For nearly fifty years, the pro-life movement had the advantage of a single, clarifying obstacle. Roe v. Wade was the elephant in the room. It prevented states from passing any meaningful legislation to protect unborn children, and in doing so it gave the movement one target, one strategy, and one measure of success. Everything pointed toward the day the decision would fall.
Dobbs did not make abortion illegal. It did not extend a single protection to a single unborn child.
That day came, and it did not do what most pro-life Americans assume it did. Dobbs did not make abortion illegal. It did not extend a single protection to a single unborn child. What it did was remove a barrier — it pressed a reset button back to 1973 and returned the question to the states. One monolithic issue became fifty separate ones, and the strategy that had been built for the first was suddenly the wrong instrument for the second.
The movement has been slow to recognize this. There are more abortions in the United States now than there were before Dobbs. Continuing to strategize the way the movement did under Roe is not merely inefficient; it is fruitless. What the moment requires is a pivot.
Losing on Friendly Ground
The clearest evidence that something has gone wrong is where the losses are occurring. Abortion has been written into the state constitutions of Ohio, Missouri, Montana, and Kentucky — states no one would describe as hostile terrain. Florida was spared only because its ballot measures require a sixty percent threshold; a simple majority of Floridians voted to enshrine abortion as a fundamental right.
There is an uncomfortable implication in this. If a state has legal abortion today, it is because the people of that state want it. That is a sobering fact, but it is also an opening. Public opinion is not a fixed feature of the landscape. It can be persuaded, and persuasion is something the pro-life movement has historically been good at — when it remembers to do it.
The other side has been better at it lately. Abortion advocates rarely discuss the issue honestly, and their linguistic strategy is disciplined: abortion is health care, abortion is normal, abortion is a right. They are also tactically shrewd. In several states, abortion initiatives were placed on the ballot alongside other left-leaning measures — in one case, marijuana legalization — specifically to drive sympathetic voters to the polls.
Above all, they campaign on fear. Voters were told that without a constitutional right to abortion, a woman with an ectopic pregnancy would die untreated, or that a woman miscarrying would be left to develop sepsis because no physician would deliver her dead child. The claim is testable, and it fails the test. Years after Dobbs, no physician in any state where abortion is illegal has been successfully prosecuted for treating an ectopic pregnancy. No statute anywhere denies a woman emergency medical care.
But the accuracy of the claim is not the point. The fear works, and it does not only work on the other side’s voters. It works on marginal pro-life voters, on Christians who oppose abortion but recoil at the thought of women being harmed. Any strategy that ignores this is a strategy that loses. Prudence in how the movement advances its legislation is not a compromise of principle; it is a condition of principle succeeding.
The Work Begins in the Church
No state, city, or nation is holier than its churches. If people cannot be helped to understand what an unborn child is and what abortion does to that child, no legislative victory will hold. A great many Christians are sentimentally pro-life — they feel the wrongness of abortion — but are not grounded in it philosophically or biblically. Sentiment does not survive a well-funded fear campaign. Conviction does.
Sentiment does not survive a well-funded fear campaign. Conviction does.
This work has to start in the church, because it will not start anywhere else. But the way the movement has approached pastors needs to change. For decades the message to clergy was essentially an accusation: your silence is killing children, and you have blood on your hands. Whatever its rhetorical force, it has not worked, and it misjudges the men it is aimed at.
Clergy in the West are the most messaged-at group of pastors in human history. Every reel, every channel, every feed features a subject-matter expert explaining to their congregations that the pastor has it wrong. The pastor, meanwhile, is expected to preach at a high level every Sunday, to be a moral philosopher capable of assessing every film and song and headline, to be a competent counselor, and — as the occasion demands — a biologist, a geologist, and an astrophysicist. Handing such a man one more item for his to-do list is not a strategy.
The deeper problem is formation. Many pastors attended a Christian high school where abortion was never discussed, went on to a Christian college where it was never discussed, and then to a seminary where bioethics went unmentioned. They arrive in congregations where people ask why they do not preach on abortion, and they have no answer — not because they are indifferent, but because no one ever taught them. They have also spent fifty years being told by the culture to stay in their lane: no uterus, no opinion.
Conditions were more favorable a generation ago, and even then the churches were largely silent. The movement had an unambiguously pro-life president in Ronald Reagan. It had pro-life advocates in both parties — Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore; Joe Biden once co-sponsored a human life amendment. The Catholic bishops spoke forcefully, and the Moral Majority organized in the pews. None of those tailwinds exist today. If clergy were underequipped then, the deficit now is far worse — and it will not be closed by guilt. It will be closed by training pastors to do what seminary should have done: make the scientific, moral, and biblical case for life from the pulpit.
The Trouble with “Equal Protection”
The most consequential strategic argument inside the movement concerns so-called equal protection bills — legislation that would prosecute women who obtain abortions as murderers. Such bills have been defeated in Tennessee and are pending elsewhere, and candidates running on the position have lost primaries in significant numbers. Their political viability is doubtful. The more important question is whether, if enacted, they would be good.
The term invites an obvious question: who, exactly, is being protected? The job of the pro-life movement is to rescue as many children as humanly possible from abortion. Measured against that standard, these bills would not protect all children, and they would place at grave risk children who can currently be saved.
Begin with enforcement. Mifepristone and misoprostol have uses beyond abortion and cannot be eliminated from circulation. Both metabolize so quickly that within hours they are effectively undetectable; the handful of studies that have identified them required extraordinarily expensive, precisely calibrated equipment and highly skilled technicians. Those who supply the drugs know this and coach their clients accordingly: if the abortion is incomplete, go to an emergency room and report a possible miscarriage. California has gone further, passing AB 240, which strips the prescribing physician, the pharmacy, and the patient from the labels of mailed abortion drugs. There will be no evidence to prosecute.
The logistics are equally unworkable. Enforcing such a law would require investigating miscarriages — an enormous number of which occur naturally every year — and subjecting grieving women who wanted their babies to criminal inquiry. No state will staff a miscarriage police force, and no state should.
The gravest cost, however, falls on children who are presently being saved. Once a surgical abortion begins it is virtually impossible to stop; that child is gone. The chemical abortion protocol, by contrast, has a gap in it. Mifepristone is taken first and misoprostol second, and in that interval a pregnancy center can intervene by flooding the woman’s system with progesterone. The research on abortion pill reversal shows that in 65 to 68 percent of cases, the life of the unborn child is saved. This is precisely why the industry has been working to compress the interval, which was once 24 to 48 hours, down to six or eight.
Now introduce an equal protection statute. Everyone who works at a pregnancy center is a mandated reporter, exactly as a school counselor is. A woman who has taken mifepristone — which by itself will cause an abortion in over 75 percent of cases — has, in the eyes of such a law, already acted with intent. If she regrets it and seeks reversal, she would be walking into a building where the staff are legally obligated to report her. She might save her child and go to prison for the attempt. The likelihood that any woman presents herself under those conditions is essentially zero — and the children who could have been saved will not be.
She might save her child and go to prison for the attempt.
There is a political cost as well. Equal protection advocates have handed the other side a boogeyman, and the coming advertisements write themselves: a sympathetic young woman facing prosecution for seeking what voters have been told is basic health care. Some states are already committed to abortion and some to life, but a great many remain undecided, and those are precisely the states such ads are built for. Should abortion advocates ever assemble thirty-eight states, a federal constitutional amendment would erase fifty years of work in an afternoon. And in any state that has already written abortion rights into its constitution, an equal protection bill is dead on arrival regardless.
Abolition, Premature and Permanent
Underneath the tactical objections lies a substitution. Equal protection advocates promise abolition; what they would actually deliver is criminalization. There is a real difference.
Equal protection advocates promise abolition; what they would actually deliver is criminalization.
A statute is not the whole of the law. Between the text on the page and the protection of a child stands the middle section of legal application — the district attorney who declines to charge, the judge who will not hear the case, the jury that will not convict. A law that cannot survive that passage dies standing up. Australia offers the cautionary case: it had, on paper, precisely the ban abolitionists say they want. It went unenforced for years, and when the political moment arrived it was discarded as a dead letter.
Worse, unenforceable laws breed lawlessness generally. Nearly everyone speeds, and nearly everyone knows why: the odds of being caught are low enough to make the risk worth taking. No one would speed if a state trooper followed them from driveway to parking space. Laws that carry no realistic prospect of enforcement teach citizens that law is theater — and in this case, the people distributing abortion drugs are already making the argument out loud, assuring women that detection is impossible and a claimed miscarriage is indistinguishable from a chemical abortion.
None of this is an argument against the goal. There should come a day when the deliberate killing of an unborn child is treated as any other unjust taking of human life is treated. The question is not whether abolition is right but what the movement leads with, and when. Permanent abolition and premature abolition are not the same project, and pursuing the second forecloses the first.
Where the Effort Belongs
The energy currently spent on unenforceable bills has an obvious better use. It belongs in prosecuting abortionists, in stopping the interstate shipment of abortion drugs, and in securing the right of pro-life states to enforce the laws their citizens have already passed. That last question is bound for the Supreme Court before long, and the principle at stake is straightforward: no state should hold a heckler’s veto over another state’s protections for unborn children.
Once life states and death states are genuinely distinct, the comparison becomes visible to ordinary people — what kind of culture takes root where the young are disposable, and what kind takes root where human beings are protected from conception to natural death. That contrast is the movement’s most persuasive argument, and it cannot be made until the laws are allowed to function.
The final pivot is the hardest, because it is not about legislation at all. Far too many Christians who are ideologically pro-life do nothing. Under Roe, inaction had a certain logic to it — nothing an individual did could overcome a federal constitutional right. That excuse is gone. Everyone can now do something effective, and the movement’s central task is to move a very large number of sympathetic people from inaction into action.
Dr. Marc Newman lays out this case at length in Pivot, which identifies five strategic pivots the movement must make — in language, in education, in how it legislates in pro-life states, in how it works within pro-abortion ones, and in moving ordinary people from inaction to action. It is the most timely strategic treatment of the post-Roe landscape currently available, and it belongs in the hands of anyone serious about the question.
The elephant has left the room. What remains is fifty states, a persuadable public, a church that has never been taught, and a great many children whose lives depend on whether the pro-life movement is willing to work smarter than it has.