Pro-life after Dobbs

PAUL BUTLER, HOST:  It’s the 24th day of June 2023.

Glad to have you along for this edition of The World and Everything in It: Weekend. Good morning, I’m Paul Butler.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: And I’m Anna Johansen Brown. Next up: One year without Roe.

Overturning Roe v Wade was a milestone pro-lifers had been working towards for decades. Yet when it finally fell, it left a slew of different and maybe tougher battles to fight in states across the country.

BUTLER: What brought things to this point, and how is the pro-life movement faring post-Roe? Here is WORLD’s reporter on the Life beat, Leah Savas.

LEAH SAVAS, REPORTER: At 10:10 a.m. Eastern on Friday, June twenty-fourth, 2022, court-watchers across the country clicked refresh on the U.S. Supreme Court website and saw it … the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

BROADCASTER: The Supreme Court has ruled on the future of abortion rights in the United States…in a 6 to 3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court has ruled that states can decide whether abortion should be legal or illegal… “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled.”

It meant the end of an era for the pro-life movement. Here’s Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, speaking at this year’s March for Life in Washington D.C.

LYNN FITCH: to God be the glory…for nearly 50 years you have marched to proclaim the fundamental dignity of women, of their children and of life itself…

The Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 invalidated existing state laws protecting unborn babies from abortion. Back then, Roe surprised even abortion supporters… including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

RUTH BADER GINSBURG: I thought Roe v Wade was an easy case and the Supreme Court could have held that extreme law unconstitutional and put down its pen. Intead, the court wrote an opinion that made every abortion restriction in the country illegal in one fell swoop. And that was not the way the court ordinarily operates.

That galvanized a nation-wide movement to fight for the unborn. At first, pro-lifers set their focus on federal legislation. When those efforts stalled, they shifted focus to the Supreme Court and state-level legislation to challenge Roe.

Dobbs was the stone that eventually took down Goliath. The case stemmed from a 2018 Mississippi law protecting babies from abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mississippi’s only abortion business sued the state’s top health official Thomas Dobbs over the law. In December 2021, the case ended up before the Supreme Court.

SCOTT G. STEWART: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: Roe versus Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey haunt our country. They have no basis in the Constitution. They have no home in our history or traditions.

Conservative Justices like Brett Kavanaugh saw merit in that argument.

BRETT KAVANAUGH: The Constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice on the question of abortion, but leaves the issue to the people of the states or perhaps Congress to resolve in the democratic process.

Meanwhile, liberal Justices like Sonia Sotomayor worried that reversing Roe v. Wade would harm the reputation of the court.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR: The newest ban that Mississippi has put in place…Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

But the first stench the court had to survive came a month before the ruling. On May 2, Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. Protestors swarmed the court…

ABORTION ACTIVISTS: We will not go back, we will not go back, we will not go back…

CBS: The security fence surrounding the Supreme Court is all you need to see to understand the gravity of what unfolded in Washington this past week.

But the court held firm. The final Dobbs decision ended nationwide protection of abortion, allowing elected officials to pass laws protecting unborn babies.

Pro-lifers across the country celebrated… but not everyone was pleased. Some believe the court missed their chance to protect the right to life of unborn babies in the Dobbs ruling. Here’s audio from an abortion abolitionist podcast.

ABOLITIONIST: We're not going to celebrate or praise a court that says states you have the right to go murder your Children if your people decide that.

Pro-life leaders like Lila Rose and Kristan Hawkins celebrated the decision but warned that the fight wasn’t over.

LILA ROSE: We will not have true justice until our nation acknowledges that under our Constitution, every American born or preborn has an inherent right to life protected by our Constitution’s 14th amendment.

KRISTAN HAWKINS:  I'm here to ask you to commit right now to finish what we started and finally abolish abortion throughout America.

Pro-lifers agree that Roe needed to go. But they don’t all agree on the best strategy to protect unborn babies from abortion. And that lack of consensus likely contributed to disappointing losses at the ballot box following Dobbs. The first test of voters came in Kansas on August 2nd.

Fifty-nine percentof Kansans surprised the country by voting against a pro-life amendment that would have clarified state lawmakers can pass laws to protect unborn life.

GUARDIAN: Coalition of voters across the political spectrum came together today and voted no, they voted no to protect their neighbors…And really, you know, demonstrated our free state rights here in Kansas are alive.

Five more states including Michigan and Kentucky considered abortion-related ballot measures that November. All resulted in pro-life losses.

Overall, Republicans fell short of a majority in the Senate and took only a slim majority in the House. Some politicians…including Donald Trump…blamed the abortion issue for the disappointing results. And some pro-lifers took it as a warning that most Americans are simply OK with abortion.

So with Roe gone, and new challenges on the table, what kinds of policies should voters and lawmakers pursue to protect the unborn?

Some favor state by state legislation and constitutional amendments. Others say the country needs a federal law protecting unborn life, in order to save unborn babies in deep blue states like New York and California. Last September, Senator Lindsay Graham put forward a bill to protect unborn babies from abortion nationwide after 15 weeks. Some pro-life groups see that as the next best incremental step to protecting unborn babies in pro-abortion states.

But to others, that kind of bill seems meaningless. Around 95 percent of abortions happen before 15 weeks gestation… meaning that almost 450 thousand babies will continue to die each year, even under this kind of federal law.

So here we are today, one year after Dobbs. The pro-life movement is still celebrating a monumental victory, but the work of ending abortion in America is far from over.

For WORLD, I’m Leah Savas.

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