This summer will see the four-year anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. There, the court consigned the “egregiously wrong” Roe v. Wade to the dustbin of history. This outcome was a big win for the pro-life movement, and was worthy of celebration.
Five decades prior, the court erred by removing the issue of abortion from the political arena, ruling that the Constitution required abortion to be legal everywhere and always. This forced pro-lifers to wage a fifty-year struggle to finally get the Supreme Court to recognize the error of its ways. Few political movements have needed to be so resilient in order to succeed against such intractable forces.
But, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, Dobbs was not the end. It was not even the beginning of the end. Rather, it was the end of the beginning. The victory in the five-decade war we had been waging to overturn Roe was not going to settle the political question; it was going to be the starting gun for the real work of inculcating a social and legal culture of life into a populace that had become used to taking the lives of the unborn as a matter of course.
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The good news is that Dobbs lets us take our arguments to the people, not to judges who are bound to follow a decision that “wrongly removed an issue from the people and the democratic process.” Now the arguments are in state legislatures and ballot initiatives. And the pro-life movement must adapt to meet this moment. It is no longer enough to argue that the Constitution does not recognize a right to abortion. We need to convince our fellow citizens that it is wrong for it to be allowed anywhere.
Too many people have lived for too long thinking that abortion was a morally legitimate option. State after state, even nominally conservative ones, have liberalized their abortion laws after Dobbs. Those who think that Dobbs ended the fight, and that the Supreme Court had declared abortion illegal, might not realize the horrors that are still occurring. And it’s not just in states where abortion’s champions have been charging ahead.
The Biden administration, under the guise of protecting women’s health and the cover of COVID-19 policies, loosened the restrictions around the “abortion pill” mifepristone. This made it easier to access this toxic drug. These rules were relaxed so much that abortion by pill is now the most common form of abortion. And so, while Planned Parenthood clinics may be closing across the country thanks to Congress finally making it so that pro-lifers do not need to fund those human abattoirs, abortion itself in the United States is on the rise.
What abortion proponents do not discuss, and what the Biden administration ignored when it liberalized access to medical abortion, is that those drugs can present serious health risks for the mother, also. Relaxing the medical supervision and oversight of patients taking these drugs puts women’s health at risk. The Biden administration made it so that a woman could obtain those drugs without seeing a doctor.
Removing that requirement introduces medical complications but also allows for abuse and misuse. We have seen situations where vulnerable women have been coerced, tricked, or secretly given these drugs without their consent. And we know that sex traffickers use these abortion drugs as part of the abuse and exploitation. The “women’s rights” argument quickly falls apart when these realities are understood.
As a pediatric neurosurgeon, I have operated on babies in the womb. Unborn children are living human beings, made in God’s own image and likeness. Each and every human being is blessed with the spark of life from our Creator from the moment of conception.
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Scientific advances continue to strengthen the pro-life case and remove the ambiguity around human development. The more science reveals about human development, the clearer our moral responsibilities become. Valuing life is counter-cultural to the “me”-focused society we live in today. But there is still hope!
Our Founders recognized that the right to life is the most fundamental right. They gave us a government designed to protect “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But the government lost its way and created out of whole cloth a “right” to take the one thing that is most important. We must reassert the primacy of life. The fight against abortion is still an uphill battle. But in 2026, we renew a focus to bolster our movement that honors the sanctity of life.
