For half a century, Americans’ inherent contrarianism worked for the pro-life movement, of which I have been a member for forty years. In 1973, the Supreme Court had declared abortion legal in almost all cases—making abortion access the law of the land. Partly in response, large numbers of Americans took a contrary view, inclining toward the pro-life movement. For decades, almost every Gallup Poll showed fewer than 30 percent of Americans agreeing that abortion should be “legal under all circumstances.”
Then a funny thing happened, which in hindsight was predictable. In 2022, after the Supreme Court said states could make abortion illegal, the percentage of people who said in polls that abortion should be “always legal” jumped to 35. In 2024, 50 percent of Americans said abortion should be “legal under certain circumstances.” The percentage of Americans who said abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances” dropped from 19 percent in 2021 to only 12 percent this year. Put another way, for 49 years, about one in five Americans wanted a law they could not have. When they could have it, the number dropped to one in eight.
We are a contrarian people. My favorite childhood movie, The Great Escape (1963), stars Steve McQueen as an American pilot stuck in a German prison camp during World War II. McQueen’s character razzes the commandant, who finally asks, “Are all American officers so ill-mannered?” The reply: “Yeah, about 99 percent.”
The post-Dobbs world has been tough not only for the ill-mannered, contrarian pro-life movement, but also for unborn children. The number of abortions has probably gone up, not down, since the Supreme Court decision. It’s hard to be sure, because no central repository of abortion data exists. Technological change has made counting even more difficult. In the fourteen states that allow surgical abortions only in rare instances, it appears that numerous women receive abortion pills by mail or private services.The abortion-supportive Guttmacher Institute says 63 percent of abortions in 2023 occurred through ingestion of mifepristone and misoprostol pills. One major pro-life organization, Heartbeat International, says “chemical abortion accounts for over 80 percent of all abortions in the U.S.” Over the years, pro-life groups have picketed abortion clinics and occasionally blocked doors with the goal of blocking all surgical abortions. With the advent of mail-order abortions, that’s increasingly like battling pornography by picketing porn stores.
A national ban on mifepristone, even if pro-life forces could get one passed, would be hard to enforce unless police frisked travelers and opened every mailed envelope that could contain mifepristone. An alternative way to fight abortion pills would be to sue groups in New York, Massachusetts, California, and other abortion-friendly states that prescribe and send mifepristone to states where its use is prohibited. Those states and others, though, have already created “telemedicine abortion shield laws” that forbid their officials from cooperating with efforts to penalize abortionists.
Some pro-lifers speak of fighting abortion pills through judicial intervention or federal legislation. That approach has political and practical problems: the emphasis on compelling rather than convincing is a fatal weakness in a liberty-oriented country like ours. Again: Americans, historically, do not like being told what to do.
I believe more than ever that the pro-life movement needs to apply the thinking of John Locke and Abraham Lincoln.
John Locke, in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), applied to politics what the apostle Paul taught in Galatians 5:6—Locke called for a “Faith which works not by Force but by Love.” He emphasized changing minds that “cannot be compell’d to the belief of anything by outward Force. Confiscation of Estate, Imprisonment, Torments, nothing of that Nature can have any such Efficacy as to make Men change the inward Judgment that they have framed of things.”
Lincoln added to Locke’s emphasis on “inward Judgment” an awareness of community opinion. “Public sentiment is everything,” Lincoln said in 1858. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”
If any tragedy in American history could push politicians to move faster than public opinion allowed, slavery was it. Lincoln abhorred the evil but, concerned about the loyalties of border states where slavery remained legal, refused to challenge it. He quipped, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.” He did not push for emancipation until the Union won a key battle at Antietam in September 1862.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave and social reformer, often complained during the Civil War that Lincoln was slow to act. In 1876, though, Douglass acknowledged that “from the genuine abolition view, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country—a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult—he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
The emphasis on compelling rather than convincing is a fatal weakness in a liberty-oriented country like ours. Again: Americans, historically, do not like being told what to do.
If any current tragedy could impel Lockeans to move faster, abortion is it. Locke opposed those with “a mind to sacrifice infants.” But Locke also wrote that “it is one thing to persuade, another to command: One thing to press with Arguments, another with Penalties…. Laws are of no force at all without Penalties, [which] are not proper to convince the mind.”
God does not judge by appearances, but many Americans do. While most support abortion early in pregnancy, only 22 percent nationally support its legality during the third trimester. Even in California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, a lack of support for aborting unborn children who look very much like born ones has contributed to the closing of some abortion clinics—or abortion businesses, I would call them—much to the annoyance of The New York Times. Overall, though, the abortion industry is changing as the pornography industry did: forget brick-and-mortar shops, stream directly to homes. Whenever desire for the product remains and technology allows, the product will get through.
Over the years, pro-life groups have picketed abortion clinics and occasionally blocked doors with the goal of blocking all surgical abortions. With the advent of mail-order abortions, that’s increasingly like battling pornography by picketing porn stores.
The harm resulting from pro-life identification with Donald Trump, a violator of women and of Lockean and Lincolnian principles, is obvious, but power corrupts all over. In my state of Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton—after being impeached for alleged bribery and other abuses—intervened when Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, was forced to leave the state to get an abortion when she learned that her third child, still unborn, had a lethal disorder.
She had gained a court order allowing for an abortion. Then Paxton, as the Texas Tribune reported, “channeled the full power of the state to stop her, threatening hospitals, appealing to the state’s highest court and ultimately getting the order blocked.” Cox got an abortion outside of Texas and Paxton gained applause from some—but he also teed up the ball for portrayals of the pro-life movement as heartless.
Cox’s exceptionally hard case last month brought tears to the eyes of Democratic Convention delegates and millions of TV viewers. Some of us might applaud a woman who keeps her pregnancy going in those tragic circumstances. Others may not—but when “pro-life” means coercion rather than kind helping, more women will steer clear of pregnancy resource centers that could assist them, and more unborn lives will be lost.
The failure of the pro-life movement to show compassion and convince enough minds became evident in 2022, when abortion supporters won seven out of seven state-level abortion ballot questions.
Even in conservative Kansas, voters turned down amending the state constitution to stipulate that Kansans have no guaranteed right to abortion. Pro-lifers would agree that God is on the side of unborn children—but to show that politics saves lives, we must have Kansas and other states like it. Since we do not, we must think of another way.
The pro-life movement has shown for half a century how unborn lives can be saved via one-to-one compassion rather than top-down political and judicial directives. Yes, the political side of the pro-life movement helped to make Donald Trump the Supreme Court appointer-in-chief. But I’m more impressed by an impact noted in the 2023 annual report of Care Net, the umbrella group for 1,250 pro-life pregnancy centers: Counseling and ultrasound at those centers led to “one million lives saved from abortion in the previous 15 years.”
That number seems credible to me, based on visits I’ve made to pregnancy centers in a dozen states. I’ve also seen close-ups of the difference compassion makes. In 1984, while I taught at the University of Texas, my wife started the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center, and I chaired it for a while. In 1990 and 1991, I chaired meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington, D.C., and thought my friend Guy Condon, who became head of Care Net, was right when he said: “We are losing miserably the battle for perception and public conviction…. Our sloganeering, demeanor and symbols make us appear to be against women, against individual freedom, against the democratic process.”
In 1992, another friend, Feminists for Life officer Frederica Mathewes-Green, was part of a $2.5 million attempt by Maryland pro-lifers to defeat an abortion-supporting referendum. They lost, and she reflected that perhaps the defeat was “a blessing in disguise. Perhaps we’ll be able to let go of our search for earthly power. Perhaps we have been putting too much faith in working to elect legislators to pass laws that would compel people to agree with us. Now we are realizing the need to put first things first and help people to come to agree with us, before we can pass and sustain pro-life laws.”
During the 1990s a technological breakthrough—the broad introduction of 3D and 4D ultrasound—helped convince many women to continue their pregnancies. Each saw not just plastic fetal models or pictures of a baby, but a video of her baby. For that and many other reasons, including change in sexual behavior and contraceptive use, the number of abortions in the U.S. apparently declined by 45 percent from the early 1990s to 2018. By 2019, only 46 percent of Americans called themselves pro-choice, and 49 percent said they were pro-life.
Politically, as an informal and mostly inconsequential advisor to presidential candidate George W. Bush in 1999, I was able to have him meet in Austin with half a dozen pro-life leaders from around the country. I wanted him to understand the power of ultrasound technology to educate women (and sometimes men) about the reality of their unborn children. Bush agreed to propose Health and Human Services funding of ultrasound machines for hundreds of pregnancy centers, not as an ”anti-choice” measure but as a way to help more women make an informed choice.
Nevertheless, President Bush showed how to base the case for life in Lockean and Lincolnian principles. He said, “This Nation was founded upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain ‘unalienable rights.’ Chief among them is the right to life itself.… We should join together in pursuit of a more compassionate society, rejecting the notion that some lives are less worthy of protection than others…. Unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law.”
Overall, though, the abortion industry is changing as the pornography industry did: forget brick-and-mortar shops, stream directly to homes.
Compassionate conservatism during the Bush years and in the following decade helped a little. Now, cruel conservatism competes with bureaucratic liberalism, and Donald Trump holds onto support from some pro-life organization heads even while saying, “My administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Reversing Barry Goldwater’s slogan from sixty years ago, Republicans provide an echo, not a choice.
Meanwhile, technology is aiding the pro-choice side, as women can now abort chemically, irrespective of state laws. A new Heartbeat International report describes well how “the landscape of abortion has undergone a profound transformation. The shifting landscape of abortion, characterized by increased accessibility, reduced medical oversight, and alarming risks to women’s health, underscores the urgent need for compassionate care and practical support for women.”
Yes, government can help a little. During the past two years, states that protect unborn life have chosen to expand Medicaid coverage for postpartum women, increase child care options, and provide other medical and financial help. But one study showed an often-overlooked factor: 42 percent of women who had abortions said their decision would have been different if they had received more support from people near them. Ten percent said they had faced something worse than lack of support: coercion. Supporting and amplifying the work of pro-life pregnancy centers can accentuate the positive and help women push back against coercion from boyfriends or others.
Republicans should support compassionate conservative legislation while emphasizing the winning of minds and hearts. Democrats should help women who don’t want to get abortions push back against coercion. And let me suggest, by way of offering an analogy that I hope won’t be misinterpreted, something that would be daring in this election environment. At the Democratic Convention, Kamala Harris tried to walk the tightrope of U.S. policy in the Middle East. She said, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself…. At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost.” Harris, with her lock on left-of-center voters, wants to be the president of all Americans. I would have been impressed by her saying—at the convention, or during the debate on Sep. 10, when she spoke at great length about abortion—something like, “I will always stand up for reproductive rights. At the same time, I understand that abortion is devastating for some women, and I recognize that millions of my fellow Americans see it results in innocent lives lost. I will work to secure reproductive rights but reduce suffering.”
I am not comparing either opponents or defenders of abortion to the residents of Israel or Gaza. I am saying that both sides should recognize that most women who receive abortions see it in terms of necessity and sorrow. As poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in “The Mother” (1945), “Abortions will not let you forget / You remember the children you got that you did not get, / The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, / The singers and workers that never handled the air.”
Three decades later, Linda Bird Francke wrote in a 1976 New York Times column (originally published under the pseudonym Jane Doe) that she and her husband had decided they didn’t have room in their lives for a baby, but that she felt, later, haunted by a “very little ghost that only appears when I’m seeing something beautiful, like the full moon on the ocean last weekend. And the baby waves at me. And I wave back at the baby. ‘Of course, we have room,’ I cry to the ghost. ‘Of course we do.’”
The pro-life movement, rather than commanding obedience, can save more unborn lives by helping women and men realize that they “have room.” A prescription for the pro-life movement in this new age of abortion-by-mail: Help more men and women see via ultrasound the prospective ghosts while they still live. Politically, apply Locke and Lincoln. Personally, emphasize compassion and community. Love will save more lives than law.