The Reopening of the American Heart

The following is adapted from remarks given at the John Paul II Life Center annual gala in Austin, Texas.  

The real pro-life movement—the one that really can rescue unborn children and change our culture—isn’t the one based in Washington. 

That’s the first lesson pro-lifers need to take from the turbulent political season we have all endured since the Dobbs decision. There is no question the pro-life cause has had a tough year. We’ve seen state referenda, policy priorities, and political rhetoric all move in the wrong direction.

As a result, media elites are trying to craft a narrative that the right to life is now a losing issue. And as usual, a handful of Republican insiders and pundits are willing to help in this gaslighting. But gaslighting it is! 

Yes, the cause of life has suffered setbacks over the last two years. But we have endured them in the context of a historic victory. The defeat of Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court in 2022 represented the greatest triumph for human dignity since the fall of Soviet communism.

It was a victory fifty years in the making. A long, twilight struggle, punctuated by setbacks—and outright defeats—far more crushing than a few state referendum votes. 

Look at how far we have come. Four years ago, abortion-on-demand extremism was the law of the land. It had been so for five decades, in defiance of the Constitution and democratic legitimacy. Under Roe, abortion was the only issue in American politics untouchable by the American people. The traditional means of policy advocacy were denied us.

For forty-nine years, we elected pro-life Congresses and pro-life presidents, pro-life legislatures and governors. But it wasn’t enough. We were still blocked by the Court. Even some of the Justices we fought to get onto the Court turned on us and the Constitution once they secured their lifetime appointments. 

Over time, we found that the fight against Roe demanded a specific, legal strategy. It was about winning technical arguments about judicial and constitutional interpretation. And we won that battle. But it was still, in the words of Winston Churchill, only “the end of the beginning.” 

All Dobbs did was finally return to the pro-life movement the right to fight for the unborn on a level playing field again. Now that we can, we face an entirely different kind of fight.

It’s not about legal doctrines anymore. It’s about hearts and minds. In this fight, elite, pro-abortion institutions are not only more powerful adversaries than in the last. They are also revealing themselves to be more ruthless and extreme than ever before.

It was not long ago that some leaders of the Democratic Party were still pro-life. Washington even found rare bipartisan consensus against taxpayer funding of abortions at home or abroad. Even committed pro-abortion politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton argued the procedure should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

On the left today, that kind of moderate language would be career-threatening. “Safe, legal, and rare” is out. “Shout your abortion” is in. President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrat leaders in Congress all support federally funded abortion-on-demand up to the moment of birth. Indeed, progressive leaders and states are increasingly ambivalent about babies’ right to life after they are born.

Hardly a week goes by without some creepy new anti-baby article in an elite media outlet. The latest, in the Los Angeles Times, was headlined, “It’s almost shameful to want to have children.” 

Nor is it a coincidence that the same elite institutions trying to dehumanize the unborn are trying to devalue every other part of family life: marriage, fatherhood and motherhood, biological sex, parental rights, girls’ and women’s privacy. Not to mention that most pro-child and pro-family institution of all—the Church.

Make no mistake, this campaign of misinformation—covering everything from tax policy to education to IVF—is working. The United States is more child- and family-unfriendly than it has ever been. The birth rate in the U.S. hit an all-time low the last two years. Children are enduring an epidemic of mental illness. Only about half of American adults are married. And the rising generation is even less likely to say, “I do.”

What all these trends point toward is more than a single-issue political agenda. It’s holistic, and existential. It’s what University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox calls “the closing of the American heart.” Is it any wonder that when the Supreme Court returned the fate of the unborn to the democratic process two years ago, our wounded, traumatized, anti-child culture recoiled the way it did?

The post-Dobbs challenge to the pro-life movement, then, is no longer simply to win a few court cases or change some laws. Because to do that through the democratic process, we’re going to have to heal our culture. To truly create a culture of life, we must help moms and dads and kids—born and unborn—on the ground, eye-to-eye, in real time. Not just from conception to birth, but throughout families’ whole lives.

The political arm of the pro-life movement—especially in Washington—was not ready for that fight. Its unreadiness cost us dearly. But contrary to the media narrative, our recent losses do not mean that America has suddenly become pro-abortion. Rather, the signal from the electorate is that in post-Dobbs America, pre-Dobbs strategies and messaging won’t work. 

To be truly pro-life, America is declaring, it’s not enough just to be anti-abortion. And they are absolutely right. The good news is, Washington conservatives are finally asking the question we all should have been asking all along: What does it mean to be truly pro-life? What issues and reforms beyond abortion should a pro-life movement worthy of the name be working on?

At the Heritage Foundation, we’ve been waiting a long time to help answer these questions. Long before the Dobbs decision, we began working on a comprehensive “Life and Family” agenda—pro-woman and man, pro-child, pro-marriage, and pro-human flourishing.

One of our greatest inspirations in this work was the John Paul II Life Center and other pregnancy resource centers. Why? Because those centers knew what so many Republican politicians did not: that while it was the Supreme Court’s job to overturn Roe, it’s our job to create a culture of life in America. 

No one in America is doing more today to build that culture than the JPII Life Center and the Vitae Clinic. They meet unexpected mothers where they are. They show them the love and security and help all moms deserve and all children need. They offer them medical, emotional, material, and financial support. 

The JPII Life Center was the first pregnancy resource center in the country with two full-time OB/GYNs on staff every day. These doctors provide care and support to moms-in-need from the day they walk in through the first three years of their child’s life.

They also launched A Glimpse Inside, a groundbreaking education program that helps young men and women see the dignity and humanity of unborn babies, and are publicizing the truth about the dangers of the abortion pill.

Thanks to their work, every organization, campaign, and policymaker now working to answer the American people’s demand for a broader, fuller definition of “pro-life” has a model. Everything the post-Dobbs pro-life movement in Washington needs to start promoting, pregnancy centers like the JPII Life Center have been doing all along. 

To take the work that pregnancy centers have been doing and transform it into public policy, we must see that in our wounded culture today, every political problem is first and foremost a family problem. And every one of them needs a family-first solution.

Our welfare system still penalizes lower-income couples for getting married. Our tax system still penalizes parents, especially stay-at-home moms. Who do you think the high cost of healthcare, gas, and groceries really hurts—billion-dollar corporations or families living paycheck to paycheck? Who is bearing the brunt of out-of-control housing inflation? Dual income, no kids (DINK) elites, or young couples trying to buy their first home? The more you look at policy through a family-first lens like this, the more you see how much damage Washington is doing to America’s moms, dads, and kids. 

Think of the racist, misogynistic poison of woke indoctrination in our classrooms. Or the coddling of our predatory Big Tech corporations that are deliberately fueling pornography addiction among our sons and a mental health crisis among our daughters.

Think of the funding of Planned Parenthood and the promotion of abortion services overseas. And then remember the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saying the whole point of Roe was to prevent “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” 

This is the mentality of the pro-abortion left. This is why they are threatening to destroy the Senate filibuster rule to pass a national abortion-on-demand law.

You don’t have to squint hard to see that this fanaticism extends far beyond the bounds of the abortion issue. It also helps explain why those same elites are so threatened by people like Donald Trump and JD Vance, conservative leaders like Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ted Cruz, and Chip Roy, organizations like the JPII Life Center, and policy ideas like those Heritage helps develop.

They are afraid that a pro-life, family-first reform movement will break up their unaccountable power and take back the billions of taxpayer dollars they use to wage culture war against us. They’re afraid we’re actually serious about building a culture of life through public policy changes.

And they should be. Because the building of that culture is already underway. Maybe not in Washington or on the campaign trail yet, but in the homes and neighborhoods of the families we serve, in the lives of the babies we rescue, the moms we help, the marriages we support, the communities we nurture.

This culture of life may seem small right now, almost invisible to those who don’t want to see it. But it’s already growing. A pregnancy resource center here. A clinic there. A wedding here. A little brother or sister there. Before you know it, dinner tables will get a little louder, and the pews a little fuller. 

One community builds a new neighborhood of starter homes. Another builds a walkable playground. Another brings biological truth back into our schools and kicks out the cellphones. In time, pro-family towns will start to comprise pro-family states, which will start to influence pro-family candidates and policies in Washington.

Let us never forget what our Lord and Savior told his disciples: “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” 

The powers of darkness want to snuff out this new pro-life, pro-family movement now, while it’s still small, developing, and vulnerable. Like we all were at one time. But we cannot let that happen. We’re going to fight for this movement, and all the children it serves. For ours is not a movement built on power or money. It’s built on divine love—focused on the reopening of the American heart. 

St. Paul said, “let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” Here, right now, we must pledge never to give up—for the sake of both the unborn, and for the tens of millions of Americans who need to be inspired by our witness. We can prevail, and we will. All we need is the courage and the perseverance to keep moving forward.

Dr. Kevin Roberts is the President of The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America.

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Image by Direct Media, from StockSnap, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.