The fight is still to end abortion
Timothy P. Carney
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For 50 years, we pro-lifers fought to overturn Roe v. Wade. After many defeats in court, we finally won.
In the past 18 months, we have fought to pass laws protecting the unborn and defeat laws protecting abortion. Every time the voters have had a say, we lost.
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In Ohio on Election Day, voters approved an extreme pro-abortion constitutional amendment, and it wasn’t even close. In Virginia, Democrats ran on protecting abortion, and they took full control of the state legislature. These follow losses in Kansas and Kentucky.
Defending abortion seems to be a winning issue, and restricting abortion seems to be a losing issue.
There are, of course, caveats to this grim account.
The abortion defenders benefit from a friendly media that lets them get away with lies — for instance, Virginia Democrats claimed consistently that Republicans would ban all abortion, while Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin touted a ban that would only affect pregnancies in the second and third trimester.
Maybe in the long run, pro-lifers can more accurately frame the debate, and so win more fights.
Also, Donald Trump is an aggravating factor in all of this. Ever since winning in 2016, Trump has dragged down Republicans up and down the ticket in most states, even some conservative ones. The pro-choice slander — that pro-lifers do not care about babies but only want to control women’s bodies — gets some credence when the pro-life party is run by a serial philanderer with a professed fondness for grabbing women’s private parts.
Maybe the pro-life cause will flourish electorally when Trump is gone.
But these maybes might just be wishful thinking. That’s why the familiar cries have returned, telling Republicans and conservatives to surrender on abortion.
Yes these losses in the post-Roe abortion battles mean pro-lifers should retrench for now. But we still need to win the war. Outlawing abortions is only one battle in the broader war. The objective of the war is ending abortion.
To be sure, a just society would outlaw abortion except in the most extreme cases — abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent and vulnerable human, and such an injustice should be proscribed by law.
At the same time, outlawing a thing is often not the most effective way to combat that thing, and sometimes it is counterproductive.
Even if conservative states do succeed in passing abortion bans, and even if Congress somehow protected all unborn babies in the second and third trimesters, the fight to end abortion would still mostly involve changing our culture, and winning hearts and minds.
“Change hearts and minds” is almost a cliche in pro-life circles, and so it can seem that those words lack content or that they signal surrender. But conservatives — and most pro-lifers are conservatives — should intuitively grasp the truths behind this line. Culture is prior to politics, and a culture’s values and beliefs will determine its actions.
And nearly every aspect of winning hearts and minds is a conservative cause: We need to reduce the “demand” for abortion; we need to support pregnant mothers by becoming a more family-friendly culture; we need to restore appreciation of the truth that sex, love, marriage, and family are naturally linked; and we need to resurrect the unpopular virtue of mercy that properly underlies charity.
Some in the Republican establishment will try to shut up the pro-lifers. That’s a mistake. We need a fierce pro-life movement now more than ever. The bad results, however, suggest that pro-lifers need to play defense and recalibrate their counteroffensive.
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The proper battlefield for the pro-life cause in the coming months or maybe years may not be a debate about the legality of abortion. It may be about reducing the demand for abortions. We need to protect and support crisis pregnancy centers. We need to craft a broad pro-family agenda that supports families with everything from better sidewalks and playgrounds to increasing housing supply.
We’ve lost battles, and we need to admit that. But it is intolerable to consider surrendering in the war because that would mean accepting the slaughter of innocent babies. We need to regroup, and fight on the battlefield of conscience, culture, and love.