Three Takeaways from Our Post-Dobbs Moment

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned one of the most odious legal regimes ever foisted on the U.S. American people: that of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. We are still in the early stages of being able to discern the results of this massive judicial decision, but I think we can start to make some judgments. Here are three early takeaways from our post-Dobbs moment.

1. States with laws protecting prenatal justice saved many thousands of our most vulnerable children and, overall and in the main, did not harm women’s health.

The first full year for which we have good data on this is 2023, and we recently got two good sets from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The New York Times, reporting on the NBER data, was forced to admit that births increased in states with laws protecting prenatal justice—a statistic the pro-abortion authors indicated as the best evidence for abortion laws actually saving lives. Numbers showing merely lower abortion rates, for example, often do not account for women going to other states for abortions or getting illegal abortions.

The JAMA study found similar results and estimated that over 22,000 lives have been saved by recently enacted pro-life laws. Catholic University of America professor Michael New calls the study “analytically rigorous,” but he also suggests that the number of lives saved could actually be significantly higher—the JAMA study only considers the effects of abortion bans and heartbeat bills, not gestational age limit laws. 

Finally, New is very clear about another important fact of our post-Dobbs moment: According to CDC numbers released two months ago, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023 went from 22.3 per 100,000 live births to 18.6. Many abortion advocates argued that abortion bans would cause a massive public health crisis for women, but that has simply not been the case. While we should not paper over the difficulties when it comes to individual cases, the public health data is clear. Laws protecting prenatal justice have not been damaging to women’s health overall, and the U.S. may follow Chile’s example in seeing a rise in women’s health after dramatically restricting abortion.

2. Abortions overall in the U.S. are up, though this is most likely due to the current “wild west” context in which the abortion pill is being distributed.

Both the NBER and JAMA studies found that abortions overall are up in the U.S. It is difficult to know for sure what the primary cause of this is, but the New York Times suggests that “telehealth and a surge in financial assistance” help to explain what is going on here. Indeed, the “#WeCount” project from the Society of Family Planning reported that in mid-2022 only 4 percent of abortions were from telehealth; that number jumped to 19 percent by late 2023.

This trend, buoyed by pro-abortion state practices (like so-called “shield laws” in places like Massachusetts, California, and New York) encouraging their local physicians to prescribe the abortion pill to women and girls in other states with strong prenatal justice laws, is likely to continue and is—in a sense—part of the response to Dobbs. There are, however, good reasons to think that a backlash may be coming: This is very much a “wild west” situation in which informed consent and women’s health is being ignored.

With regard to the former, many readers may already be aware of the extradition order filed by Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill attempting to hold a New York physician accountable for prescribing and shipping abortion pills to a seventeen-year-old girl in Baton Rouge. The girl’s mother ordered the pills and coerced an abortion that the girl did not want. Indeed, according to the prosecution, the girl had already planned a gender-reveal party for her baby. This is very likely only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ignoring informed consent in our new practice of granting abortions via telehealth.

As a means of protecting women’s health, the FDA has for years maintained a strict threshold of ten weeks as a gestational limit for use of the abortion pill. But in an era defined by what the Washington Post describes as a “covert network” designed to provide abortion pills (often sourced from Mexico and other foreign countries), it is very often the case that no medical professional is used and gestational limits are ignored. Indeed, the Post reports that an “abortion doula” in the network warns her clients that at fifteen weeks, the fetus is the size of an apple and is “going to look like a baby.” The doula often sends acid, along with the pills, so her client can dissolve the baby’s body and bury whatever is left—the better to hide the evidence.

It’s safe to say that informed consent and women’s health are not priorities in this abortion-distribution context. Instead, a kind of post-Dobbs fanaticism has taken over in which the overriding concern is simply to get women and girls abortions.

3. Even in a “new media” environment, the pro-life movements continue to suffer from messaging problems post-Dobbs.

Over time, the truth of the harms caused by the abortion pill “wild west” is likely to come out. But will it get broad distribution and be absorbed into the culture? Even on less hostile outlets like Fox News—and new media podcasts and the like—it is often quite difficult to get pro-life messages a fair hearing. Part of the problem is that many of the trusted sources will downplay the downsides, while pro-life sources are marginalized as ideological, fanatical, ignorant of the science and medicine, and so forth. Another problem is resources: I was just visiting pro-lifers in Montana who said that they were outspent 100 to 1 on their abortion ballot initiative, with pro-abortion money coming in from all states and even other countries. This is a problem throughout the U.S.

It is difficult to know what to do with these structural issues, but I’ve written recently in these pages about the important and repeated suggestion from Vice President Vance that the pro-life movement needs to rebuild trust with a skeptical public that finds it difficult to engage with what we have to say. It helps that the old media and media institutions are taking on water at the moment, but we haven’t fully taken advantage of the opportunity to build relationships with new media, to tell better stories, and create new institutions of our own. 

That said, these things may also be changing. The pro-life movements are doing a much better job of focusing on storytelling, we have broadly-supported manifestos and statements driving home our commitment to equal concern to both mother and child, and there are even two new pro-life medical schools on the way.

So, while there are good and bad signs for pro-lifers at this point post-Dobbs, there remains quite a bit of hope that we can build on the good and put a white-hot spotlight on the bad. Pro-Life 3.0 is here and we are shifting to meet this new moment.