It has been one year since Dobbs vs Jackson, the landmark Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe vs Wade. Very controversial, this decision did not outlaw abortion in the united states, but rather ceded power back to the states. Since then, a number of states have passed laws restricting or outright banning abortion on demand, Consequentially, other states have taken steps to legalize it all the way to birth.
Estimates vary on just how many babies have been saved in the past year. It’s hard to estimate, because the states with restrictive laws have naturally had less abortions, but others have had more, due to “abortion tourism”. Various pro-life sites have put it at 32,000 or nearly 25,000. Either way, it’s clear there have been tens of thousands of less abortions in the last year.
This may not last, of course. The Democrat Party, after taking abortion on demand for granted for all these decades, may now be emboldened to finally codify into law at a more permissive rate than ever before. It could well be that the ultimate outcome is a net negative for God’s smallest of children.
The political consequences are also hard to parse. The United States congress is now bipartisan. There is a presidential election next year. President Biden, the Catholic incumbent, has taken a hard pro-choice line. The Republican hopefuls have various degrees of pro-life stances. Former President Trump has declared rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to be “too harsh”, attacking him from the left. We’ll see how that plays in the primaries. Some have said this will hurt the Republican party. Many supposedly pro-life Republicans lamented Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed 15-week-ban, post-heartbeat, introduced shortly before the midterms, showing their hand has valuing winning elections over saving lives. Well, if you have to sanction that kind of infanticide to stay in office, you don’t deserve to win. What are conservatives trying to conserve anyway?
Of course, the sad fact is that no law can really solve the problem entirely. I don’t mean that ridiculous canard “You can’t legislate morality”, as if every law every written wasn’t an attempt to do just that. Rather, even accepting the simple fact of human biogenesis and the morality that follows, it’s also true that this is a unique homicide, one in which the victim has no identity, is not known to exist, and prosecuting the woman is unthinkable. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, after his pro-life conversion, admitted he fabricated the tens of thousands of women who had supposedly died in back-alley abortions. Likewise, despite the alarmism and scare tactics of the Democrats and the pro-choice lobby, the death of prospective mothers hasn’t occured,
At any rate, whatever laws are passed next restricting or legalizing abortion, whatever hearts and minds are changed, the babies that have already been born already will not be retroactively aborted. Children like Kingsley Halbert will live on. One person can change the world. What could 20,000 do?