The End of Roe: Two Years Later

In the absence of a unifying vision, turmoil takes its toll

Two years ago Current ran a four-day forum of reflections on the end of Roe (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4). What has been the impact of this decision? Two writers who contributed to the original forum reflect on what the end of Roe means today.

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Internal divisions are roiling the anti-Roe coalition

Susan McWilliams Barndt

For a long time in the U.S. you could be pro-life by being anti-Roe. Whatever differences existed within the anti-Roe crowd seemed secondary to the goal of overturning that decision.

One major effect of Dobbs has been the exposure of serious—maybe fundamental—differences among Americans who consider themselves pro-life. 

Two years ago, in this journal, I anticipated that split as falling along Lincoln-Douglas lines: Between those who seek total abolition of abortion and those who would leave laws about abortion to the states. That split has happened. Today it is playing out in debates over the Republican Party platform between activists who seek national prohibitions on abortion and a Trump team that thinks abortion should be decided by the states. 

When you look at surveys of Americans who supported overturning Roe, you see the same thing. The majority of anti-Roe voters (59%) say that abortion laws should be left to the states. Just under a third of those voters (29%) would like to see nationwide laws restricting abortion. You also see a healthy number of anti-Roe voters (11%) take the surprising position of wanting nationwide laws that protect access to abortion. This last group is surprising. It is probably some combination of people who have changed their position on abortion in the last two years; people who were never pro-life but objected to some specific element of Roe; and people who did not understand Roe in the first place.

In politics, you should never assume that your ally on a particular matter of policy is your ally on all counts. We can disagree about basic matters of justice, morality, and right—and still want the same policy to be in place. As we all know, two people can want the same thing for different reasons.

That seems so obvious when I type it out, but it’s also one of those truths that is easy to forget. It’s especially easy to forget when you’ve been fighting for the same thing, with the same people, for a long time.

Today, we are entering an era in which pro-lifers are only starting to contend with the major differences that divide them. Those moral and intellectual divisions have always been there, but now they are political divisions. And in the end, those internal divisions may prove tougher to overcome than the external foe that was Roe.

Susan McWilliams Barndt is Chair and Professor of Politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She has authored and edited numerous books including A Political Companion to James Baldwin (2017) and The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018).

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The pro-life social vision that Dobbs didn’t offer

Daniel K. Williams

Two years ago the Supreme Court told us in its Dobbs decision what the United States is not. It is not a country that acknowledges abortion as a constitutional right, the court declared. 

But if the Supreme Court told us what the nation is not, it did not tell us what the nation is. The court did not try to replace the rights framework that it rescinded with a new rights-based vision. It did not declare that the unborn had a constitutionally protected right to life. It did not suggest a new constitutional basis for protecting the rights that pro-choice activists believed restrictive abortion laws would undermine. 

Instead, it left reproductive rights activists with a sense of loss. It stood aside from the fray as the two sides in the abortion debate continued battling against each other at the state and national level, with each side more determined than ever to protect the rights they believed in.

Because Dobbs was not accompanied by any shift in public opinion in favor of the pro-life point of view, pro-lifers experienced only limited success in passing restrictive abortion laws. The most socially conservative states in the South, Midwest, and Mountain West enacted partial or near-total abortion bans, but several liberal states expanded abortion access and abortion funding. The number of abortions continued to increase in the months after Dobbs. There are now more abortions occurring each year than there were before the court decision was issued.

We are also no closer than we were before Dobbs to reaching a national political consensus to protect human life from the moment of conception and to honor the human dignity of every person. This was the original vision of the pro-life movement, but discussions of this broader vision have largely been lost in the cacophony of political debate over abortion bans. 

What we urgently need is what Dobbs did not even pretend to provide: a social vision for the protection of human life that will address the fears of abortion rights advocates while also honoring the human dignity of all marginalized people, including the unborn. 

To find such a vision, maybe we should look not to the Supreme Court but to the church. In 1965—nearly eight years before Roe v. Wade and more than half a century before Dobbs—the Second Vatican Council outlined a pro-life social vision in the conciliar document Gaudium et Spes. It condemns abortion, reiterating the longstanding position of the Catholic Church that human life should be protected from the moment of conception. But instead of merely saying that the church supports antiabortion laws or viewed abortion as evil, Gaudium et Spes outlines a vision for a just society that promotes human flourishing by honoring human dignity and protecting the rights of all. 

There must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one’s own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious.

It goes on to contend that

in our times a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception and of actively helping him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign laborer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlawful union and wrongly suffering for a sin he did not commit, or a hungry person who disturbs our conscience by recalling the voice of the Lord, ‘As long as you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it for me’ (Matt. 25:40).

Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person . . . all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.

The council then insists that “Respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them.”

On this second anniversary of Dobbs, these exhortations are more necessary than ever. At this moment of deep political divisions, I hope that those who truly care about unborn life will avoid the temptation to think that lasting gains can be secured merely by making abortion illegal. Court decisions alone will not save unborn lives, as Dobbs has shown. Nor will they be sufficient to create a just society. 

Instead, if pro-lifers are to have any hope of lasting gains, their hope will come not from defeating their opponents in court or at the polls but in persuading their critics of the justice and beauty of a comprehensive pro-life social vision that Dobbs never offered. It will come from loving our neighbor and seeking the well-being of every person as an image-bearer of God, as Gaudium et Spes exhorted. It will come from helping the refugee and the “foreign laborer looked down upon,” as well as the unborn. It will come from protecting access to education and freedom of information, as the Second Vatican Council suggested. And it will come from truly listening to others with whom we disagree—even when those disagreements extend to the matter of abortion.

Dobbs didn’t offer this vision, which is why its aftermath so far has not resulted in an increased respect for unborn lives and for human beings in general. But Dobbs has created an opening—a political vacuum, in a sense—for people who truly care about all human lives to bring a comprehensive pro-life vision into the public square. At our moment of intense partisan divisions and a general loss of hope, reaching beyond partisanship to rediscover and promote this social vision will not be easy. But it’s vitally necessary. Not only unborn lives, but the future wellbeing of our nation, depend on it.

Daniel K. Williams is a historian working at Ashland University and the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.