A New Wilderness for the Pro-Life Movement: Post-Roe Setbacks Reveal Cultural Legwork Ahead

In June 1858, Abraham Lincoln famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” He was quoting Jesus but spoke in the context of slavery. Lincoln said it would be impossible for the nation to endure permanently “half slave and half free.” A reckoning was coming. America would have to become “all one thing or all the other.” And so it did.

Lincoln’s insight — that moral evil can’t be contained within a polity without inevitably corrupting the whole — feels awfully relevant again. While civil war is thankfully not on the table, the moral tension that has turned state against state since the fall of Roe v. Wade resembles something of the moral chasm that marked the antebellum republic. It is becoming clear that that tension cannot go unresolved forever. Per Lincoln’s prophecy, we are once again becoming “all one thing,” and that thing is not pro-life.

The Post-Roe Reset

The fall of Roe v. Wade was a moral and legal triumph — and above all, a grace from God. For half a century, unborn image-bearers had been crushed, poisoned, and flushed from their wombs “while the law looked the other way.”^[1] States could do next to nothing to stop it. Roe’s defeat was well deserved. It was the fruit of decades of persistence, persuasion, and prayer from the pro-life movement. With Roe now gone, abortion law has been returned to the states. Subsequently, twenty states have enacted pro-life laws, and 13 have banned all or most abortions. This real progress ought not be minimized.

Yet the four years since Dobbs have been mostly defined by setbacks. With the Dobbs ink barely dry, pro-abortion advocates sprung into action by pushing state ballot initiatives — often couching them in the language of limited government. These measures proved politically effective. In more than ten states, voters have now enshrined or expanded abortion rights — even in traditional red states like Kansas and Montana.

Perhaps the most shocking development, though, is the way blue state governors have turned their states into abortion tourism hotspots. With abortion now banned in much of the country, governors in states like California and New York have shamelessly lured women to their states to terminate their pregnancies.

What’s more, at the moment when pro-life policy is most actionable, President Trump has been mostly AWOL. Sensing the issue to be a political loser, he has repeatedly deflected to the “states,” as if to say, “Dobbs was my part — now I’m done.” To his credit, the President did pardon pro-life activists who had been wrongly jailed. He also signed legislation defunding Planned Parenthood through Medicaid for a year. Yet he has still refused to wield his power where it could matter most: taking abortion drugs off the market. These drugs, which now account for two-thirds of U.S. abortions, are drastically deregulated — available by mail at the click of a button. These drugs are being shipped into all 50 states, making a mockery of state abortion bans and facilitating an even higher abortion rate than we had under Roe v. Wade. As pro-life leader Marjorie Dannenfelser has put it, “Gavin Newsom is determining policy in pro-life states.”

Fixing this situation would be as simple as restoring the requirement that these drugs be dispensed in-person. That alone would bring mail-order abortion to a halt and save hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet this much, the President has refused to do.

For these reasons, the President occupies a truly paradoxical space in the post-Roe era. On one hand, he has done more to advance the pro-life cause than any president in our lifetimes, having picked three of the justices who ended Roe. Yet his unwillingness to play hardball at this critical stage — and, in particular, his move to strip pro-life language from the 2024 GOP platform — have left the pro-life movement perplexed and demoralized.

Winning Hearts and Minds

Two years after Dobbs, HBO host Bill Maher mocked pro-lifers as “the dog who caught the car.” We had overturned Roe; now, we had no idea what to do. Maher was wrong in one sense — the pro-life movement has an agenda; it only waits to be implemented. Yet he was right in a deeper sense: Americans simply don’t buy into the pro-life vision, and they are refusing to be led into a pro-life future. We the people, who govern this nation, keep voting for abortion.

This is partly owing to the law’s shaping influence on the conscience. For 50 years, Roe catechized Americans to believe that abortion was essential to women’s equality with men. Along with contraception, it reinforced the assumption that sex could be severed from responsibility, commitment, and parenthood. It taught that in a “liberated” world, where free love reigns, the right to kill one’s nascent offspring is an absolute necessity. We are living in the world Roe built. Its legal form is gone, but the culture it birthed remains — and Americans on both sides of the aisle are invested in it.

But if the Old Testament teaches us anything, it is that law cannot change the sinful heart. And in a republic, laws are only as good as the civic actors who legislate and vote. So long as hearts of stone predominate, the pro-life cause will be fighting moral and political gravity. So long as sex without consequences is seen as an absolute right, the demand for abortion will remain.

This is the hard reality now facing the pro-life movement. Its success cannot rest simply on quick-footed lawyers and devout lawmakers. Its success requires nothing less than dismantling the sexual revolution.

This work must begin, first and foremost, in the church. Few Christians today realize just how deeply we have been conditioned by the sexual revolution. We must take a hard look, for instance, at the culture of contraception, which teaches married couples that sex and procreation need not be linked and that children are burdens to be delayed, not gifts to be embraced. We must also rebuild the marriage culture — helping young people find spouses and inspiring their hearts with a Christ-shaped vision of love and sacrifice. And we must help them escape the Gnosticism that would have them compartmentalize politics from biblical conviction under the guise of a “wall of separation.”

Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what has been planted. In this new pro-life chapter, we must plant seeds of truth while plucking up the lies of the sexual revolution and the euphemisms that cloak what abortion truly is. We need more David Daleiden exposés and more Charlie Kirk-style campus encounters, where rational conversation challenges hearts and minds. We need to rebut the feminist lie that liberated womanhood equals manhood — and the manospheric lie that true men dominate and control. And politically, we need a vision for an economy that is less expensive, more liveable — more hospitable to new life.

It’s a discouraging moment to be pro-life. Yet for Christians, there is cause for hope. While our fallen world groans under the weight of sin, Christ also came to destroy the devil’s works (1 John 3:8), and no defeat is ever final so long as He indwells us. The wicked still do wickedness (Rev 22:11), yet the people of God restrain them (2 Thess 2:6-7). As the City of God, embedded with the City of Man, we contend for every life on sidewalks, in courtrooms, at pregnancy centers, and at the ballot box.

We have no choice. The children are still being killed, and God commands us to rescue those being taken to death (Prov 24:11). They have no voice. We do — and every child rescued matters to our God. So may we heed the encouragement of the Apostle Paul: “let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9).

^[1] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031105-1.html