Get ready for another 50-year abortion fight

Following the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which happily overturned Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement went on to suffer significant defeats in six different ballot initiatives to regulate abortion — even in deep red states like Kansas and Montana.

On Tuesday, Ohio became the seventh such loss. There, by a margin of 53% to 46%, voters approved an amendment to the state’s constitution establishing a right to abortion.

If the first six post-Dobbs losses weren’t clear enough, surely the seventh conveys the message clearly: The pro-life movement has an abortion problem.

And the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one.

How we ended up here is fairly easily diagnosed. The pro-life movement understandably spent the past 50 years primarily making the case against Roe, which involved focusing most of its efforts on embracing tactics and messaging that would be most effective at overturning it, but not necessarily for life — at least, not enough.

We believed it was enough to “abort” Roe and that by doing so, the problem of abortion would essentially solve itself. But we didn’t build alternative structures to welcome those who had found refuge under Casey’s wings, nor did we think deeply enough about what lessons we would offer to replace the ones that Roe had hammered into our souls.

In short, we assumed the pre-Roe American people were still there, dormant, waiting to be freed from Roe’s oppressive yoke if we could just marshal the courage to jettison that awful Supreme Court ruling. What we learned instead was that, broadly speaking, Americans are quite fond of their chains, despite the fact that they’re forged from the blood of innocent children and a myopic desire for a higher GDP.

Like the ancient Israelites, we prefer the slavery under which we were raised to the hard freedom of the desert.

One of the most consistent refrains in Western political philosophy is that the law acts as a teacher, instructing us in what is good and bad, noble and ignoble, just and unjust. Since 1973, Roe’s lessons — lessons that Casey reinforced and entrenched a generation later — have sunk deep into the public’s soul and corrupted its moral sense about precisely what we owe the unborn.

For nearly half a century, the American people were taught that the baby in the womb is not human, a clump of cells, of no essential worth, and that the shallow, not to mention fleeting and ill-considered, desires of adults trump their sacred duties to their progeny.

Of course, throwing off Roe didn’t instantaneously reset the country’s moral compass to postwar America. The rot has done its work. We are a different country now.

Think of Roe like a termite infestation. Dobbs was like an exterminator, and the American soul is the building in which they wage war. Unfortunately, the exterminator arrived too late to remove the termites and leave a healthy, intact building. The damage has been done.

Because of the extent of the damage, the task now is to rebuild the entire house, from the foundations upward. That challenge will occupy the next two generations or more.