Where the Pro-Life Movement Goes from Here

‘W ith every woman, for every child” — this is the theme of the 2024 March for Life, announced earlier this week by the organization’s president, Jeanne Mancini. The “theme reveal” event, hosted at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., highlighted the work of pregnancy-care centers and the individuals who make it possible. By focusing on how individuals, organizations, and states can care for mothers with an unplanned pregnancy, the 2024 theme offers a crucial next step to the pro-life movement post-Dobbs.

The first speaker at the event was Jean Marie Davis, executive director of Branches Pregnancy Resource Center in Vermont. Davis herself was a recipient of care there almost a decade ago, when she was in dire straits, with no hope, carrying every kind of burden imaginable. Davis had been sold to traffickers when she was only two years old. She had been abused, she had been trafficked, and she had persevered through addiction. By the time she stumbled into Branches, she was homeless and a few months pregnant. She was greeted by the gentle tones of Phyllis Phelps, who was then serving as the center’s director. She said Phelps was the first person in her life to ask her the simple question, “How can I help you?”

After that encounter with Phelps, Davis found new hope and a new life. After receiving a sonogram and hearing the heartbeat of her unborn child, Davis decided to keep her baby. (Her son, now nine years old, was sitting in the front of the auditorium during Davis’s talk, wearing a bowtie and a mischievous grin.) Through Branches, Davis was able to escape her past life of abuse and fear and build a new one for herself and her son. Branches connected Davis to shelter, food, clothing, counseling, maternal education, and, most importantly, the care of others.

Now, Davis runs the center herself, and offers women the same kind of help she received nearly a decade ago.

The pro-abortion movement seeks to label an unborn child as yet another of the many problems that women like Davis have faced. Phyllis Phelps was the first person in Davis’s life to tell her otherwise — to show her that she was worthy of love, worthy of care, worthy of motherhood. The Left paints pregnancy centers as cultish outposts, tentacles of a radical religious ideology that seeks to control and dominate women. In the words of Davis, she encourages anyone who holds such a belief to “come and see.” Her doors are open, and Branches hosts events for the public throughout the year.

The volunteers at these centers are just as desperate to help the women who come through the door as they are to help the unborn children in their wombs. These centers are almost solely run by women and staffed by women. Volunteers often travel long distances to provide sonograms, education, and counseling to the women who seek their help.

The theme of the 2024 March for Life is meant to counteract an argument often wielded by abortion advocates: the accusation that conservatives heartlessly ban abortion and then leave vulnerable women to fend for themselves.

The pro-life movement has never been only about passing legal restrictions on abortion. While overturning Roe v. Wade was the clear first step towards a world that affirms the dignity of life, it was just the first step, not the last. In Mancini’s words, the March for Life exists to “make abortion unthinkable.” Passing legal restrictions on abortion is of course important, but much more must be done to allow the unborn to come into this world and flourish.

Of course, on the legal side, the fight over such restrictions has shifted to the states in the wake of Dobbs. Throughout the theme-reveal event, there was no mention of upcoming state referenda on abortion or the recent losses in states such as Ohio. When I asked Mancini about this after the event, she took the long view:

We work for the day when abortion is unthinkable. . . . Overturning Roe took so many decades, and culture change takes a long time, so we are here for the long run to build a culture of life.

A big part of that building process now involves focusing in on grassroots state-level movements. The organization began a state march initiative in 2018. By the end of this year, it will have organized marches in 17 states, and it is on track to have marches in every state by 2030.

The new focus on states does not remove the need for national attention on the issue. As Mancini noted, “the national work is still critically important legislatively, but even more so culturally.”

As restrictions on abortion become law in states across the country, such legislation must be matched with real support for expecting mothers. There has long been a debate in the pro-life movement over whether the support should come from the state or from private organizations. All agree that the support should be there, but who is best fit to give it remains a question.

Whitney Lipscomb from the attorney general’s office in Mississippi, which is staffed almost entirely by women, was another headlining speaker at the event. She advocated for state-funded support of mothers and described Mississippi’s recent launch of a program called Mississippi Access to Maternal Assistance, or MAMA.

I will admit some skepticism about the efficacy of these kinds of programs across different states — it seems to me that most government programs tend to lack both effectiveness and human compassion. While Mississippi might be just the place where this kind of program could succeed, I cannot imagine similar success in, say, New York.

This, however, should serve as a call to all pro-life advocates to commit themselves through charitable means to the support of vulnerable mothers. The pro-life movement would be vacuous  without people like Phyllis Phelps, men and women who work every day to serve mothers and their babies. This support is vital, and now is the time for those who believe in the dignity of life to step up and provide it.