Anti-abortion activists will have several reasons to celebrate — and some reasons to be uneasy — as they gather in Washington on Friday for the annual March for Life.
The march, which includes a rally attended by anti-abortion activists from around the country, has been held annually since January 1974, a year after the US Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade established a national right to abortion abortion.
This year’s meeting – 50 years after that decision – will be the first since The Supreme Court struck down Roe in a momentous judgment last June.
Since then, 12 Republican-ruled states have introduced sweeping abortion bans, and several others are moving toward the same thing. But these moves were offset by other developments. Anti-abortion opponents were defeated in electoral votes in Kansas, Michigan and Kentucky. State courts have blocked several bans. And countless Efforts are being made to help women In states that prohibit abortion, either have abortions performed outside of the state or use the abortion pill for self-administered abortions.
“It’s almost like the old, wild, wild west…everything is still faltering,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Committee on the Right to Life.
As numerous democratically governed states take steps to protect and expand access to abortion, Tobias compared the current situation to the pre-Civil War era, when the nation was tightly divided between free states and slave states.
“I won’t be surprised if we have something like this for a few more years,” she said. “But I know pro-lifers aren’t going to give up — it’s a civil rights issue for us.”
The theme of this year’s March for Life is “Next Steps: Marching Forward into a Post-Roe America”. Scheduled speakers include Hall of Fame football coach Tony Dungy and Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who won the Supreme Court case in which Roe was overthrown.
March for Life President Jeanne Mancini called the June verdict “a massive victory for the pro-life movement.”
“But the struggle to build a culture of life is far from over,” she said. “March for Life will continue to advocate for the unborn and policies to protect them until abortion becomes unthinkable.”
The prospects for a federal law restricting abortion nationwide are negligible for now, as any such action emerging from the Republican-led House of Representatives would face opposition in the Democratic-led Senate. The main battlefields will be in the States.
Since June, near-total abortion bans have been imposed in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. Court challenges are pending against several of these bans.
Elective abortions are also unavailable in Wisconsin due to legal uncertainties faced by abortion clinics, and in North Dakota, where the only clinic has moved to Minnesota.
Bans enacted by state legislators in Ohio, Indiana and Wyoming have been blocked by state courts while legal challenges are pending. And in South Carolina, the The Supreme Court lifted a ban on January 5 ordering the restriction violates a state’s constitutional right to privacy.
The Guttmacher Institute, a research group that advocates for abortion rights, says the overall result is “a chaotic legal landscape that is disruptive to providers trying to provide care and patients trying to receive it.”
“When people don’t have access to abortion treatment in their state, they are forced to make the difficult decision of traveling long distances for treatment, having an abortion themselves, or carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term,” said Guttmacher collaborators Elizabeth Nash and Isabel Guarnieri wrote last week.
Looking ahead, some anti-abortion leaders are hoping Republicans will nominate a 2024 presidential candidate who will aggressively push for nationwide abortion restrictions, rather than leaving it as a state-by-state matter.
“The approach, tried and tested for a decade, to winning abortions in federal races is this: Make clear the ambitious consensus position on passing and contrast that with the extreme view of Democratic opponents,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro- Life America.
Dannenfelser says she is not surprised by the divisive ups and downs that have unfolded since the June verdict.
“This is what it looks like when democracy is restored and we have a voice in the debate,” she said. “For 50 years we had no voice because the judiciary always wanted to protect public opinion from interfering with the law.”
“We always knew it wasn’t going to be a straight line (after Roe’s repeal),” she said, adding, “We know neither side is going to lie down and die.”
Several public opinion polls since June have found that a majority of Americans support access to legal abortion. According to a July poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 53% of US adults said they disapproved of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe, while 30% supported it.
Professor Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, suggested that the anti-abortion movement may suffer from many Americans’ perception that they are more concerned with controlling women’s bodies , than helping them cope with unwanted pregnancies.
“It’s more about consolidating their political power than babies,” she said.
Some anti-abortionists try to counter such perceptions. In Texas, for example, anti-abortion groups are urging lawmakers to spend more money on services for pregnant and parenting Texans, including expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers.
According to Texas Right to Life, the state’s new abortion ban has had a major impact — it says only 68 abortions were registered by state health officials in July 2022, compared to 4,879 in July 2021.
The group noted that the data does not include illegal, unreported abortions — which are widely believed to be increasing as women receive abortion pills in the mail from overseas or from Mexican suppliers.
Charles Camosy, an anti-abortion professor of medical humanities at Creighton University School of Medicine, analyzed this high-profile electoral defeats suffered from the anti-abortion movement. Voters in Kansas and Kentucky rejected constitutional amendments that would have declared abortion illegal; Michigan voters approved an amendment that enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution.
“Pro-lifers have clearly and badly lost the PR battle since June, and that has shaped people’s voting patterns,” Camosy said via email. He said abortion advocates are better organized and better funded, while many anti-abortion politicians either avoid the issue or sound too extreme.
“However, obviously very good things have happened,” Camosy added, citing the decline in abortions reported in states with bans.
“Pro-lifers also now relish the opportunity to actually discuss the issues in a democratic, open context…rather than constantly being confronted with the injunctions of different courts,” he said. “We may lose some battles early on… but it’s worth having the debates.”
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