“Children are currently celebrating birthdays … they’re learning to talk right now. They’re there. They’re telling jokes, they’re giggling, they’re walking, all because the Dobbs decision allowed certain states to have pro-life laws to go into effect that would protect these unborn babies, that would serve their mothers.” – Ryan T. Anderson

This quote from Ryan T. Anderson reminds us that, in the midst of what can seem like a daunting battle against expanding abortion, little blessings crawling around throughout the country represent clear victories along the way.

Anderson, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and co-author of Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothingjoined us for a webinar earlier this week on the pro-life way forward. Listen to it in full here.

Anderson laid out eight points he sees the pro-life movement must address in a post Dobbs landscape:

1-Incremental Changes

The overturning of Roe did not take us back to 1973. Fifty years and several generations living under Roe taught Americans to believe they have a right to abortion and that unborn babies have no rights, points out Anderson, “So, while Dobbs did important work to repair the damage to our constitutional order, it couldn’t erase a half century of political and social and cultural corruption. Which is simply to say that we all are incrementalist.”

Anderson says we have to be wise about what laws we try to pass, “Our goal needs to be not simply the most protective law that’s possible today, but the most protective law that can withstand efforts to repeal it.”

The goal is to use new endurable laws to shape public opinion.

2-Courageous Politicians

Without the protection (of sorts) of Roe, the so-called pro-life political elites show their true colors. They are unwilling to lead the nation in a life-honoring direction. We have seen many fall silent under the weight of the hottest of topics.

Still, Anderson points to many truly committed pro-life politicians, “By contrast, not a single pro-life elected official has lost reelection. Each and every time a pro-life politician has gone up for reelection, they’ve sailed to reelection. And if you look at the governors who signed pink capable bills and heartbeat bills into law, they all sailed to reelection.”

Anderson says courageous pro-life politicians can use their leverage to counter the pro-abortion message from activists and the news media, “It’s much easier for a senator or a governor to have access to the media, to have a press conference, to be able to push back on the lies. And unfortunately, in too many states we lacked the political leadership from governors, from senators, from congressmen, from state-elected officials to really use their bully pulpit to push back.”

Anderson says cowardice is prevalent this election year, “Many of our political leaders are simply retreating from the battlefield. Yes, it’s true. We need to win elections, but we need to win elections without throwing the pro-life cause under the bus.”

3-Public Opinion Reality

We need statesmen to boldly stand for life, for one, Anderson says, because they shape public opinion, “Pro-lifers, for the most part, were locked out of or were forced to be silent inside of most elite sectors of society. The one elite sector of society where you can be a pro-lifer and not get your head chopped off is politics. And particularly the Republican Party of politics. And we need those people to be speaking out intelligently, compassionately, boldly, persuasively to shift public opinion.”

Unfortunately, most Americans support elective abortions at least during the first trimester. Given the choice between no abortion or abortion throughout pregnancy, abortion wins. Anderson points out that even those we expect to support life, vote for radical abortion amendments.

Anderson says, “Polling from Ohio showed that one third of voters who went to church at least once a week. A record high 69% of Americans say abortion should be generally legal in the first three months of pregnancy. It’s also the case that a record high, 34% say abortion should be legal under any circumstance. A record high, 52% say that abortion is morally acceptable, and that’s ten points higher than what the historical average had been.”

4-Skin in the Game

Dobbs forced Americans to face the consequences of their pro-life claims. Anderson says, “Pre- Dobbs no one had skin in the game in terms of being denied an abortion. So, it was easier to abstractly affirm the dignity of the child in the womb when it wouldn’t cost anything in terms of choice being limited or denied because Roe prevented it from costing anything.”

He points out that now, even pro-lifers have to count the cost of being pro-life, and it’s an ugly truth, “So rape, incest, life of the mother, and in my case, or my daughter’s case or my girlfriend’s case. For 50 years, Americans, they built their lives around the ready availability of abortion. And so even when people know that abortions stop a beating heart, for a certain percentage, they just don’t care, or they aren’t willing to make the personal sacrifices required to care and realize it. And the reason why is that they’ve built their sexual lives around the reality of not caring about that child in the womb.”

5-A Broader Focus

Because sexual habits drive the support for abortion, Anderson says, “The pro-life movement needs to be as well-versed in how abortion harms women, how it harms people on the periphery of life, people with disabilities, how it harms unborn baby girls, how it harms racial minorities, how it has harmed the practice of medicine, how it’s undermined politics, the rule of law, how it’s harmed the culture, how it harms the economy, etc., so that we could paint a broader picture of what the underlying problems with abortion are, beyond killing the baby.”

Anderson points to the fact that, “Every state that has laws on the books protecting life in the womb also passed laws that expanded support for pregnant mothers, for new mothers, and for their newly delivered babies.”

He says we need to learn to craft these types of laws in a way that don’t undermine the institution of marriage.

6-Money and Institutions

Because of the sexual revolution’s hardening effect on hearts and minds regarding life, Anderson says we need new institutions that are more “pro-sexual sanity,” not just pro-life movement, “So long as non-marital sex is expected, abortion will be viewed as emergency contraception. And so, the biggest challenge we face is not so much persuading people about the humanity of the unborn. That’s important work. But to my mind, the even deeper work is changing how people lead their sexual lives.”

Anderson admits the pro-life movement is outspent at the state ballot initiatives, national groups, and foundations. He challenges those God has blessed with resources to make meaningful gifts and, “Really think carefully about how you go about your philanthropic life.”

7-Teamwork

Anderson calls on pro-life groups to stop the “circular firing squad” and work together; instead of competing, collaborate and build partnerships, “My advice is that as much as possible, we need to stop attacking each other. Our disagreements, we need to work out privately. Pick up the phone. Have a Zoom call. Fly to town. Sit down together to work it out so that we can have common strategies. There just aren’t enough of us, and there aren’t enough resources to be wasting any time or treasure on disagreements internally.”

8-A Bigger Picture

After a lot of talk about strategy and politics, Anderson turns to the bigger picture, “We need to see abortion not primarily as a political issue or a legal issue, but first and foremost as a spiritual issue, which means the church really needs to find its voice. Whether or not we’re going to defend the truth about the human being made in the image and likeness of God cannot be optional. And I think this really means that the church needs to find her voice.”

Polling shows 70% of women who have had abortions identify as Christian; 36% of those women attend church at least once a month. Of them, most said their church had no influence on their decision to have an abortion.

Anderson appealed to churches to think through their role in terms of teaching and ministering to their members in a systematic and systemic way regarding the sanctity of life, “And it needs to start when children are young and it needs to be not just on the pro-life question, but the child in the womb… How do we understand ourselves as creatures made in the image and likeness of God as creatures made a male or female, where men and women are created for each other, not for one-night stands, not for the hookup culture; but for marriage? It strikes me that that is the key question right now and that ultimately, it’s a spiritual question and that ultimately, we need the church to find its voice.”

Anderson expounded upon each of these points in the webinar, and Pastor Seth Troutt from Ironwood Church also joined me for the discussion. Please listen here to the webinar in whole. You will be glad you did.

ICYMI:

• Read here for critical information about Arizona’s extreme abortion amendment in the It Goes Too Far campaign’s op-ed in The Republic.
• Watch here where the It Goes Too Far campaign answer questions about Prop 139 on PBS’s AZ Horizon.
• Read here how a news story designed to scare voters into passing extreme abortion measures actually shows how dangerous the abortion pill is for women and girls.