#668 - Peace & Life: Dobbs Anniversary / Pro-life 3.0- June 23, 2023
June 24: Dobbs Decision First Anniversary
The decision says: "The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, are overruled; the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Our headline covering the story last year: “Major Obstacle Removed.” We knew very well that this is all we achieved, and we have plenty of work to do. After all, we’ve also achieved making nuclear weapons explicitly illegal internationally, and that doesn’t seem to have done the trick either. But such is the nature of social change: removing obstacles allows more work to be done.
More Work to be Done
Abortion bans are in some states and not in others, and this will be true for some time. The pro-life movement clearly needs to focus on social policies that remove pressures for abortion (and which we also care about for stopping poverty, racism, and euthanasia). Especially noteworthy movement along these lines, worth sharing with others:
PostRoeFuture.com – signed by several prominent pro-lifers. This was published January 19, 2023. Suggested policies include: accessible and affordable health care, expanded child tax credits, paid parental leave, flexible work hours, affordable child care, and prenatal child support laws.
Make Birth Free: A Vision for Congress to Empower American Mothers, Families and Communities is a White Paper by Americans United for Life and our member group Democrats for Life of America (DFLA). It explains the need for measures to fund obstetrics – prenatal care and birth. One suggestion is to expand Medicare (as a precedent, this was done with end-stage renal disease). DFLA is reporting progress in meeting with legislators to get this moved in the U.S. Congress.
Our Latest Blog Post
Reflecting on her interactions with Quakers, Rachel MacNair is Applying Pacifist Insights to Abortion.
Quotation of the Week
Charles Camosy
Religious News Service, June 27, 2022
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision officially out and Roe and Casey no more, America’s pro-life movements enter phase 3.0 . . .
Pro-life 1.0, which has been documented in Daniel K. Williams’ magisterial book “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade,” was a politically complex movement, coming primarily neither from the right nor from the left. It drew significant strength from Catholics opposed to both the violence of the Vietnam War and the violence of abortion.
Pro-life 2.0 appeared in the late 1970s and early ’80s, formed when evangelical Christians joined a “fusionist” Republican coalition: Working-class religious folks (including so-called Reagan Democrats), small government libertarians and foreign-policy hawks. This made for some strange bedfellows.
With Dobbs, we now have Pro-life 3.0, a movement that finds itself, post-Roe, free to be much more politically creative and nimble, particularly as it works to support women and protect prenatal children at the state level. This task is less prone to fall into the toxic left-right, life-choice fights to the death we have seen at the federal level.