Three Pro-Life Leaders Reflect on Where the Movement Is Two Years After Dobbs
Three Pro-Life Leaders Reflect on Where the Movement Is Two Years After Dobbs
The Dobbs decision was a huge win for pro-life leaders. But they've been losing the battle since then.
The Supreme Court’s in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was a victory many pro-life leaders thought they’d never live to see. For the first time since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, abortion lost its status as a guaranteed right.
Now, state and federal governments would have control over the nation’s abortion policy. It was a euphoric moment for the pro-life movement, which had worked for decades to assemble a Supreme Court that would eliminate Roe.
But the euphoria was short-lived when public opinion shifted to the left. Numerous states — including ones with less-than-progressive reputations like Kansas and Ohio — saw their voters establish a right to abortion through referendums. Even conservative Republicans began to run away from the issue, vowing that they have no interest in passing a federal abortion ban.
So how do people who’ve dedicated their lives to fighting legalized abortion thinking about this moment? What lessons have they learned in the two years since the Dobbs decision? I interviewed three pro-life leaders from diverse backgrounds to find out.
“We need to meet the American people where they are”
For Eric Scheidler, who serves as the executive director of Pro-Life Action League, pro-life activism is a family affair.
His father founded one of the earliest pro-life organizations in the country in the Chicago area shortly after Roe was decided. Scheidler adopted his family’s view on the matter and for decades has been involved in grassroots activism against abortion.
“We do protests, vigils, demonstrations, public education, we produce literature and signs that pro-life activists can use,” Scheidler explained.
With the Dobbs decision in place, Scheidler is uncertain about the future.
“I really feel like we’re still in the early days, and it’s hard to say yet what the final effect of Roe v Wade’s being overturned will be,” he said, noting that some states have polarized in different directions — with some enacting strict abortion bans and others passing liberal laws.
But he believes that the pro-life movement didn’t properly calibrate for the moment — at times pushing policies that were too politically unpalatable.
He pointed to the November 2023 Ohio abortion referendum, which created a right to abortion in the state’s constitution and overturned the state’s short-lived abortion ban.
“We saw it as an extreme abortion policy or a reasonable abortion policy — the 6-week limit — that’s not how voters saw it,” he said. “If the choice before the American people is you can either have no abortion at all or some abortion and it happens to be the most extreme abortion in the world, they’re going to choose some abortion, even if it’s all abortion.”
To Scheidler, pragmatism on this issue is no sin. He highlighted the example of Arizona, where lawmakers voted to repeal a very strict abortion ban, setting the policy at 15 weeks. He noted that some of the pro-life lawmakers who did so were denounced by some in the movement.
“Some of those pro-lifers were denounced for it and called traitors. I don’t call them traitors. I call them pragmatic thinkers who want to actually save babies,” he said.
Whether this pragmatic strategy will pay off will be tested in November, when voters in Arizona will have a chance to repeal the 15-week ban via referendum.
“Sometimes we need to meet the American people where they are, even if that means the day that we can protect children more fully from abortion isn’t today,” he concluded.
"We don’t believe that any human being…should be subjected to the violence of abortion”
Protect Life Michigan has been working in the state for almost 20 years to end abortions. Unlike many other pro-life organizations that focus on an older clientele, Protect Life Michigan specifically recruits teens and young adults to help shift the culture on abortion.
But in 2022, Michigan voters voted to enshrine the right to abortion by a wide margin — the pro-life side lost the vote by more than 13 points, a margin almost identical to Ohio.
Reflecting on the referendum and other losses for the pro-life movement. Protect Life Michigan Director of Strategy Trevor Polo acknowledged Scheidler’s point about pragmatism.
“The way that our republican system of government’s going to work probably does mean that the incremental steps are going to look different in Michigan than they might look in Texas or in Wyoming or in California, but I think that’s the goal is we’re trying to move quickly as possible to ensure that all human beings are free from the violence of abortion,” he said.
What Protect Life Michigan is really looking for, however, is to shift how American culture thinks about abortion.
“The way we approach it is that we don't believe that any human being, any innocent human being, should be subjected to the violence of abortion, and that ultimately our goal is to make it so that abortion is unthinkable, like other injustices of the past are unthinkable in our current climate,” Polo said.
Challenging “the assumption that you have to be religious to oppose abortion”
One of the strengths and weaknesses of the pro-life movement in the United States is that it’s rooted in religious organizations. This gives it a well-organized base to activate in American politics, but it also risks isolating activists from more secular Americans.
That’s a problem Monica Snyder, the executive director of Secular Pro-Life, has spent years trying to fix. The organization works to provide non-religious people an organizing space to oppose abortion.
“If you’re a Christian it is easier to do pro-life work,” she noted. “One of the clearest examples of this, in my opinion, is the sheer number of pregnancy resource centers that require you to sign a statement of faith to volunteer with them.”
But then some of those people turned away end up Googling around and find Secular Pro-Life, which has a massive repository of research and resources for people from non-religious backgrounds who want to work to reduce abortions.
Snyder acknowledged that they’re a unique voice in the pro-life landscape, comparing it to high school cafeteria.
“Secular Pro-Life sits at the alt table,” she joked.
While she shares the broader pro-life movement’s vociferous moral opposition to abortion, she thinks that they need to do a lot more to reach out to atypical supporters.
“I want the pro-life movement to put a lot more effort into outreach to groups that aren’t specifically conservatives and Christians,” she said.
The difference between Secular Pro-Life and religious pro-life organizations can quickly be gleamed by perusing their social media.
On X (formerly Twitter) and Substack their organization is constantly blasting out posts relying on mountains of scientific work. One recent post has 56 citations, many of them from peer-reviewed research.
Reflecting on the string of losses following Dobbs, Snyder said she understood the demoralization. But she wants people to reframe their thoughts.
“I remind that you can start small. I think people are most likely to get demoralized and feel they can’t do anything when they’re looking at the biggest of pictures,” she said. “Like how do I change a whole movement? How do I change a whole nation? If that’s how they’re feeling my advice would be to just think about a friend they have that might not agree with them and see if they can just chat with them. Or something just small and manageable.”
She also argued that despite all the disagreements about the legality of abortion, there’s more they can work on together than many realize.
“Even as the pro-life movement and the pro-choice movement fight tooth and nail about how accessible abortion should be legally, I would like to see that like while we're having that fight, if we could acknowledge easy common ground, if we could look at the reasons why women say they felt pushed into an abortion and work to prevent those together,” she argued. “If we could look at the reasons people feel like they didn't have enough support when they had a difficult diagnosis, and we could look at, you know, any of those things, there should be so much common ground.”
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