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-and-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.
This article was originally published as part of a symposium in the Human Life Review. The full symposium may be read here.
