Roe v. Wade turns 49 on January 22. Each year on the anniversary of Roe, hundreds of thousands of Pro-Life Americans flock to Washington D.C. to protest and march en masse. Thousands more, just as determined and impassioned, congregate at state capitols to do the same. This weekend they will gather with Roe on the brink, the Texas Heartbeat Act flourishing and spreading, and optimism never appearing more justified.
Nearly a half-century of unfettered legal abortion should have bred pessimism in the movement working to abolish abortion. More than 70 million aborted children is a grim statistic. Yet, during this period of deafening darkness, there were whispers of promise: a new supposedly Pro-Life Supreme Court justice, and then another; a court case destined to cast Roe from this earth, and then another; a novel law that would obliterate legal abortion, and then many, many more. However, one after another, each expectation turned sour.
Abortion became further entrenched in our law, politics, and America. Institutions committed to the continued and profitable destruction of preborn Life burgeoned. One of two major political parties has organized in absolute support of that enterprise. Defenses of abortion grew more explicit, less apprehensive, and came from progressively more powerful and influential voices. Pro-Life victories—when and where they occurred—were restricted in scope or isolated in geography. All the while, the core of Roe remained unblemished, and the abortion venture went largely unphased.
Now 2022, perhaps, is the inflection point. Capturing much of the Pro-Life movement’s consciousness is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which directly attacks the major premises of Roe. That the Supreme Court even agreed to hear the case was an omen of legal abortion’s structural fragility: commonsense, ubiquitously popular laws like Mississippi’s 15-week prohibition on elective abortion cannot coexist with Roe. An unelected and unaccountable branch of government cannot frustrate moral consensus permanently.
Supreme Court opinions are not guarantees, so predicting how the justices will rule is a foolish endeavor. But if the Pro-Life movement were to envision a Supreme Court ruling reversing Roe, the oral argument last month went precisely how one might expect that argument to have gone.
Neither the conservative justices nor even the progressives pretended Roe was anything but a shameless exercise of unbridled judicial power. The progressives instead mustered flimsy justifications for Roe as a critical, albeit erroneous, precedent of the Court. The conservatives, who comprise the majority, sounded skeptical and primed to reject abortion as a constitutional right and Roe as a precedent. This summer, those justices may finally jettison Roe and send elective abortion as a policy matter back to the political branches of government—or, at the very least, weaken Roe and authorize states to pass more robust Pro-Life legislation.
But we don’t have to wait until the justices release an opinion in Dobbs to save lives and propel the movement forward.
Last year, Texas passed the Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans elective abortions on preborn children with detectible heartbeats. This law, which relies solely on private lawsuits for enforcement, has befuddled both judges and the abortion industry. Judges have labored to find a coherent rationale for enjoining enforcement of the Texas Heartbeat Act, in part because the abortion industry has struggled to provide one—an effect of the law’s innovative design. Sparing perhaps as many as 100 Texas children from the injustice of elective abortion each day, the Texas Heartbeat Act is the strongest Pro-Life bill to take effect since Roe. Nearly 5 months after taking effect, the law continues to save lives.
Bridging the gap for preborn Texans to a potential victory in Dobbs is only one reason why the Texas Heartbeat Act has been an unrivaled success. Other states are now seeking to emulate Texas’ triumph, pursuing bills that can similarly avoid bad rulings from judges sympathetic to the abortion industry. Thus far, Alabama, Florida, Missouri, and Ohio are working to model the Texas Heartbeat Act. More will follow.
Even though these successes and reasons for hope are new, the Pro-Life movement’s determination has never wavered.
Legislative and judicial setbacks haven’t stopped us. Blizzards haven’t stopped us. The pandemic won’t stop us. Come what may, the Pro-Life movement will be marching again next year, 50 years after Roe. Only now can we reasonably expect that to be not a protest of remembrance but a show of jubilation. And our work will continue.