Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and newly-appointed member of the Religious Liberty Commission, told attendees of the 54th Heartbeat International Annual Conference on Friday, May 2, “The very first thing I think we always have to say when we acknowledge the reality after Dobbs is that there are little children who are living and breathing and walking and talking and starting to learn how to tell jokes precisely because of Dobbs”.
However, as a Washington insider (“in the swamp, but not of it,” he said) Anderson sees disturbing trends that reveal the Dobbs decision has not erased the half-century of damage done by Roe v Wade. He went on to discuss both the negative impacts on law, politics, public opinion, and culture at large, while also proposing solutions to heal Roe’s fallout.
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Assessing the post-Dobbs landscape
“The law is a teacher, as Aristotle said, and the law taught for 50 years that women have a right to choose and that we have no duties to the unborn,” Anderson said. A disappointing trend has seen new state laws passed to protect life, only to be overturned by ballot initiatives a few months later.
Therefore, to bring lasting change on the legal front, he said, “Our goal needs to be not simply [to pass] the most protective law that's passable today, but the most protective law that can withstand the efforts to repeal it.” At the same time, Anderson sees opportunities for the Trump administration to make significant change by “undoing every pro-abortion action” of the Biden administration.
On the political front, Anderson said the post-Dobbs silence of purportedly pro-life Republicans reveals an insincere commitment to the cause.
“The main vice that we're seeing right now is cowardice from some people in the political class who aren't willing to speak up boldly and courageously in defense of life,” he said. “Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. Every human being deserves the law’s protection. That has to be a bedrock principle of the political class.”
Tweet This: We're seeing cowardice from some in the political class who aren't willing to speak boldly & courageously in defense of life
Hoping to “give some of our officials in D.C. a new arrow for their quiver,” the Ethics and Public Policy Center, of which Anderson is president, released its report, The Abortion Pill Harms Women on April 28, only days before Anderson delivered his conference keynote. The report revealed that the true rate of adverse effects on women who took the abortion pill is 22 times higher than the FDA has previously claimed.
The study analyzed data from an industry-wide health insurance database containing 865,727 chemical abortion cases of “real women in real clinical settings who are prescribed the abortion pill,” he said. “10.93 percent of them, that's virtually one in nine women, suffered a serious adverse event...like sepsis or hemorrhaging.” Half of those women had to go to the emergency room for treatment. (The full report is available here.)
“Women deserve to know the truth about what they are risking when they take these chemical abortion drugs,” Anderson said. “So, what we're calling on the Trump FDA to do is simply to make good on the promises of ‘make America healthy again.’ A drug that causes one in nine women to suffer serious adverse events is not making those women healthy. A drug that kills virtually all of the babies that are exposed to it is not making those babies healthy.”
Anderson said he believes the report “can help change the narrative” that developed under Roe. Currently, he said, “public opinion is not with us.”
He cited a Gallup poll that indicated a record 69 percent of Americans approve of legal abortions in the first three months, with 34 percent approving of abortion in any circumstance. And for the generation of 18 to 29-year-olds, those most likely to have abortions, 83 percent support first-trimester abortion.
“More and more people now realize they have skin in the game, in the sense that they may be denied their abortion,” Anderson said. “When the moment of decision comes and they're in the ballot box, even if in their heart they know that abortion is wrong, they vote to protect their access to abortion.”
Anderson said that mindset is the pro-life movement’s biggest challenge: “people who know that abortion stops a beating heart but are okay with it.”
Facing the challenge
“To help change hearts and minds, we would actually have to enlarge in how we engage on this,” he said, which calls for a broader focus.
While he noted that “every state that passed a pro-life law prohibiting abortion also passed meaningful supports to the mothers and their children,” Anderson said these economic measures may not address the underlying reason women seek abortions. “Non-marital sex is the main cause of abortion,” he said, as evidenced by statistics that show 87 percent of women who have abortions are unmarried, while only 13 percent are married.
“It wasn't just the bad constitutional law of Roe that corrupted our nation,” Anderson said. “It was three generations of the sexual revolution that Roe allowed to fester and to then catechize us and to then habituate us into unhealthy sexual practices. So long as non-marital sex is expected, large numbers of American will view an abortion as necessary; they'll treat it like emergency contraception.”
He proposed that the United States needs a pro-chastity movement and a pro-marriage movement as vigorous as the pro-life movement. He commended pregnancy centers for already doing some of that work: “You're providing [women] with the support and the care they need, but you're also helping them think through ‘How did you get in this situation to begin with,’ and ‘What choices can you make differently to not come back here two or three years?’”
He recommended that the new movements focus first on churchgoers. When only 10 percent of Catholics and 7 percent of Protestants are virgins on their wedding days, Anderson said, “The church is going to have to convince Christians of living out a Christian sexual ethic before we can convince the rest of society.”
Further, he observed, a successful defense of life will require teamwork.
“This needs to be a hallmark of the prolife movement: the charity that we have for the women that we serve, for the babies that we want to protect, but also for each other.”
Finally, Anderson pointed out that abortion “is primarily a spiritual issue.”
“The imago Dei is not optional, and our defense of the imago Dei is not optional,” he said. “The deepest reason for our dignity and the foundation of every civilization is the imago Dei. And the people helping our neighbors grasp this truth are the people in this room.”
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages Pregnancy Help News.
