To the children who grew up in the shadow of Roe v. Wade, Friday’s Supreme Court ruling ushered in a world they’d never experienced. For the first time, entire generations woke up Saturday morning in a country not controlled by abortion on demand. But as much as the Left has leaned into this misunderstanding over the years, the end of Roe was never going to be the end of this fight. If anything, conservatives warn, it’s the starting gun.
“It’s a momentous occasion, there’s no question about that,” Dr. Ben Carson told Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” But the founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute “caution[s] people not to become too celebratory.” “This is just the beginning,” Carson insists, “because what the court has actually done is reestablish things the way that they’re supposed to be — these major life and death decisions. Tumultuous social issues are supposed to be in the hands of the people and their representatives, not in the hands of unelected judges.”
Now, the real work begins, Donald Trump’s former secretary of Housing and Urban Development points out. The battle will shift to the states, where the legislative infrastructure that pro-lifers have spent the last several decades building will click into place. Each state will decide for themselves “whether and when” abortion would be legal. Some will allow it; others won’t. But what matters, as the justices themselves point out, is that the question would be left “for the people,” not courts wielding “raw judicial power.”
The biggest reason we’re at this point as a nation, Carson agrees, is because of President Trump’s three Supreme Court picks. “He worked very hard on making sure that we had courageous [justices] who really understood the Constitution [and] what it meant — as opposed to just partisans.”
Like Trump, the world-renowned neurosurgeon says his conversion to the pro-life movement came “relatively late in life.” “I was pro-choice,” Carson admitted. “Now, I myself didn’t believe in abortion — I thought it was terrible. But I said, ‘What right do I have to impose my beliefs on someone else?’ … But one day, in thinking about slavery and how slave owners thought that they could do anything, because they felt they own[ed] these people. They could kill them, rape and murder them, whatever they want[ed] to do. And I said, ‘How rotten that is’ … What if the abolitionists had said, ‘Well, I don’t believe in slavery. I think it’s a horrible thing. But, you know, you do what you want to do.’ Where would we be? And there is a responsibility that we have for others.”
And frankly, Carson points out, it’s become increasingly difficult in the medical field to justify being pro-abortion.
“[I]f you look at a first trimester abortion on the screen, you see the head and the arms and the legs and the torso. And then you see a tube being introduced on the screen. And in many cases, you see the baby move away from it before it rips off one of the legs, rips off the arm, rip[s] off the head, and you see all the blood and gore going down the tube. It is enough to change your mind pretty quickly.… [I]n the case of a second trimester abortion, you know, it’s very hard to understand how people trained as physicians, people trained to save lives can put these forceps into the uterus and grab something and just twist it and pull it out. It’s just hard to imagine. You know, out comes a shoulder. Out comes the intestine. I mean, I don’t understand how you can do that after taking the Hippocratic Oath.”
Advances in ultrasound technology, Perkins agreed, is one of the tools that got America to this point — along with prayer, political engagement, and a movement that refused to quit. In a speech to the Louisiana GOP’s Victory 2022 convention Friday, the Family Research Council president explained that “Technology provided a window to the womb that showed the world the miracle of life, refuting the lies of the Left that it was ‘just a clump of cells.’” But it was also, he went on, “an army of compassionate volunteers who funded and established care pregnancy centers and adoption agencies that helped change the hearts and minds of women and the nation.” Most importantly, though, it was the “relentless engagement by pro-life Americans.”
Now, Carson insists, those pro-life Americans have their work cut out for them. “It’s not enough to just say, ‘We won, we got this thing reversed.’ We have to think about those mothers who find themselves, in many cases, in very difficult situations. … And if, in fact, we’re going to … make it more difficult for them [to get abortions], what we should be thinking about is how do we make their lives and their decisions more palatable by providing real options for them.” It’s time for adoption reform, he urged, “because it’s expensive. The hurdles are immense. It’s a difficult process.”
In most cases, Carson argued, mothers “don’t want to give their baby up, but they need some support. And we need to be able to get them on their feet so that they can teach themselves to be self-sufficient and teach their children to be so.”
At the end of the day, that’s the role of “Americans, of churches, of people of faith — not the government,” Perkins insisted.
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
