The Food and Drug Administration recently made it legal to obtain a medical abortion via a drug called mifepristone at any pharmacy willing to sell the pharmaceutical. These medical abortions now account for over half of all abortions obtained in America today.
All this, despite the Dobbs decision.
After Dobbs, we have an increasingly messy web of pro-life and pro-abortion skirmishes at the state and federal levels. With just one long-awaited pro-life victory, nearly every familiar battle line dissolved or shifted. Every state’s pro-life contingency is now fighting independently, and with different means, to preserve the life of the unborn.
This isn’t the time to exhale. This isn’t the time for the pro-life movement to rest. The battle to protect unborn lives is far from over. Women continue to face unplanned pregnancies. Courts and legislatures continue to actively define and redefine the future of abortion in America. In many senses, we have entered a far more difficult era of our fight to defend life.
This one legal decision did not protect the sanctity of life, nor did it solve the complicated problems faced by women all over the country who’d consider or seek an abortion. We must continue to take action in every way we know how, especially political involvement, support of pro-life nonprofits, and adoption.
So, what does that look like? First, we must continue to speak up on behalf of egislation that will protect the unborn. Vote for politicians who will fight to articulate and defend the sanctity of life. Make sure your voice is heard in the halls of state legislatures and the offices of attorneys general across the nation.
Second, more than ever, this fight is not merely political. Pregnancy resource centers in your community need your support. Give them your time, your wealth, or your talents. Each year, these centers provide hundreds of millions of dollars worth of resources, medical care, and programming support to vulnerable women. They’re under attack in large part because they are an essential and astonishingly successful part of our work to tend to the practical needs of abortion-minded women and to their children.
We need individuals, organizations, and other communities to engage vulnerable women by reaching out to them and by creating safe spaces for them. The pro-life movement knows better than to believe that helping those with unplanned pregnancies is something accomplished only by legislation.
Finally, get involved in foster or adoptive care if you can. Be the parent a vulnerable child needs. If your family isn’t ready to foster or adopt, recruit your church to wrap around women in desperate need of community and ministry. Provision of material and medical resources isn’t enough: Women and children need to know they are protected, cherished, and held safe by a loving and effective community. Become that community.
The pro-life movement has to demonstrate its continued credibility as a force in post-Roe America. It can — not by waiting for states to determine the future of abortion — but by actively influencing our political and social future for the better, while standing in the gap for all those in need.
Don’t lose hope. Don’t lose vigilance. After Roe, women and children in every state need our support to get the help they need now and the protection they need in the future.
Herbie Newell is the president and executive director ofLifeline Children’s Services, the largest Evangelical Christian adoption agency in America, host ofThe Defender Podcast and author of “Image Bearers: Shifting from Pro-Birth to Pro-Life.”