By Stephen P. White

For the better part of two generations, the pro-life movement in the United States was galvanized by a shared commitment to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Thanks to the Dobbs decision of 2022, Roe is now gone, and abortion policy in the United States has been returned to the democratic process.

If Dobbs represented a generational legal victory for the pro-life movement, the ensuing two years have also revealed some of the massive political and cultural obstacles facing the pro-life cause. Just a few months after Dobbs, a pro-life amendment to the state constitution was defeated in Kansas setting off a string of similar defeats on various amendments and ballot measures in California, Michigan, Vermont, Ohio, Kentucky, and Montana.

A predictable loss in, say, California is one thing. A string of losses in heavily Republican states is something else entirely. Not surprisingly, these trends have made many politicians skittish.

If principled commitment to defending life (or at least to overturning Roe) was once seen as a winning position for many Republicans, some of those same politicians (including, it seems, Donald Trump who has said he would not sign a federal abortion ban if elected) have more recently discerned that restricting abortion through the democratic process is something of a political liability.

How all of this will play out in the months between now and November's election remains to be seen. At least three more states have abortion-related initiatives on the ballot for November. For now the pro-life cause seems to be on its political heels. What seems clear is that, to recover its footing in the post-Dobbs environment, the pro-life movement has its work cut out for it.

Catholics, of course, have a great deal to contribute to that work. One issue of particular importance will be inevitable (and inevitably messy) questions about how to balance an unequivocal commitment to the defense of every innocent human life - to which there can be no exceptions in principle - with the practical need to work through a democratic process in which the enactment of such total legal protections might be impossible, at least for the foreseeable future.

In his 1993 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II was unambiguous: to posit a supposed "right to abortion" as an expression of human freedom is to negate human freedom itself.

To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom: "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin." (John 8:34)

For years, this declaration was sufficient to demonstrate the illegitimacy of Catholic support for a "right" to abortion as imagined by Roe and its defenders. (Obviously, it didn't convince all Catholics, and many simply rejected the Church's defense of life in principle, but that is a different matter.)

Insofar as Roe short-circuited the democratic process - moving responsibility for abortion law from elected legislatures to judicial fiat - efforts to contain the abortion license legislatively, at the state or federal level, were severely curtailed under Roe.

Principled opposition to the fiction of abortion as a right remains the only option for Catholics, but the work of writing and passing actual abortion legislation admits of no such easy clarity.

And so in the complicated and shifting post-Roe era in which we find ourselves, it is worth remembering that in the same encyclical in which Pope John Paul II categorically rejected support for "a right to abortion" he also endorsed the prudence of a kind of incrementalist approach to protecting life through the (always imperfect) political process.

It's worth quoting him at length.

A particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage ...