media or even a podcast in which students ask women who have used pregnancy center services (or even Franciscan University’s on-campus Guadalupe House, which is designed to shelter and provide services to pregnant Franciscan students) to share their experiences and answer questions. These sessions would emphasize the loving support available to women experiencing a crisis pregnancy and showcase the success stories of women who said yes to life. I can envision these students encouraging women to share their pregnancy stories through social media posts, using positive and hopeful language. And, most importantly, I can imagine my students helping to humanize the unborn child by presenting imagery that conveys the wonder of new life, the miracle of the child in the womb.

In the early days of the pro-life movement, there was an over-reliance on using gruesome photos of aborted fetuses to change minds about abortion. And although there is still some debate as to whether these photos were effective or not, over the years the pro-life side has largely abandoned emotional shock in favor of unemotional intellectual persuasion. Perhaps now is the time for a communications strategy that favors positive stories with pictures of happy babies and happy mothers—because this is how we show that we really do “love them both.”

—Anne Hendershott is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.

 

Victor Lee Austin:

In the fall of 1989, the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of New York had a strong pro-choice resolution on its docket. To wide surprise, on the day of the convention the movers withdrew it. It was whispered that they had learned others were ready to offer a substitute resolution. I was one of them, part of a small group prepared to move that the diocese affirm the more moderate position of the national Episcopal Church. Those responsible for pulling the original resolution did not want to have the discussion that ours might have provoked.

Subsequently, I was asked (by a similarly small group) to produce an occasional newsletter on abortion. We called it Care and Community and gave it the tagline “By Episcopalians, for the Life of the Church.” Our focus was on the effect of abortion as a church matter—on the care we ought to have for one another and the kind of community we wanted the church to be. We deliberately avoided politics, and published no arguments for changing the law. The position of the Episcopal Church then was (and, to an extent, still is) that abortion is regrettable. Life is sacred from its inception to natural death. Perhaps most importantly, whenever members of the church are consulted about a proposed termination of pregnancy, they are to encourage alternative, positive courses of action, including adoption and so forth. Nonetheless, the Episcopal Church was and remains opposed to any legislation that would limit the ability of a woman to reach an informed decision in this matter. My bishop at the time summarized our position as “pro-choice politically but pro-life theologically,” which of course is inconsistent—it is impossible to maintain a line between politics and theology. Still, a lot of life involves such contradictions.

With help from many sources (I might mention the late Linda Bridges [the managing editor of National Review at the time] for particular example, the late J.P. McFadden for moral encouragement, and the late Richard John Neuhaus for inspiration, including the newsletter’s title), we produced a prolife publication without touching on what abortion law should be. Care and Community came out two or three times a year for nearly a decade. It had an effect. No abortion resolution was submitted to our diocesan convention during those years. Pro-choice colleagues would offer that, although they did not agree with us, they appreciated the spirit with which we carried forth.

* * * * *

It seems to me that the United States today needs a large-scale, focused effort under the rubric of “Care and Community.” We need, patiently yet persistently, without slur or slander, to point out what abortion acquiescence has done to our society. We need to enlist a body of people of goodwill to share their concern about what happens to care and community when abortion is accepted, promoted, even celebrated. There will be no lack of material, alas. We want to build a wide network of people who may well disagree on what the best legal arrangements might be; the uniting discernment will be that abortion is devastating to our society.

Such a project would stand implicitly on a natural-law basis, at least in the rough sense that abortion, being an offense against humanity, cannot help but be manifestly bad. We need to help people see the deep harms that abortion inflicts upon humanity and human society, wounding our communities and desensitizing us to the need for care.

And what are those harms? For one, abortion atomizes society. With abortion on offer, pregnant women are often left to face their situation alone. Light needs to be shed upon this nonpolitical reality. Precisely at a point in life when a woman needs a community of friends to support her, she is abandoned with a prescription for harsh chemicals to ingest at home or an appointment at an abortion facility. Where are her friends, her boyfriend or husband, her parents? She has a “right” to abortion, but the way in which that right is practiced amounts to a solitary choice. It is a sad truth that those of us around her may feel relief; since it is her decision alone, none of us will have to be greatly inconvenienced. It is her decision, and she will have to live with it.

But in truth—and this is a truth most people recognize once it is pointed out to them—human beings are relational, always; we are not atoms, and we should never abandon one another. We show our connectedness when we help one another in trouble, when we eschew the “easy out” (which hardly turns out to be easy) provided by some pills or a “procedure.”

Another social effect of widespread abortion practice is that it encourages us to see human beings, not as individuals with dignity, but as products we can select for existence or termination. Prenatal testing often turns into a search-and-destroy operation for unborn humans who don’t measure up to our desired standards. A child with Down syndrome today is followed through his or her life with questions: Why weren’t you aborted? Why has this inferior, awful life been forced upon you?

I once had a priest tell me of a parishioner who was in a hard place. Her son was impossible for her to handle. At one point she told her son, “I should have aborted you,” which is indeed what “everyone,” years before, had urged her to do. This is a small glimpse into the world abortion has brought about—our world.

Such thoughts only scratch the surface of what could be said about the effect abortion has had on our society, our communities, our care for one another. Examples abound in everyday life. Researchers are writing about this, as are novelists and playwrights. There are TV episodes that, intentionally or not, show how abortion negatively influences the way we live together. There are moments in film that do the same. The mounting evidence of societal damage demands our concerted attention. To highlight and broadcast it is an important part, at least, of our effort to nurture a culture of life.

—The Reverend Canon Victor Lee Austin is the theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, Texas.

 

Charles Camosy:

Overall and in the main, I agree with the statement. But with a few significant caveats.

First, getting folks to objectively agree in some abstract way about the transcendent value of the humanity and/or moral status of the prenatal child— while not unimportant—will not get us where we need to go. I’ve been struck by stories from both pro-life sidewalk counselors and pro-abortion escorts that more often than we might think the woman going to get an abortion identifies as pro-life. Stories from Shout Your Abortion indicate that some women reconcile their abortion with the fact that the fetus is a baby with objective moral status. Probably the most influential pro-choice argument ever made—the “violinist” argument made by Judith Jarvis Thompson in 1971— at least tries to presume that that fetus is a baby with objective moral status.

Economic, social, familial, and other kinds of desperation push women and girls to have abortions—even when they know the individual being killed, expelled, sent back to heaven, etc., is a baby with objective moral status. To the extent they have any argument or explanation in defense of their action, they think of abortion as more like a refusal to help someone with their body, or (for prolifers) necessary to address such a dramatic/emergent situation that is somehow different now that they are in it. They could be facing marginalization by their family and other social circles. They could be facing the prospect of having to tell their spouse of their infidelity. They could be facing the loss of their job and/or their academic program, both of which might be necessary to care for children already born. The partner with whom they hooked-up in a casual way may (perhaps because of desperation on his end) implicitly or directly threaten her limb or even her life if she does not have the abortion.

Laws protecting prenatal justice are absolutely essential, not just because they protect babies (the number one reason to pass such laws), but also because they often protect women from the social expectation that they will have abortions in difficult circumstances. To be clear, however (and especially in the age of abortion-pill-by-mail proliferation), even if we are successful in getting laws protecting prenatal justice, we will still have lots and lots of illegal abortion. Especially from women in these desperate circumstances who will have relatively easy access to mail-order abortion pills.

So, in changing hearts and minds, we need to address the desperate circumstances which lead to so many abortions. We need to support and protect pregnant girls and women at work and school. We need to help build stronger and healthier families and marriages. We need to address the fact that the number one killer of pregnant and postpartum women and girls is homicide—and that intimate partner violence correlates strongly with abortion. We need to emphasize that the overwhelming majority (over 9 in 10) of women do not regret it down the road after being denied an abortion.

And we need to do more than write these facts down in an opinion piece and hope that the right people see it. Instead, we need to get much, much better at story-telling—especially when it comes to social media, podcasts, and other new media. We need to put serious resources into this storytelling, doing it well, and pitching it to the right people who can help amplify it. This means taking time to form the right relationships.

Of course, this is often easier said than done. Our opponents have far more resources: access to journalists, access to capital/donors, communications infrastructure, governmental support, and more. And, post-Dobbs, these deeply unfair circumstances have become dramatically exacerbated. I was visiting Montana recently and met with prolifers there who estimated that on their recent abortion ballot measure they were outspent 100 to 1 (including by out of state and even international folks) and had few friendly voices in the local public discourse. They lost badly, but they never had a real chance. This basic story could be told in many other states as well.

We need a long-term plan to change hearts and minds by building better ways to tell our (much better) stories. We need to build trust with gatekeepers of our public discourse, something that will just take time. Vice President JD Vance has said in multiple contexts that this rebuilding of trust takes priority; without this, we simply cannot change hearts and minds.

We need to build trust with regard to so many claims! That we have the science on our side and our opponents (largely) do not. That we care for women and our opponents (largely) do not. That we care about applying our principles (like nonviolence, human equality, and care for the most vulnerable) consistently and our opponents (largely) do not. That we have beautiful stories of hope and our opponents (largely) do not.

Any serious attempt to do this will involve massive, long-term projects that will still be in process long after I have departed this earth, so obviously we need to think beyond the short-term thinking of the next election cycle or even the next decade. What kinds of stories will our pro-life children be telling and how will they be heard? That’s the key question for us to be thinking about right now. And, to get a bit meta here, perhaps we need to think of ourselves as Moses in this story. We may be able to help lead prolifers through the desert of our current situation to the promised land. But we may not be the ones to enter it.

—Charles C. Camosy is a professor of medical humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine.

 

Cecily Routman:

“Choose life, that you and your children will live.”

The Jewish nation’s founding document is the Torah, a morally based legal contract between God and humankind. The terms are simple: Be a moral people, bring this moral way of life to the rest of the world, and God will protect and prosper humanity. Do otherwise, and expect trouble.

This is explained clearly in Deuteronomy 30:15-28:

Behold, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil, inasmuch as I command you this day to love the Lord, your God, to walk in His ways, and to observe His commandments, His statutes, and His ordinances, so that you will live and increase, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land to which you are coming to take possession of it. But if your heart deviates and you do not listen, and you will be drawn astray, and you will prostrate yourself to other deities and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you will surely perish, and that you will not live long days on the land, to which you are crossing the Jordan, to come and take possession thereof.

The moral law is rooted in the belief that all life is sacred, created by God, and worthy of protection—especially the life of the unborn. This belief is fixed in Pikuach Nefesh, a Jewish legal principle declaring that the preservation of human life overrides every other religious rule in Judaism.

America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, declared the right to life on July 4, 1776. Our Constitution reiterated this fundamental right upon ratification on March 4, 1789. John Adams emphasized the need for America to embrace moral standards when he wrote to the Massachusetts Militia on October 11, 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The right to life in America disappeared on January 22, 1973, when Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton granted a constitutional right to kill an unborn human baby until birth. Over 65 million unborn babies died horrible deaths during the following 50 years. On June 22, 2022, the Dobbs decision revoked Roe and Doe, returning abortion legislation concerning the right to kill innocent humans in the womb to the individual states. Many states have passed laws or voted for constitutional amendments that allow abortion homicide, sometimes up to birth.

As reported by the Guttmacher Institute (GI), annual abortion numbers fell below 1 million in 2012. According to the GI’s Interactive Map: US Abortion Policies and Access After Roe, since the Dobbs decision, 12 states have banned abortion outright and three others now ban it after six weeks gestation. Despite these restrictions, because of successful political action in many states, interstate travel, and access to abortion pills, in 2023 the number of U.S. abortions once again topped 1 million.

We find ourselves in perilous times when human ideas rather than biblically based morals and ethics inform our attitudes, laws, and lifestyles. Since 1973, Americans have been deliberately taught that abortion is: a civil right; a requirement for financial equity; a solution to childhood poverty and abuse; a healthcare entitlement that’s good for women.

Many in our leadership class disregard or endorse this horrific human rights abuse. At every level of culture and government, injudicious judges, lawyers, activists, and politicians perpetuate a death culture. Even well-meaning policy makers lack the courage and moral clarity to stop this loss of life, this critical threat to our nation.

While legal abortion persists everywhere in America, national moral integrity eludes us. The right to life, the foundation of the American spirit, must guide policy and law. Without it, America’s future remains uncertain.

To get federal legislation passed that will end this great human rights tragedy, we need a renewed embrace of traditional American moral standards, reflected by a polled majority of voters who see the baby in the womb as an innocent human being who deserves the right to life under law. This majority must denounce torturing babies in the womb to death as morally wrong, dangerous for women, harmful to fathers, destructive to society, racist, genocidal, and evil.

Leading up to the midterm elections, pro-life advocates must collaborate on aggressive media campaigns that flood the entire country with ethical, intelligent, impactful images and messages. If morally centered religious and secular leaders follow suit, we can change how Americans vote on life.

On Flag Day 1954, President Eisenhower signed House Joint Resolution 243 that added “under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance.

Bipartisan support for this national spiritual infusion grew out of a need for reassurance from Heaven after the horrors of war and its aftermath. Politicians who opposed inserting these two words capitulated. President Eisenhower said:

Over the globe, mankind has been cruelly torn by violence and brutality and, by the millions, deadened in mind and soul by a materialistic philosophy of life. Man everywhere is appalled by the prospect of atomic war. In this somber setting, this law and its effects today have profound meaning. In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.

A growing number of Americans are waking up to the brutal reality of abortion death and its aftermath on families and communities. Now is the time to once again offer them the spiritual support they need to face the future. By protecting the life of human life in the womb, we can save America’s soul and her future.

—Cecily Routman is the President of the Jewish Pro-Life Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2007 to provide Jewish communities with Torah-based prolife education and healing after abortion.

 

David Mills:

I have three responses to the question the prompt asks about the way the pro-life movement should think about its work. What members of the movement should do, as in acts of kindness, is another question.

First, belief doesn’t mean practice when conditions don’t favor it, and conditions never did. Second, the pro-life movement assumed an ideologically convenient answer to why the current conditions didn’t favor it, and as a result chose to understand the problem moralistically and respond politically. Third, the moralistic understanding led inevitably to the convergence of the pro-life movement with rightist politics and the Republican party.

Always in Favor

First, the majority was always going to favor abortion to some extent. What people tell pollsters often differs from what they will do or support when the belief affects their own lives.

Our culture assumes that you must be able to enjoy sex as and when you want to. It’s ideally spontaneous and carefree, as natural and normal as eating, a recreation like any other. You may choose to limit your experience, as in choosing to enter a monogamous marriage, but you don’t have to.

That belief is so pervasive that many, perhaps most, overtly religious and morally conservative people hold an attenuated version. Look at old Evangelical books on sex, which taught that once you had the ring, you could enjoy your own God-approved bacchanal. Many Catholics think the same way, using a peculiar idea of the theology of the body.

Implicit in this idea of sex is the belief that the act should not bring consequences you don’t want, particularly disease and pregnancy. How can anyone truly enjoy sex if they have to worry about a baby? That belief requires available abortion.

When lots of people enjoy sex, some of them will become mothers and fathers when they don’t want to be. That makes abortion necessary. Hence the response to Dobbs.

The Unasked Question

Second, the pro-life movement did not ask deeply enough what creates this culture. The general conservative answer, held by most prolifers, was and is the loss of religion (sometimes secularized into a loss of “morals and manners” or “civilization”): that Americans have rejected God, lost belief in an objective morality, etc.

But that still leaves the question: Why did we lose religion, etc.? The mainstream pro-life movement didn’t recognize the question, much less answer it. The answer would have required a conclusion most prolifers did not want: that a large part of the reason was America’s economic culture and its supporting beliefs. Broadly put, American capitalism (to which mainstream prolifers couldn’t imagine themselves objecting) produced the culture of which abortion was an essential part.

For one thing, sex sells. A sexualized culture encourages consumption. (C.S. Lewis noted this in Mere Christianity.) Maximizing shareholder value justifies almost anything.

For another, the individualized idea of sexuality dissolved the binding ties and institutions that inhibited the most efficient and profitable operations of the market, most importantly the family. G.K. Chesterton pointed this out over 100 years ago in What’s Wrong With the World, as have scholars like Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation.

That would take another article to argue, but for evidence, look at how America’s major corporations immediately responded to Dobbs by spending money on helping their employees get abortions. That was a business decision, not an altruistic one. Pregnancy hurts the bottom line.

Prolifers didn’t recognize this, because the recognition conflicted with their ideological commitments, which ignored economics and elevated a moralistic understanding of human behavior. In the moralistic understanding, people choose to do wrong and they need to do better, but we know they’re not going to be better left on their own, so we must change the laws to force them to be better. To stop abortion, you just change the law.

At the same time, the Democratic party went all in for legal abortion without restrictions and began to insist on it as a human right, one that required government funding and protection so that everyone who wanted could exercise that right. The party—just as capitalist a party as the Republicans— turned away from economic issues to the lifestyle concerns of its increasingly elite constituencies.

The effect narrowed the pro-life movement to concern for the unborn. The movement later broadened its concern to the ill, disabled, and aged, and more recently to others like the sexually-trafficked. But in practice it’s still bound by its original focus and its original political commitments. A concern for universal human dignity, as articulated by the “whole life” movement, would have delivered the mainstream from its political captivity.

Political Capture

Third, this failure to recognize the economic source of the demand for legal abortion and the rejection of human dignity as the intellectual foundation and constriction of attention to the unborn, allowed—in fact invited—rightist political partisans to capture the official or mainstream pro-life movement. The Democrats’ movement to the other side made the division stark and permanent. These partisans, and the Republican party, used pro-life fervor to bolster other causes and to elect Republicans who had no real commitment to ending legal abortion. That includes Donald Trump, as he recently made clear.

A movement led by people ideologically and politically enmeshed with a bigger movement of people and institutions who did not believe the same things about human dignity was never going to succeed in fundamentally changing a culture in which sex was understood as it is in ours, and what legal victories it won would prove to be partial and impermanent.

Given that reality, I can understand the hope for a deep national conversion to a belief in a transcendent morality, but it seems to me a counsel of despair, because we won’t get it. We won’t eliminate poverty by hoping people become more generous or prevent domestic violence by hoping people learn anger management skills.

The question is what to do now, in the society we have. That requires undoing the errors of the past, particularly recognizing the disastrous failure to understand the source of the cultural support for abortion, founding the movement on a “whole life” belief in human dignity, and breaking with the Republican party.

—David Mills is Associate Editorial Page Editor at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

 

W. Ross Blackburn:

When my son heard the symposium topic, he suggested a one-word response: “Duh.” Though a bit flip, he is right. Let me suggest three reasons, in order of importance, why the pro-life movement must appeal to God.

First, secular reasoning has proven to be a dead end. It is not difficult to see why. Apart from God, it is impossible to make a case for morality, for in saying something is immoral, the question inevitably arises, “According to whom?” The appeal to rights (which both sides engage in) also goes nowhere: What rights? Whose rights? Who says? If there is no God, Dostoyevsky famously observed, everything is permitted. We are left with “might makes right.” Which is why abortion has become so politicized: Apart from God, we turn to government to force compliance upon others. This is not to say politics is irrelevant, only that it is insufficient.

What we don’t hear, in our political world, are words like these of William Wilberforce:

Policy . . . is not my principle, and I am not ashamed to say it. There is a principle above everything that is political; and when I reflect on the command which says, “Thou shalt do no murder,” believing the authority to be divine, how can I dare to set up any reasonings of my own against it? And . . . when we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God. The nature and all the circumstances of this [slave] trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance—we cannot evade—it is now an object placed before us—we cannot pass it; we may spurn it, we may kick it out of the way, but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it. . . .

Speech in the House of Commons, May 12, 1789

Wilberforce spoke against slavery, but his argument also applies to abortion. He understood that policy was not enough to end slavery. He did not just argue that slavery was wrong; he warned that God would judge the nation. More powerful than politics, he insisted, was the witness of the church.

Let true Christians then, with becoming earnestness, strive in all things to recommend their profession, and to put to silence the vain scoffs of ignorant objectors. Let them boldly assert the cause of Christ in an age when so many, who bear the name of Christians, are ashamed of Him: and let them consider as devolved on Them the important duty of suspending for a while the fall of their country, and, perhaps, of performing a still more extensive service to society at large; not by busy interference in politics, in which it cannot but be confessed there is much uncertainty; but rather by that sure and radical benefit of restoring the influence of Religion, and of raising the standard of morality.

The second reason why secular reasoning is inadequate is because it sacrifices beauty and wonder. By artificially reducing abortion to a rights issue, we sideline other matters that bear upon it—particularly sex. Consider our cultural obsession with sexual consent. Do an internet search on “sexual consent,” and you will find a mind-numbing number of suggestions and rules concerning what constitutes consent in our sex-saturated culture. On the other hand, listen to John Milton in Paradise Lost as he imagines Adam first gazing upon Eve in Eden. Bear with the old spelling—it’s worth it:

Under his forming hands a Creature grew,

Manlike, but different sex, so lovly faire,

That what seemd fair in all the World, seemd now Mean, or in her summ’d up, in her containd

And in her looks, which from that time infus’d Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,

And into all things from her Aire inspir’d The spirit of love and amorous delight…

Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her Eye, In every gesture dignitie and love.

I overjoyd could not forbear aloud.

This turn hath made amends; thou hast fulfill’d Thy words, Creator bounteous and benigne, Giver of all things faire, but fairest this

Of all thy gifts, nor enviest. I now see

Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man Extracted; for this cause he shall forgoe Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere;

And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soule. (Book 8, lines 470-499)

Adam beholds Eve—her eyes, the grace in her steps, the dignity in her gestures. As love awakens in him, he is overwhelmed, forever ruined for life without her. But he need not fear, for God himself presents her to him, a gift from his generous hand. Vulnerable and dependent, Adam is yet made complete in the one-flesh union of marriage. This wondrous gift we have exchanged for condoms, consent, and role playing in sex-ed classes—our birthright for a bowl of pottage. Our impoverished culture will not be won to sexual sanity (to say nothing of sexual delight) by enforcing a regimen of rights and consent, but rather by embracing a vision of the wondrous gift of male and female in marriage. Then boundaries around sex and procreation will make sense, as we trust God who gave them for our good.

Finally, and most importantly, we must appeal to God because our world is abortion-weary and burdened. Over 65 million children have been slain in America and tens of millions of women wounded in the half century since Roe. And every wounded woman stands in a circle of complicity, joined by the baby’s father, grandparents, friends, and/or any others—clinic workers, politicians who promote abortion, church members—who either encouraged her to destroy her child or remained silent. Conservatively, well over one hundred million people in the U.S. alone are burdened in one way or another by the sin of abortion. No wonder it is intractable—to look at abortion honestly forces us to acknowledge what we would rather deny, what we cannot take back.

Yet God forgives sinners. The world needs to know that God forgives the sin of abortion specifically. Abortion isn’t an academic or political debate— it’s not a debate at all. Those involved with slaying a child must support abortion; otherwise their burden is crushing. They will do so until they know there is a place—really, a Person—where they can turn and be received. Christ, the Lamb of God who bears the sin of abortion (John 1:29), bids the weary and heavy-laden to come to Him (Matthew 11:28), where we can face our sin honestly. At this point, it is not enough to cite “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” if by so doing we obscure Christ. For God offers forgiveness, and therefore healing and peace, in Christ. “Shout Your Abortion” isn’t a cry of peace, but rather the self-justifying cry of those who know of no other way to find peace.

Abortion has always been a religious matter. To insist that abortion is necessary to ensure economic and social “benefits” which are threatened by children is to incite child-sacrifice. What else should we call killing children so we may live as we wish? This is how far we have fallen, how deeply lost and disordered our culture has become. Our recovery, then, will not come from outlawing abortion, but from repentance—a cultural reorientation to Christ. The abolition of abortion, should it happen, will be the fruit of a renewed people, a people who forgive because we have been forgiven, who love because we have been loved, and therefore who do good because we are becoming good. If the failure of Dobbs to change abortion culture causes the pro-life movement to reorient toward Christ, then Dobbs will have been a resounding success.

—Rev. W. Ross Blackburn has been a pastor in the Anglican Church in North America for 20 years. He has a PhD (Old Testament) from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and has written articles for the Human Life Review and Touchstone, as well as educational materials for Anglicans for Life.