Assessing the State of the Pro-Life Movement After Dobbs

 The Annual National March for Life will be held this Friday, January 19, 2024 in Washington, D.C.

This guest post is from Regent Law 3L Daniel Luster:

In June of 2022, the Pro-life community celebrated a milestone victory when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs. This gave rise to a wave of elation and optimism that the battle was all but one. This optimism has receded of late as pro-abortion advocates have posted a series of wins across the states—they have won seven out of seven ballot initiatives dealing with abortion since the Dobbs decision. Most recently, and perhaps most glaringly, events in Ohio have changed the mood in the pro-life community, if not the calculus. In the last election, the people of Ohio voted for a constitutional amendment to the state’s constitution that protects the right to abortion. This was a blow to the pro-life movement and will undoubtedly give rise to much introspection for those who are seeking to protect the unborn.

But what accounts for this contradictory state of affairs—on the heels of the biggest pro-life win in history, there is a groundswell of pro-choice sentiment sweeping the nation? There is, perhaps, an explanation for this state of affairs, which I will attempt to sketch here.

What is becoming increasingly clear that the Dobbs victory was more of a win on a technicality than a win that resulted from a larger change in the moral views of our society. This is not to say it was unimportant or not worth fighting for, but it was partial. Strategically, those in the pro-life movement and, generally, on the right of the political spectrum have spent the better part of the past fifty years to make the Dobbs decision happen. That is, of course, an invaluable effort. However, recent events expose a problem in the pro-life’s calculus. I believe that the pro-life movement has largely ceded the moral high ground to the left—that is to say, the pro-life movement has completely withdrawn from the debate over bodily autonomy and self-ownership. So, the Dobbs decision was a win, but it was not the all-out victory we hoped it would be. The sway of the left’s moral arguments still has a hold over our country’s collective view of the abortion issue.

Bodily autonomy is a powerful cultural argument; the left uses it deftly to argue in favor of abortion. The right has come to see it as synonymous with the right to abortion and has shrunk from the debate about a woman’s right over her own body. The consequence of this withdrawal is to leave the moral high ground in this debate to the pro-choice camp. As I will show, the irony of this is that the very thing that makes abortion wrong is self-ownership of one’s body—the unborn child has an absolute, inalienable right to ownership of their body.

The first mistake was to give in to the change in language from the idea of self-ownership put forward by the English political theorist John Locke to the term bodily autonomy. Self-ownership means that you, not everyone else, have the right to control your body. It does not connote that one is free from all moral constraints of how you use your body, just as in the use of other property; your ownership is not a moral license. Bodily autonomy, in our culture’s conception of it, denotes a much broader idea, derived from the great English utilitarian and charlatan John Stewart Mill, that one is free from all constraints in how they use their body. Self-ownership, however, is a political-legal categorization. You own your body as it relates to other people. This comports with the Biblical view of humanity—all of us are created in God’s image and imbued with value. This value means all are equal before the Lord. For Locke, God’s creation of humans as equals meant that each person is sovereign as they relate to every other person. Locke believed we each own our body. All rights flow from this proposition of self-ownership. The pro-life movement needs to embrace this moral argument. Self-ownership is precisely the reason why abortion is wrong. A woman does not own the body of her unborn child and, therefore, cannot kill it.

Perhaps part of the reluctance to embrace the position of self-ownership, though it is the moral high ground, is due to the broader social implications of advocating for self-ownership. It would become obvious that almost all of the powers the state currently exercises over its people are illegitimate.

The second mistake has been the almost total focus on winning the court battle but not on changing culture. It has been said that “law is downstream of culture.” We can put too much stock in the power of the law to change behavior. While the process is certainly obscure, the culture’s ideas about morality have a drastic impact on how the law is shaped, and this fact should not be discounted. We need to move beyond hoping that one court decision will change pro-choice adherents’ minds and shift focus to the battle of ideas in culture. We can and should regain the moral high ground.

Determining how to do all of this in love is, of course, a different and more profound dilemma.