For 50 years, the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) was a point of interest for a lot of abortion opponents. That goal was completed in 2022 when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision returned abortion law to the states.
Chaos and confusion have followed the top of Roe as much as victory and celebration. Pro-lifers like me had been marching for all times and calling for the overturn of Roe for therefore long. The movement was hardly prepared for what would occur next—what’s now happening—in 50 different states with 50 different political contexts; legal histories; levels of medical preparedness, access, and expertise; and overall dispositions toward the needs of girls and unborn children.
The reality of a post-Dobbs world is that there isn’t a longer one big political goal. There are 50 or 500 or 5,000 smaller goals. Pro-lifers face unprecedented opportunities to advertise a whole-life, pro-life ethic through a wide range of policies—medical, financial, social, and academic—that may encourage those making decisions around abortion to decide on life and help communities support those lives.
Creating a more pro-life America post-Roe would require work on many, many fronts, particularly for the reason that percentage of people that find abortion morally acceptable recently increased, and abortions are literally on the rise. Changing hearts and minds is crucial work. But changing laws can assist too.
States now have the chance to pass their very own abortion-related laws. This patchwork approach makes it imperative that legislators developing laws to guard unborn children and their moms are well-informed. They must hunt down the expertise of health care providers, agency heads, and others whose knowledge and experience can ensure sound, compassionate, holistic policies.
A “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to abortion law unmoored from the best-available medical practices and technology doesn’t uphold a pro-life ethic, and pro-life laws have to be greater than mere posturing when the lives of each mother and child are at stake. The stakes are too high to experiment with exciting but ultimately impractical—or dangerous—laws that puts lives at unnecessary risk.
Beyond medical law, financial policies can determine life-and-death decisions around abortion. Indeed, three in 4 abortions happen amongst low-income families, and girls who select abortion consistently cite financial limitations as a serious reason for his or her alternative. This month, a various group of pro-life leaders—including Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America, Roland C. Warren of Care Net, Kathryn Jean Lopez from the National Review Institute, and Leah Libresco Sargeant of Other Feminisms—asked Congress to expand the kid tax credit in light of the Dobbs ruling.
“We understand,” they wrote in a letter sent to congressional leaders on January 10, “that the work of upholding the sanctity and dignity of life is removed from over.” Pointing to long-standing bipartisan agreement around expanding this tax credit, the letter argues that such a shift is a straightforward, politically viable technique to decrease the abortion rate. “Many moms face significant health and financial challenges throughout pregnancy and into the early years of raising a toddler,” it says. “We can, and may, do more as a nation to supply for his or her needs.”
This type of proposal shouldn’t be only right; it’s also prudent. “In a post-Roe landscape,” as Patrick Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center argued last 12 months, “it is important that abortion opponents arise in favor of the health and wellbeing of moms and the babies they carry—for political reasons, along with moral ones.” Brown proposed a federal provision that might extend postnatal Medicaid coverage from 60 days to at least one 12 months, ensuring all babies would have medical coverage throughout infancy.
Many pro-life leaders and organizations are coalescing around similarly practical projects in municipal, state, and federal policy. These efforts, which may bolster each social and financial support networks that effect abortion-related decisions, include:
- Increasing resources for childcare, ensuring that faith-based childcare providers could be included in these expanded programs, and including resources for in-home care by parents or relatives
- Meeting health care needs for pregnant moms, recent parents, and youngsters through existing programs, including community health care centers and pregnancy resource centers
- Supporting adoption and adoptive parents, including expansion of the adoption tax credit, together with strengthening the foster care system through expanded partnerships that assist each foster and biological families
- Creating a national online resource to supply information to pregnant and recent moms and to attach them to existing federal, state, and native resources
- Strengthening connections and collaborations between governmental resources and programs and faith-based resources and programs that serve pregnant women, children, and families
Some of those projects are already in motion. For example, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch launched a web site, Mississippi Access to Maternal Assistance (MAMA), which directs women and families to each private and non-private resources of their state. “Whether you’re a mother-to-be or a mother of three, MAMA can quickly connect you to health care services, infant essentials, clothing, food, shelter, financial assistance, child care, jobs, education, legal aid, adoption services and more,” the location reads. “Remember, Mama, you possibly can do that!”
An internet site seems, perhaps, so easy—maybe even unimaginative. But its link to resources is usually a bridge between life and death, or a minimum of a steppingstone to the next quality of life. There will likely be many such small steps toward our smaller goals within the post-Roe era. The ways to assist pregnant women in need are only as limited as our imaginations. And after pregnancy, care is required into the “fourth trimester,” because probably the most urgent needs of a recent mother and recent child proceed into the weeks immediately following birth.
At the federal level, one possible route is the Providing for Life Act, which Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson introduced last 12 months. The bill “charts the policy course for a culture of life in America,” Hinson said, by expanding the kid tax credit, providing tax breaks to working families, enhancing paid parental leave, establishing a federal clearing-house of resources available to pregnant moms, expanding WIC eligibility for postpartum women, and enacting multi-tiered child support reform, amongst other policy reforms. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio published a memo with similar ideas on this month’s anniversary of Roe.
Life-affirming polices on the local scale also go well beyond abortion law. For example, where I live, one hospital recently announced it should temporarily suspend obstetric services due to a national ob-gyn shortage. Expectant moms who would normally deliver their babies at this facility will now should travel to a neighboring hospital.
This shortage of ob-gyns is an ongoing problem—not a results of the Dobbs decision, however the consequence of a number of things developing over the past decade. Now, some expectant and recent moms are going without the essential health services needed for labor, delivery, and postpartum care. Addressing the causes of this shortage is only one task in a panoramic range of labor we’d like to do to create a more pro-life world, and Christian universities with medical schools should seize this chance to proactively train and credential the following generation of ob-gyns.
In all this work, remember: The baby whose life we save within the womb can also be a baby who deserves to be delivered safely and lovingly into the world, and that has never been reducible to outlawing abortion or overturning Roe.
Now Roe is dead. But there may be far more we will and must do to be sure babies live.
Karen Swallow Prior, writer of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, is a columnist at Religion News Service and writes frequently on Substack at The Priory.
