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I’m David French, and I’m a columnist at The New York Times, where I write about law and culture. I’m pro-life. I have been a pro-life attorney before I was a columnist. I’ve been involved in the pro-life movement. And I supported the Dobbs decision.
But I am deeply concerned by where we are now, profoundly concerned. The bottom line is, to actually materially decrease the number of abortions in the United States of America, you have to reach people’s hearts. You have to reach people’s minds. It’s not just about reaching the law.
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Since 2016, after years of decline, abortion rates have been creeping up in the United States. And some early numbers show that’s true even after Roe versus Wade was overturned. This increase in abortion should be a jolting wake-up call for the pro-life movement.
Since Dobbs, the pro-life movement has lost time and time again at the ballot box. And so this emphasis on the law was missing something else, something even more profound, and that was the emphasis on culture and, more specifically, on a culture of hope, building and developing a culture of hope in this country so that people will choose to have children even when they live in states, for example, where abortion is legal. And so it is critically important as a pro-life movement, if it wants to reduce the number of abortions, to cultivate a sense of hope.
So when I’m talking about hope, what I’m talking about is this sense that the future is bright, at least to some degree. Having a child is one of the most ultimate expressions of hope that anyone can ever undertake. You’re bringing a new life into this world and raising a child in a nation, in a culture.
This is something that’s saying, I have some sense about the future, that it’s going to be better, that it’s going to be brighter, that I’m investing it in a concrete way. And I drill down on this because America, right now, is in the middle of what you might call a hope crisis.
So there’s an extraordinary wave of depression and anxiety in teens and adults, for example. There was one analysis that said that 44 percent of American 8th, 10th, and 12th graders report feeling, at times, that, quote, “my life is not useful.” Another 48.9 percent said, “I do not enjoy life.”
And it’s interesting. After the marriage rates stabilized in the Obama administration, they plunged again during the Trump administration. We saw continued increases in depression and anxiety during the Trump administration. This is not an emotional state where people are eager to move forward and to have children, necessarily, or even to get married. So measure after measure after measure is saying that Americans right now do not feel that sense of hope that’s necessary, in many ways, to form a family.
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One thing that is absolutely certain is that post-Dobbs, abortion is a extremely polarizing issue in American politics. There is much more attention on it than there was prior to Dobbs. And so, at this point, the pro-life movement is actually under a spotlight to a greater degree than it was.
And quite frankly, in many ways, the pro-life movement was not ready for that white hot glare of public attention. It’s very split. It’s very divided. It’s very fractious. Big parts of it are now completely intertwined within the MAGA movement. And the MAGA movement is not a movement that is known for love. It is not a movement that is known for affection, except for those people who are within its tribe.
And so we’re in, I think, a transitional period right now, post-Dobbs. It’s too soon to tell what the long-term trends will be. But as of right now, it appears that the pro-life movement has lost a lot of ground on persuading Americans to embrace a culture of life.
So how do you do that? One, you have to disentangle yourself from hard-edged, vicious, partisan politics. Number two, you have to replace that hard-edged partisanship with a posture of love and affection, including for people who disagree with you on this issue. Because one of the ways that abortion will be decreased in the United States of America is by reaching pro-choice women and persuading them to have a child, as opposed to aborting a child.
And so there’s no way to a culture of life without reaching hearts and minds. And then, finally, it’s time to think very creatively about, what are the public policies that can increase that level of financial security that young and struggling families have?
I think it is really important to understand that, from a pro-life perspective, the right decision happened when the right was wrong. And this is what I mean. I believe Dobbs was the correct decision as a matter of constitutional law, and the current American right was not ready for this decision.
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