The Failure and Future of the Pro-life Movement

Derek Suszko

Derek Suszko is Associate Editor for The St. Croix Review.

June 24, 2022 — the day that the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — was a moment of jubilation for the defenders of unborn life. The end of 50 years of strenuous effort to reverse the injustice (and unconstitutionality) of Roe v. Wade was a catharsis for all who made the lives of voiceless infants their cause. The ecstasy of the prayers and the invocations of joy outside the steps of the Supreme Court on that day were a sight to behold. It was the exhalation of a great task surmounted, and stirred the hope that the scourge of mass abortion might one day be eradicated from the American homeland. There would be backlash, no doubt, to the termination of a judicial decree that held the country hostage for five decades and impacted so many societal currents; but for the first time in decades many pro-lifers believed American social trends were tending towards righteousness. Amid the elation of the verdict, who could castigate the champions of unborn life for their hopefulness? In the two years that followed, the hope would turn to dismay.

In the months and years after that day, the cruel reality of the abortion issue in America began to emerge. Expected failures to pass restrictive access amendments in Vermont and California accompanied surprising failures in Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana. The midterm elections of 2022 animated pro-abortion voters and blunted the anticipated “red wave” that many expected as a repudiation of Biden’s cadaverous presidency. In 2024, the Republican Party struck the “defense of life” clause from the official platform. In the elections of 2024, stringently pro-abortion amendments went on the ballot in Florida, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. The amendments, enshrining universal abortion access as a constitutional right, passed in seven of those states. The amendments failed outright only in deep red Nebraska and South Dakota. In Florida, a plurality of voters voted in favor of passage, but the amendment failed to pass because of a 60 percent threshold requirement. Both president-elect Donald Trump and vice-president-elect J.D. Vance went on record with squeamish, non-committal statements on the abortion question during the campaign. The shift signifies a desire to moderate the resolutely anti-abortion position characteristic of the last fifty years of the Republican Party. It is not hard to see why the party is moving away from its previously rigorous pro-life stance. Even in the short term since Dobbs, the electoral evidence demonstrates a major lag in pro-life support compared to Republican strength on issues of immigration, economy, and government reform. The election of 2024 exposed abortion as a point of issue divergence for a large number of Republican voters. Trump won the state of Missouri by 18 points while the pro-abort amendment passed by two. In Arizona, a similar amendment passed by 24 points and Trump carried the state. And so, in the aftermath of the November 5 election, the fate of the pro-life movement is murky. A strict pro-life position faces extinction within the Republican Party as a major emerging political coalition seeks to shed its one remaining issue handicap. Given the undeniable success of the Republican appeal in 2024, it appears that the national cause for unborn life will be sacrificed at the altar of expediency.

The current pro-abortion tilt of the American electorate involves many causes: The social realities of our times, the consequences of the triumph of feminism, the decline in religiosity among the population, the effect of technology on lifestyle trends. But none of these causes can conceal the essential failure of the pro-life movement. It is true that the movement was dealt a bad hand historically, tasked with fighting a cultural development riding the high tide of 20th century social progressivism. Unlike the movement to abolish slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries, the cause of unborn life cannot claim to be a moral crusade combating a longstanding injustice. Rather, it is a reactionary movement attempting to defend long-accepted morality from the insurgency of modern social imperatives. Abortion is so entangled with the cultural triumph of feminism that it is an unnerving question how much a modern society can reduce it without challenging feminist social customs that now seem fundamental and irreversible.¹ Even conceding all these factors, the pro-life movement must be judged a failure, despite overturning Roe after half a century of effort. The number of abortions in the United States since 1973 is appalling, and though the Dobbs decision led to an inevitable national reduction, the rates are rising and actually peaking in many blue states.² What is clear after fifty years of pro-life advocacy is that the movement not only failed to curb the scope of abortion in the country but also signally failed to win over the hearts and minds of the American people. This failure was compounded by social and technological upheavals, but the truth is that the pro-life movement was not anywhere near as effective as it might have been. Now after the defeat of Roe, the pro-life movement is on the precipice of political irrelevance. If the movement is to have hope of future impact in national politics, it is necessary to understand how it erred.

Critique of the Movement

After the Roe verdict of 1973, pro-life advocates faced a culture battle defined by the unique contours of American politics and composition. The Diktat given by the Court, mandating universal access to abortion as a matter of 14th Amendment right, meant that the political fault lines would divide on the constitutional question of abortion. From the outset, this prescribed a legalistic focus for the pro-life movement. But there was another, even more pivotal, distinguishing factor for the issue in the United States. In secular Europe, the abortion question was mostly handled legislatively and compromise on restriction was found past various stages of pregnancy. The United States was (and remains) by comparison a profoundly religious nation. Religious conservatives were adamant that life was sacrosanct, and any suggestion of a compromise position allowing for abortion at earlier stages of pregnancy was tantamount to an abandonment of God’s law. Since religious voters were so fundamental to the Republican voting coalition, the party had to officially reflect the stance of the Religious Right. This led to many decades of fatuous dissonance on the issue between the reality (abortion was universally available) and the public discourse (pettifogging on the negligible exceptions for “rape and incest”). The imposition of Roe was a hidden advantage to Republican politicians lukewarm to a strong pro-life position. They could “punt” on the issue by declaring Roe constitutionally questionable, and pledge themselves to the slow work of its repeal. The duality of two-party politics lent the perception that the country was evenly divided on the issue, even though the pro-abort victory was absolute as long as Roe was law. The consequence of these factors was that they obscured how unpopular a strict pro-life position really was among the broader electorate.

Confronted by the unique political conditions in the country, the American pro-life movement had many strategic options at its disposal. Advocates chose to invest heavily in a slow-burn “judicial strategy”: Work to elect “pro-life” candidates who would install originalist judges to overturn Roe on a constitutional basis. Trusting in the soundness of these efforts, the movement as a whole ventured a tepid and defensive strategy in the rhetoric of public appeal. Advocates strenuously avoided criticism of women and doctors, and were generally content to euphemistically reinforce the sacredness of “life”. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the unilateral victory of Roe put the pro-aborts on the defensive, and it is riveting to read the lamenting, cautious rhetoric of prominent Democrats during those decades. Pro-lifers declined to counter with aggressive messaging when the pro-abort position was most vulnerable to refutation. As the years went on, the sacredness of abortion became a rallying point for the Left, and the Democrats emboldened their messaging. The Democrat slogans went from “safe, legal, and rare” to “shout your abortion” as the issue became a major animator of their voting base.³ Throughout these developments, the pro-life movement made no real alteration in the intensity of their messaging. If anything, the movement attempted to curb overly assertive pronouncements for fear of violent incitement. Fifty years and 63 million abortions later, Roe was overturned, and in the wake of Dobbs, the pro-lifers learned just how badly they had bungled the messaging war.

It never had to be this way. From the beginning, it was clear that the circumspect strategies adopted by pro-life advocacy groups were flawed. The gradual radicalization of the pro-abort position in the public discourse was the most glaring evidence for the failure of the pro-life movement to sway younger generations in its favor. The stance of moral indignation against the evil of abortion might have worked if the movement was willing to publicly illustrate the immense barbarity of the practice with relentless aggression. Think of a Lee Atwater-style campaign that vividly produced the horrific images of abortion in television commercials and deployed nakedly violent language in condemnation. But for the most part, the movement balked at such overt portrayal, likely out of fear of fomenting retributive violence or spawning a John Brown. Instead, most pro-lifers were content to play the euphemism game that worked to the advantage of the pro-aborts. When pro-aborts insisted on “pro-choice” and “reproductive rights,” the pro-lifers stumbled into their framing with slogans like “Choose Life” and emphasis on “life affirming” women’s care. These pitfalls reinforced the impression that abortion was a legitimate “choice” and that abortion was essentially a matter of “women’s health care” and had something to do with “reproduction.” The “ultrasound laws” passed in many red states, requiring women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound prior to an operation, represented another feeble attempt to persuade by reactive means. Curiously, the halting public rhetoric of the pro-life movement never gave way to an effective pragmatic appeal. The pro-life movement might have supplemented its moral arguments with explicit social policy suggestions. Almost all elective abortions are based on two criteria: Economic anxiety and diminishment in social status. Pro-lifers could have advocated for family welfare policies that gave financial incentives to marriage and child-bearing. But none of the major advocacy groups did anything of the kind. This negligence was not entirely the fault of pro-life advocates. The necessity of alliance with the anti-government politics of Reaganite conservatism meant that pro-life organizations could not endorse middle class and family welfare without being out of step with the dominant politics of the American Right. The consequence of these deficiencies was contradictory and confused messaging. Abortion was a heinous offense, comparable to murder, but there were no murderers since impressionable women were victims too. When candidate Trump, in 2016, casually suggested that women who undergo abortions should be criminally accountable (a natural conclusion, if abortion is truly murder) it was pro-lifers who forcefully rebuked him. The contradiction exposed a fundamental frivolousness in the pro-life position. Clearly, pro-lifers did think there was a qualitative difference between murder and abortion. Otherwise why wouldn’t they insist on criminal penalties for mothers, and more obviously, doctors performing the operations? The pro-life position was hampered by discrepancies between its moral rhetoric and lack of policy prescription, and it was far too easy for opponents to cast it as hyperbolical and dissembling.

Much of the failure of pro-life messaging was due to its gynocratic focus. Desiring to avoid the bad optics of men denouncing abortion, the major advocacy groups all elected to place women at the forefront of their public appeals and strategic initiatives. This was not inherently a bad maneuver, but it had the effect of softening the activities of the movement into a tepid conformity. Advocates were unwilling to take rhetorical risks or venture bold policy proposals. The movement never had the courage to condemn aborting women or doctors or focus dispassionately on the logic of why women undergo abortions in the first place. If anything, the movement aided the pro-aborts in fostering an essentially sympathetic view of aborting mothers as victims. Rather than seeking to forestall abortions by dealing with the problems leading up to a woman’s choice to abort, the movement championed women who regretted their abortions after the fact. This lent the impression that the movement was less concerned with reducing abortions as it was with assuaging the guilt of aborting mothers. A noble pursuit, no doubt, but a futile one in the absence of any pragmatic strategies of prevention. The movement relied heavily on its moral rhetoric but neglected to make the rhetoric forceful enough to induce any real discomfort. And because the movement was so trammeled up in an essentially religious view of the issue, it never confronted why so many women in the U.S. consider abortion access a social necessity.

This refusal to grapple with the pragmatic elements underlying the abortion issue was most damning of all. To many pro-lifers, brought up in strong religious environments, it was incredible that so many Americans could casually accept the mass dismemberment of unborn infants. But to many non-religious voters, the pro-lifers were self-righteous scolds unwilling to view the issue through any lens but moral dogmatism. Again, this effect might have been offset by a real commitment to publicly exposing the horrors of abortion in vivid form. But pro-lifers were terrified of a broad backlash that would jeopardize their careful quest to repeal Roe, and never matched the message to the morals. At the most cynical extreme, the entire pro-life movement was akin to a grift, an enormous gobbler of scarce right-wing political funding in the service of a totally deficient messaging strategy. When Roe was finally overturned after decades of languid judicial activism, pro-lifers found that abortion restriction was anathema at the ballot box. Roe was gone, but the pro-life cause was increasingly marginalized in the public opinion. Many Republican politicians concluded that the work was done, Roe was overturned, the voters of the states would decide the issue, and let the chips fall where they may. Surely a sad and unacceptable legacy for all who lament the continuing evil and barbarism of abortion. But where does the pro-life movement go from here? Must it give up its commitment to national illegalization? The resurrection of a strong pro-life cause is possible, but it demands a new and honest look at the hard truths of the abortion issue in the U.S.

The Persistence of Abortion

An examination of the reasons for the popularity of both abortion and its availability of access in America is perturbing to many pro-lifers, especially pro-life women. This is because it opens the question how many of the social “gains” of feminism must be peeled back for a strong anti-abortion position to have real resonance for future generations. The most basic admission is that legal abortion persists because women want it. Advocates point out with fairness that many (perhaps even most) elective abortions involve pressure or intimidation from a male figure. But the truth is that if only men voted, abortion would be restricted across the developed world. Abortion is a women’s issue, and it is women voters who insist on abortion access as a fundamental feature of a modern society. To many women in America, the availability of abortion is a social necessity. There are multiple nuances embedded in this fact that reveal the true factors underlying the issue. From 1973 to 2021, abortions for unmarried women in America occurred at about 10 times the rate of abortions for married women. This means that unmarried women underwent over 90 percent of legal abortions in that time. Naturally, unmarried women represent a huge plurality faction of the electorate for Democrats, and a good portion of them vote Democrat because of abortion.⁴ There is a large discrepancy in the class status of unmarried women who actually undergo abortions. Unmarried women who get abortions are disproportionately lower-class, but intriguingly, support for abortion access among unmarried women skews middle-class and wealthy. This means that there is a huge swath of unmarried women voters propping up the electoral support for widespread abortion access who are unlikely to ever have abortions themselves. What explains this?

The answer is that abortion is a status safeguard. Far more than any abstract concept of freedom or bodily autonomy, women support abortion access because it is their status preserver of last resort. Women of higher social class are far more sensitive to matters of social standing, and while most of them will have the wherewithal to never require an abortion, they adamantly insist on its availability. This is because there are few factors more destructive to a woman’s social status and the quality of her marital prospects than bearing a child out of wedlock. A “single mother” bears the social stigma of unsophistication and low class. Single mothers have diminished prospects for securing a worthy long-term mate and a far greater burden in pursuing a professional career. The ubiquity of birth control ought to lessen these concerns, but it is a testament to just how pervasive the fear of an unwanted child is for status-haunted women that abortion access must be preserved at all costs as a “last resort.” It is obvious why these assertions never come up in public discussions of abortion. The dread of single motherhood is somewhat muted for lower-class women, among whom the incidence is rampant. But among the “striver class,” professional middle- and upper-class women, single motherhood is a calamity. It is impolite for there to be any public suggestion of stigma for unmarried mothers, and so the truth of the matter goes unspoken. Men are major purveyors of this prejudice, and desirable men do not tend to marry women with children out of wedlock (divorcees with children from previous wedlock are another matter). But unmarried mothers also face social stigma, perhaps more personally impressing, from other women. Additionally, many young women wish to leverage their sexuality to attain a certain lifestyle or pursue progressively higher-value mate choices. Any conception of children is a hindrance to these efforts if the eventual goal is marriage with a man of high social status. The truth is that unmarried women’s support for abortion is not primarily an idealistic assertion of “autonomy” but a status protector for the attainment of sexual imperatives.

The usual religious retort here is that men and women should refrain from premarital sexual relations, but this is valiantly naive in light of social reality. The average age of marriage is being constantly pushed back, both out of economic expediency and out of individual qualms of both men and women. Many modern women have no remnant of religious perspectives on sexuality, and will freely engage in nonmarital sex for the purposes of securing a high-value mate, a high-end lifestyle, or even enjoyment. Since so many unmarried women are sexually available to certain men, most men demand sexual access as a prerequisite to marriage. Only the most religious or deprived men will persist in a premarital relationship without sexual access, and the result is that even unwilling women find themselves pressured to engage in premarital sex. Amid this culture of rampant sexuality, women’s “safeguard” of abortion prevents the catastrophic possibility of single motherhood and slippage in status and long-term mate value. Pro-lifers can bemoan the decline in religiosity that has contributed to these conditions, but moral admonishment, absent any pragmatic remedies, is futile to effect a real reversal. All of the cultural, legal, and social trends of the last half century worked to foster these conditions, and it is quaint to think they can persist and not produce the same outcomes. Feminists insisted that all women must work, and help to erect preferential conditions to insure that women retain advantages over men in education and white-collar employment. Abortion was made universally available and partially destigmatized, and divorce made an easy matter. The disreputable results of all these societal upheavals are myriad: A comically redundant white-collar and public workforce, a shortage of equal-status men available for marriage to “educated” women, a collapse in the birth and marriage rates, a squandering of the phases of maximum fertility, a trivialization of marital union, the development of an anti-natal youth culture with devastating psychological consequences, wage stagnation, and supreme social distrust between the sexes. The abortion issue does not exist in a vacuum. It is implicated in all of these societal trends, and much of the messaging failure of the pre-Dobbs pro-life movement was its unwillingness to view the issue holistically. Without strategies to deal with these problems by policy means, the pro-life movement remains an echo chamber of moral dogmatism, persuasive only to the persuaded. A pro-life movement of the future must confront the issue in the comprehensive manner it requires.

The Future of Unborn Life

It is instructive for pro-lifers to consider the history of the movement to abolish slavery in the United States and observe how it gradually seeped its perspective into national politics. The abolitionists of the first half of the 19th century were at least as morally dogmatic on the slavery issue as the major pro-life organizations are on abortion. Their calls for wholesale emancipation were regarded as absurdly unfeasible, not only by pro-slavery factions, but also by anti-slavery sympathizers. The idea of general emancipation was so extreme in the first five decades of the 19th century that the abolitionists essentially had no influence in national politics, even in areas where they were numerous enough to represent the dominant perspective. Emancipation was out of the question as a practical matter, and the moral absolutism of the abolitionists condemned many anti-slavery politicians (among them, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts) as insufficiently pure in a cause that had no viable means to advance itself. The situation changed after the annexation of territory in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. The slavery issue shifted from being a question of emancipation to one of expansion, and with the shift it moved into the arena of practical policy. The anti-slavery Republican Party emerged in 1854 not as an abolitionist party but as one opposed to the expansion of slavery into new territories. The abolitionists continued their moral crusade, but, more broadly, anti-slavery factions now had a means to combat the issue by policy means. The southern states could not endure even peripheral encroachment on the validity of the slave institution, and seceded upon the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860. During the Civil War, the extremities of mass hostility led to the erection of a new paradigm in national politics and the total fulfillment of the abolitionist cause.

There are many reasons why the story of the abolition movement is relevant to the pro-life cause, even granting that abortion will likely never be a spearhead issue for civil severance and conflict. The overthrow of Roe meant that the stranglehold of legal abortion was lifted from those states that passed major bans, thus becoming the first “life” states analogous to the “free” states that outlawed slavery. The difficulty for the pro-life movement is that it advocates a dogmatic moral position applicable even in states where such a moral position is extremely unpopular. This is akin to the demand of abolitionists that slaves be freed in the South where such an action was laughable to almost the whole voting population. In both cases, the victims of the social institution (slaves and unborn children) retained no say in policies destructive to themselves. The abolitionists made very little headway among the broader population as moral scolds untethered from actionable policy prescriptions. It was only when they tied the anti-slavery effort to the pragmatic question of restricting the expansion of slavery that they began to secure an influence in national politics. The lesson for the cause of unborn life is clear. If the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement is abolition of abortion, it must begin its work by strongly advocating policies that reduce the frequency of abortion. Clamoring for a national abortion ban on the basis of moral imperatives that the majority of voters do not yet share is courting a disastrous irrelevancy. The movement has not won the hearts and minds of the people, and continued moral cudgeling will not alter the social factors that foster the persistence of abortion. This is not to say that the pro-life movement should abandon its moral stance of the essential evil of abortion. Rather, the movement must confront the aforesaid reasons why women demand abortion, and advance pragmatic policy initiatives that seek to solve them. Without such a realignment in focus, the cause of unborn life is a reed shaken in the wind.

The first step for the pro-life movement is emancipation from the old conservatism. Reaganite conservatism was (and is) one of the most worthless political movements in history, a dead weight that infects all it touches with terminal torpor. Rarely has a (nominally successful) political movement simultaneously neglected its supporters and voluntarily ceded so much power and consolidation to its enemies. The pre-Dobbs pro-life movement was welded to this impotent conservatism for the entirety of its history. This fact explains a good deal of the ineffectiveness of pro-life messaging. It was hard for many secular voters to embrace the moral arguments of pro-lifers when they were associated with a political coalition that viciously disparaged all manner of social welfare. The pro-abort insistence that pro-lifers only cared about babies in the womb and not after they were born was a potent rejoinder to voters without strong religious perspectives. In the wake of Dobbs, there remain many pro-lifers who refuse to countenance any acquiescence to the social reality of American sex culture, and offer only lamentation at the sexual immorality and godlessness of the population. This is not rhetoric designed to move unpersuaded minds, and a cynic would argue that it is only self-righteous posturing wholly unconcerned with the pragmatic problem of abortion reduction. True pro-lifers would instead preoccupy themselves with policy reforms that would save unborn babies from destruction.

Part of the problem is that a sizable number of pro-life advocates actually wish to preserve the social conditions that foster a culture of mass abortion. It is likely that if fewer fertile women were employed, and more of them married younger, electoral support for abortion access would decline. But the sad truth is that many pro-life advocates would deprecate such assertions because they too are infected with feminist paradigms that view such perspectives as jeopardizing “women’s liberation.” So long as the dominant cultural perspective is that women should establish professional careers and then form families, abortion access will remain a social necessity because women are not going to relinquish the cherished safeguard of their mate value. And since individual economic stability takes ever longer to firmly establish (ironically caused in part by white collar over-employment), many professional women will not even begin to seriously consider marriage and children until past the age of 30. This is biologically disjunctive, and the notion that both men and women will persist in celibacy throughout their 20s is absurd. If social policy could help cause a reversal, whereby women were given incentives to marry younger and have children earlier, the perceived social necessity of abortion access would decline. This would not necessarily preclude women’s pursuit of professional ambitions, but it would be unsurprising if a sizable number of mothers opted to forgo a career if they were continuously incentivized to bear children. This is because a significant number of women enter professional careers for the primary purpose of securing high-value mates.⁵

It should seem from this analysis that strong pro-lifers would rank among the most enthusiastic supporters of family welfare policies and emerging ideas of middle-class populism. Curiously, the opposite conditions are currently observable within the conservative coalition. Most representatives of the established pro-life organizations openly disdain the forward-thinking incentive policies of family welfare offered by J. D. Vance and others, and resolutely abide by the anti-government principles of the “old guard” Reaganite conservatism. This is baffling intransigence, and can only be explained by a refusal or inability to see the vast social entanglements underlying the abortion question. The emotional delicacy of abortion partially explains the difficulty for strong pro-lifers in adjusting their paradigms around the issue. To accept the sinful, sexually unhindered society as inevitable comes too close to surrendering the idea of curing it. But believers should never underestimate the effect of tangible alleviation on renewals of the spirit. There are millions of young people in America who want children desperately and despair that they will never have them. Cultural and economic conditions deter them from pursuing a godly life of family devotion, but in their hearts they desire such a life. Practical aid to incentivize responsible (i.e. marital) child-bearing might trigger a cultural counter-revolution and turn many young Americans to familial life, even among the non-religious. This is not an abandonment of the moral injunctions of the Gospel, but an amplification. How many times did Jesus Himself inspire repentance by practical aid? Such help is often the seed to the blossoms of faith.

The decisive Republican victory in the election of 2024 represents a genuine political realignment, and offers the first real opportunity for the “conservative coalition” to advance a populist platform. Explication of the exact details of populist policy prescription are beyond the scope of this essay. The nuances are complex and must be resolved in the public discourse. But there is little doubt that the ideas of family populism will continue to consolidate appeal among the electorate, especially if they are advanced by Vance in the new administration. The duty of pro-life organizations is to embrace, and not resist, this realignment in American politics. It is clear that the forced alliance with anti-welfare conservatism was a great handicap for the pro-life movement, and greatly constricted its moral authority. As the American Right as a whole begins to emerge from the defective philosophies of the old conservatism, the pro-life movement has a chance to renew itself by embracing the populist tide. Such a reorientation would have a reverberating effect on both the “conservative coalition” and national politics as a whole. The moral prestige of the pro-life movement among religious voters would convince many of them to abandon the obsolete perspectives of Cold War conservatism and adopt the new politics of middle class and family revivalism. Perhaps some pro-lifers remain firm believers in the ideas of Reaganite conservatism, and regard its ideas of government and economy as superseding the abortion issue. They ought to review the record of the last 40 years of Republican politics and judge whether its dominant political philosophy has been successful on any level. The move towards populism is sound not only for general reasons of electability and economic necessity but also in the interests of unborn life. No religious believer should condemn pragmatic arguments for abortion reduction as insufficiently sanctified. Morality is a great driver of human life, but the truth is that all moral outlooks retain an underlying rationality. The southern states could not accept the immorality of the slave institution because it was essential to their economic prosperity. Was it a coincidence that abortion was considered a despicable crime for nearly 2,000 years of Christian culture in the West and suddenly gained widespread acceptance when fertile women began to join Western workforces en masse? The true nature of good and evil may be eternal and inviolable, but societies always tend to adjust paradigms of right and wrong based on the rational realities of life. Abortion was not so universally horrific when it became an expedient to protect the social status of a large enough segment of the population. The great moral causes of history succeed only when they address the underlying rationalities that prevent a population from viewing an issue in moral terms.⁶ This is the grave lesson for the pro-life movement. No longer can it neglect the broader cultural and societal questions in favor of mere moral asseveration. Despite the darkness of the present time, the dearest hopes of the champions of unborn life may yet prevail. If they do, it will be because the movement confronted the realities of the culture, and succeeded in re-directing social incentives in the cause of righteous truth.

Notes

1. 1.Foremost among these, the near universal employment of women of child-bearing age. The idea that all women should work is so pervasive in modern developed societies that even most religious or traditional women are employed, either full-time or sporadically. Besides the obvious economic incentives of employment, many women retain possibilities for work as a “safeguard” against potential family disintegration.
2. 2.For perspective, the 63 million legal abortions in the United States from 1973-2021 matches the high-end estimates for total global casualties in World War II.
3. 3.This trend culminated in the grotesque presence of an “abortion truck” outside the 2024 Democrat Convention in Chicago. This gesture attests more than any other to the pro-abort success at widespread destigmatization. It would have been obscene to most Democrats even in the first decade of the 21st century.
4. 4.While this is impossible to assert definitively, one need only look at the “issue polls” that routinely show voters who rate “abortion” as the most important issue skew overwhelmingly Democrat.
5. 5.The statement is controversial because of dominant ideologies but the rates of economically comfortable professional women who leave the workforce after marriage and childbirth is highly suggestive.
6. 6.The Civil War, of course, precluded resolution of the slave issue by political means. Legal slavery was only terminated by superior violent force. The rational perspective of the Southerners was not erroneous — the antebellum southern states had the highest GDP per capita in the nation. The postbellum southern states had the lowest, a condition that has persisted to the present day.     *