https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/dobbs-turns-one/One year ago tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court corrected its most grievous error of the 20th century.
For nearly five decades, the Court had forced states to abide by Roe v. Wade’s outrageous and obvious lie that the U.S. Constitution forbids almost any law that protects human beings from lethal violence in the womb. On June 24, 2022, the Dobbs majority got it right when it told the truth about Roe and restored the right of the American people and their duly elected representatives to protect the lives of all people.
The first birthday of Dobbs is something to celebrate not only because it ended Roe’s grotesque distortion of our Constitution but also because the laws that have taken effect after Dobbs have very likely already saved tens of thousands of human lives.
Analysts will debate the precise number of lives saved by post-Dobbs laws, and it is true that even the best estimates amount to a small decrease in the percentage of all abortions committed annually. But what shouldn’t be lost in any statistical discussion is that we are talking about unique human beings endowed by their creator with the unalienable right to life. Each life deliberately destroyed is an incalculable loss. Each life saved is priceless.
Elective abortion remains the most far-reaching human-rights abuse of our time, but there has been moral progress over the last year. Twenty-three states now have laws to protect the lives of unborn children at six weeks of pregnancy, when a baby’s heartbeat is detectable, or earlier, but several of these laws are being held up in state court. Two states, North Carolina and Nebraska, recently limited elective abortion to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Those twelve-week limits were the most protective laws each legislature could pass, owing to a supermajority consensus needed for enactment, and pro-life legislators prudently acted on the belief that it was better to save some lives than none.
Most blue states, however, continue either explicitly or effectively to allow abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, for any reason. A new “all trimester” abortion clinic opened in Maryland in 2022. The Atlantic recently profiled Warren Hern, a late-term abortionist in Colorado who makes a living by killing premature infants in the womb “who are 22, 25, even 30 weeks along.” Most of the time, Hern admitted, the viable babies he stabs in the heart with a poison-filled syringe are physically healthy, and so are their mothers. He even admitted that he once performed an abortion simply because the baby was a girl.
The greatest threat to pro-life progress now comes from congressional Democrats, who almost unanimously seek to impose Colorado’s policy of elective abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy in all 50 states. Every congressional Democrat except one in the House and one in the Senate has voted for a federal abortion bill that would create a national right to abort a baby until birth whenever a midwife, nurse, or doctor asserts that the continuation of the pregnancy poses a risk to the pregnant woman’s mental or emotional health. That same abortion bill, the deceptively named Women’s Health Protection Act, guts conscience laws that protect health-care workers, strikes down parental-consent abortion laws, and even protects sex-selective abortion. Senate Democrats are just a seat away from having the votes to abolish the filibuster, pass their radical abortion bill, and provide unlimited taxpayer funding of elective abortion — a policy that would cause tens of thousands more abortions to be performed each year.
To protect the pro-life progress made over the past year, pro-life voters would be wise to back a presidential nominee who helps rather than hurts Republicans down-ballot — a presidential candidate who wouldn’t likely spark a backlash that hands Democrats unified control of government in 2024 or 2028.
Pro-life elected officials themselves have much work to do. They need to explain to voters the extremist Democratic agenda on abortion. They need to recognize when prudent legislative compromises are necessary. And they must ensure that all hospitals act on the proper understanding that every pro-life law protects the life of the mother and no abortion law requires waiting to intervene until a mother’s condition becomes dire.
When pro-life Americans look at real but tenuous gains achieved over the past year and the daunting task ahead of them, their mood might be less than celebratory. But on the first anniversary of Dobbs, it is worth taking a moment to be thankful for the tens of thousands of human beings who will get to see their own first birthday, and many more, because of it.
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