From The Declaration To Dobbs: The Unfinished Pro-Life Work

Four years ago, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, ending nearly 50 years of Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.

Roe had been based on an absurd lie, one that turned the American founding on its head. The Declaration of Independence, the very first words our nation spoke, states unequivocally that every human being is equal from the moment of his or her creation, and is endowed by God with an inalienable right to life that all governments are bound to protect.

Roe read the Constitution in the opposite direction, requiring states and the federal government to actively deny the right to life to unborn human beings. As a result, more than 60 million American children were killed.

Dobbs ended that era of constitutional interpretation, but it didn’t stop the deaths. Since the end of Roe, abortions in America are up, not down, rising most recently to more than 1.1 million each year. That’s about 200,000 more than in the final years of Roe v. Wade.

One reason for the increase: Biden changed federal regulations of abortion-inducing drugs, as part of what courts have characterized as an intentional strategy to undermine pro-life states. Now, activists in blue states can prescribe and ship these pills to “patients” in pro-life states whom they have never even seen or examined — including abusers who are poisoning women with these abortion drugs or coercing them into taking them.

Most Congressional Republicans and most pro-life states have called for the Biden rules to be scrapped. It’s easy to understand the urgency: many states with strong pro-life laws on the books now have more abortions within their borders each year than they did under Roe v. Wade.

But the federal government has been slow to act and is actively fighting lawsuits trying to force a change. Why? Because many federal officials feel that, after Dobbs, protecting life is no longer their problem.

Some still mistakenly believe that the Constitution forbids the federal government from recognizing or protecting unborn children’s right to life in any way. Because of this, they view federal pro-life action with deep suspicion. States, they argue, are the only ones with the authority to protect the right to life — and should be free to choose whether to protect it or whether to attack and deny it without any limitation: even up until birth, or even across state lines.

This maximalist “states-only” position simply isn’t what the Constitution, or Dobbs, says. The Constitution allows states to protect life, but it doesn’t forbid the federal government from trying to do so, too. The 14th Amendment, in fact, explicitly charges Congress with the duty and authority to ensure the equal protection of the laws and to ensure that no state deprives anyone of life, liberty, or property without due process.

Contrary to a pure states-only view, the Dobbs decision left every existing federal protection of the unborn — including a federal ban on partial-birth abortion — completely intact. As Justice Kavanaugh wrote, the Court, by finding that the Constitution didn’t require abortion, simply returned authority to the people’s elected representatives and the normal democratic process, both in the states and in Congress.

America was founded a quarter-millennium ago on the claim that legitimate governments must secure the God-given rights of every human being.

The party of Lincoln was founded 78 years later to ensure that those rights were protected federally to the maximum extent possible. The signature achievement of America after the Civil War was to put those protections squarely and clearly into the United States Constitution, and to give Congress the authority to enforce them.

The states-only philosophy is the legacy, not of Lincoln or the Founders, but of Jefferson Davis and Stephen A. Douglas. For them, as with the states-only maximalists of today, the height of the American ideal was to give each state perfect freedom to define its own “domestic institutions” however it liked. Whether these institutions were compatible with the God-given rights espoused in the Declaration was deemed immaterial.

We should acknowledge, with Lincoln, that this is a recipe for tyranny under the guise of freedom. The Founders had meant what they said, and they were right. All governments are bound to recognize the inherent and equal rights of every human being. There is no moral right for any government to restrict those basic rights to one favored class of people.

Thanks to Lincoln’s efforts and the Fourteenth Amendment, there’s no Constitutional right for any state to do so, either. Four years after Dobbs and 250 years after the Declaration, it’s time for our leaders to reject the lie that lies at the heart of Roe and to affirm, once again, that all men really are created equal.

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Marjorie Dannenfelser serves as president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. She has been called “the woman who brought down Roe.”