Every now and again I drop into the NRPlus Facebook group. It’s a community of good humor and wisdom and fellowship. It’s the kind of place you want to be on an election morning and any other day when you find yourself processing and thinking through next steps. With permission, I share one of the threads I saw yesterday, which reflect where we need to be post-Roe.
David Graf
Considering that the pro-abortion side seems to have won in every state when the issue was on the ballot, maybe it’s time to switch our priorities from politicians to working on reducing the number of abortions by:
* addressing the reasons why women have abortions
* providing alternatives to abortion for women who want to keep their babies
* supporting CPCs with our time and money
* disentangling the issue of abortion from politics
* showing love to those who disagree with us on this issue
We spent decades overturning Roe and so we can spend decades if necessary to reduce the number of abortions in America to as low a number as possible by persuasion not coercion.
James Heaney
We can do both. We should do both. We must do both.
Slavery ended in part because of persuasion. But it also ended in large part because of coercion. Ending a great atrocity is almost always a both-and situation.
It is true that, after a difficult cycle, we need to regroup, consolidate in areas where we’ve successfully defended the unborn, and begin pointing to the horrors of abortion and the radicalism of the pro-choice agenda again. The pro-life movement, for having worked to end Roe for 50 years, was surprisingly unprepared for the end of Roe.
But we can’t just give up on the most pressing issue of our time, and any conservative movement that purports to do so wouldn’t be worth the effort.
David Graf
The problem is that our views are in the minority and so that’s why you’re seeing the backlash to Dobbs. We’re perceived as trying to impose our religious views upon everyone else at a time when our credibility has been shredded by an ongoing series of scandals involving religious people and organizations. We risk becoming as irrelevant as the WCTU after prohibition.
James Heaney
Some of our views are in the minority. Others very clearly are not. Michigan’s amendment legalized abortion at *every moment of pregnancy*, for any reason, including for minors, *without parental knowledge or consent*. Some abortion is popular! *That* level of abortion, really clearly, emphatically, in every poll, is not.
We lost Michigan because of disorganization, flat-footedness, and because we were also trying to defend the 1931 abortion ban (which forced voters to choose between a full ban and a full allowance).
For thirty years, the pro-life movement has followed an incremental strategy. First, we make partial-birth abortion appalling and unthinkable. Then we ban it. Then we do the same to third-trimester abortion in general. Then we push for waiting periods, informed consent rules, and clinic regulations, all of them quite popular. Then we keep gradually confronting voters with the humanity of the child, pushing back the frontiers of protection until those babies are actually protected throughout their lives. That’s a successful strategy. It ended Roe. It’s banned abortion in a quarter of the country. It’s saved hundreds of thousands of lives since 1992. We would be insane — and immoral — to abandon it.
David Graf
Given the availability of abortions at home, I have to wonder if those anti-abortion laws have worked as well as their proponents hoped.
James Heaney
I was more referring to Michael New’s research over the past many years showing that abortion restrictions in the states (even not outright bans) have had significant impacts on abortion.
There’s also very good evidence from Ireland under the 8th Amendment that, even after accounting for abortion tourism from Ireland to England (which is much cheaper and easier than flying from, say, Texas to California), Ireland had an *incredibly* low abortion rate under its abortion ban.
I agree with you on this: I don’t think the post-Dobbs abortion bans have been in place long enough for anyone to make much more than slightly educated guesses about the impact they’ve had overall. We’ll see in a few years. I’m optimistic.
In any event, it remains a practical and moral necessity to have a legal regime that protects the lives of the unborn. The 13th Amendment did not really *effectively* end slavery for almost a century, as Southern plantation owners just switched from legal slavery to debt slavery and prison slavery and had a ball for decades — but the 13th Amendment was an essential step along the road to slavery’s decimation. (Slavery still exists today, of course, despite many laws against it… as do rape, murder…. but it is much less a feature of daily life, thanks in part to laws against it.)
Politics is downstream from culture, but culture is downstream from politics as well. The stream is a circle. This metaphor is breaking down.
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