Alive and Kicking: the Pro-Life Movement at 43

This should be over by now. We should have packed our bags and gone home. Yet here we are, 43 years after Roe v. Wade - which was supposed to settle the matter - and the pro-life movement is stronger than ever. 

Normally, even the most controversial decisions are eventually accepted as law, and people adjust to the new reality. For a Supreme Court decision, even a controversial one, to remain so deeply unpopular and divisive for so long is unprecedented. For example, Brown v. Board of Education - which struck down school segregation in 1954 - was almost completely accepted within a few years, and the last vestiges of resistance flamed out after the failed presidential run of George Wallace in 1968. By 1996, it wasn't even an issue; no major political candidate even suggested the Court had been wrong. (It didn't hurt that the decision had been unanimous).

So why won't this issue go away? What accounts for the remarkable persistence, and even growth, of the pro-life movement? 

Subversion of the democratic process. Roe v. Wade stepped into a vigorous debate raging through the legislatures of nearly every state, and attempted to cut it off. Today, the United States is one of only 4 countries that allows abortion at any time for any reason; the others are Canada, China, and North Korea. Yet 55% of Americans think abortion should be illegal in most circumstances, and 68% think it should be at least somewhat restricted. As a committed pro-lifer myself, I readily admit that if our laws simply included reasonable restrictions on abortion that reflected the desires of the majority of the American public, the pro-life movement would probably fizzle out. The extraordinary and persistent discrepancy between the will of the people and actual law is the driving force that fuels the abortion debate.

Science. With 3-dimensional real-time ultrasound, we can see babies in the womb, and they don't look like blobs of tissue. They look like babies. As medicine progresses, the viability limit of pre-term infants continues to be pushed back further and further. And it is inescapable that, biologically speaking, life begins at conception. As more Americans learn genetics in their high school biology class, fewer can claim (as Barack Obama famously did) that the question of when life begins is "above my pay grade."

Pro-lifers have more babies. Never underestimate the significance of the obvious. It is easier to pass on your beliefs when you have children, than when you kill your offspring. 

Engagement with women in need. Women who contemplate abortion are not stupid. They know they are being forced into it - which doesn't sound like much of a "choice" - and usually by a man who has abandoned them. As John Rankin observes, abortion is the greatest enabler of male chauvinism. And the difference between an abortion clinic that tries to sell you something and demands cash upfront, and a non-profit resource center that listens and gives you information - and never asks for a dime - is obvious. Every time pro-life volunteers help someone choose life, they gain two converts: a grateful mother, and a little boy or girl who otherwise wouldn't have made it into this world. 

A gradual approach. In contrast to pro-abortion extremism, pro-lifers have recently pushed for such sensible policies as requiring abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at hospitals and to be inspected regularly, only letting physicians perform abortions, ending the gruesome practice of partial-birth abortion, allowing parents to have a say in whether their teenage daughter gets an abortion, and requiring women to be fully informed of the development of their baby and the risks of the procedure. These common sense policies have contributed to the closure of 53 abortion facilities in 2015 alone.

When undercover videos that showed executives of Planned Parenthood (the nation's largest abortion provider) selling baby body parts, even long-standing pro-choicers re-examined their beliefs. Bill Clinton famously said that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare" - but then decided that 1 out of 3 ain't bad. Are we approaching a tipping point - where abortion remains barely legal (and more safe) but will become truly rare?

There are reasons for hope. And also reasons for pessimism...