Three years ago today, life won on the steps of the United States Supreme Court. June 24, 2022 brought an eager crowd of pro-lifers the much-awaited release of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The decision was met with a celebration fifty years in the making.
Dobbs ruled 6-3 to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), a pair of rulings with a cumulative death toll of nearly 63 million preborn children. As Dobbs travelled to the Supreme Court in 2021, CWA submitted an Amicus Curiae (friend of the court’s) brief to the Supreme Court expressing the importance of the case to ordinary conservative women:
CWA affirms that ordinary women are capable of extraordinary things when, inspired by the love of God, our families, and our country, they work together. CWA believes it is false to suggest women need abortion to have equality. Moreover, CWA affirms women are not a monolithic group assenting to a homogeneous worldview on any policy issue so that this honorable Court benefits from hearing and giving value to a broad range of women voices in cases such as this one.
CWA’s ordinary women won an extraordinary victory on June 24, 2022. Roe and Casey’s enshrinement of the “right” to an abortion was emphatically overturned. In Dobbs’ majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote authoritatively: “Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” Justice Alito defied fifty years of Roe’s infamously shaky precedent to deliver the American people a constitutionally sound ruling.
Dobbs shattered a once seemingly unbreakable barrier in the pro-life fight. Overnight, thirteen states’ trigger laws went into effect to legislate pro-life protections, and in the years following, the number of states with pro-life laws has risen to 29. A 2023 study found that 30,000 babies’ lives have been saved as a direct result of Dobbs.
Life won, and life is still winning—but the fight for life is far from over. In a statement the day of the fall of Roe, CWA CEO and President Penny Nance, said:
Concerned Women for America and Young Women for America leaders and activists are ready to continue the fight for the unborn at the state level and work with legislators to make sure our law reflects the voice of the people through the democratic process. Truly, the pro-life movement’s work has just begun, but this decision is a huge step toward CWA’s goal of making abortion unthinkable.
Three years later, the work is still just beginning in the wake of victory. With a pro-life Republican trifecta in Washington D.C., tangible next steps in the fight to make abortion unthinkable are within reach.
Step one: Defunding Big Abortion. If the President’s One Big Beautiful Reconciliation Bill is signed into law, the abortion industry would be dealt a crippling blow. Measures in the bill would “defund” Big Abortion off of Medicaid dollars for ten years, ending the forced taxpayer funding of the nation’s largest abortion corporations. Abortion industry giant Planned Parenthood reported that two hundred abortion clinics would close if the One Big Beautiful Bill succeeds in stripping their corporation of $800 million in annual taxpayer support.
When Big Abortion is shuttered for good, moms, babies, and families will get the authentic healthcare they need to thrive. In the United States, churches and pro-lifers operate 2,700 Pregnancy Resource Centers to fill in the gaps where moms need free, compassionate help. Adoptive families are waiting with arms and hearts wide open, and underserved communities across the United States, both rural and urban, can access prenatal care, sexual healthcare, and general healthcare services at any one of 19,000 Federally Qualified Health Centers across the nation.
The heart of the pro-life movement is compassion, care, and support for mom and baby; in the post-Roe era, pro-lifers are more ready than ever to welcome babies into the world.
Step Two: Cracking down on mail-order abortion drugs and mifepristone trafficking. When pro-life states legislated pro-life protections for the unborn after the Dobbs decision, the pro-abortion left found a sinister loophole: trafficking abortion drugs via mail over state lines. In addition to ending the life of an unborn child, the abortion pill is often ineffective and sometimes deadly, causing life-threatening bleeding, infection, or other life-threatening complications in women.
Step Three: Mitigating abortion tourism. In the post-Roe United States, pro-abortion states boast themselves as “abortion sanctuary states.” Abortion-minded women in pro-life states often travel to these states—Illinois, New York, California, and Washington D.C., for example—to purchase abortions.
Dobbs explicitly returns the abortion issues back to the people and their elected representatives—state and federal. Since before the Dobbs decision, abortions per year have increased by 11% and several states have passed extreme abortion allowances through ballot referenda. In the new Dobbs era, preborn children must have a federal, constitutional right to life from conception. The right to life should not be determined by state lines or public opinion, but by clear, life-affirming federal protections. Humanity is not determined by geography.
Three years on from Dobbs, CWA is confident in the sanctity of human life and steadfast in achieving a day when abortion is unthinkable. It is a biological and Biblical fact that human life begins at conception. Whether boy or girl, abled or disabled, expected or unexpected, every preborn child—zygote, embryo, and fetus—bears the full dignity inherent in the Imago Dei. The preborn must be awarded their God-ordained and constitutionally promised right to life.
The pro-life movement celebrated a hard-fought victory when the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs. Justice Alito returned one of our nation’s most pressing humanitarian crises back into the hand of the American people—a great and heavy responsibility. The work has just begun, and with the joy of remembering Dobbs, CWA will work until the day when no child or woman faces the violence of abortion.