Building An Enduring Majority for Life in the States

BIO: Clarke Forsythe is Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life, where he has worked for 40 years, and author of Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade (2009) and co-author and Alexandra DeSanctis of Pushing Roe v. Wade Over the Brink (2023).  

The Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court in June 2022 was a complete victory in overturning Roe v. Wade. Dobbs thoroughly repudiated Roe in strong terms, erased the false history that the Court through Roe imposed for 49 years, and gave our Nation back its legal and cultural heritage protecting women and children from elective abortion. For the first time in Supreme Court history, the Court explained why no right to elective abortion is rooted in our law or history and demonstrated in great detail how the states expanded legal protection for prenatal human beings in the 19th and 20th centuries. Dobbs returned full authority to the states to protect prenatal human beings at all stages of development. 

The clarity of Dobbs enabled many states to act immediately to enforce legal limits on elective abortion. By stating several times in strong language that elective abortion is, by virtue of the Constitution, an issue for the states, the Supreme Court decisively returned the issue to the states. Considering (1) that years of Gallup polling data showed that a majority of Americans supported abortion rights before 12 weeks, while a majority supported legal limits after 12 weeks, (2) that many states acted immediately to enforce their laws, and (3) that 19 states are now enforcing early gestational limits (at 12 weeks or less), the cause for life was as ready as public sentiment permitted. The negative impact of Roe on American culture was real. 

The Presidency and the Congress have limited constitutional authority to affect a solution to elective abortion (or other life issues). The place to effectively build an enduring majority for life is in the states, which have broad police powers to protect the “health, safety, morals and general welfare,” which the Dobbs Court reaffirmed. This was confirmed as well by the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision in June 2025, which upheld Tennessee’s law prohibiting the administration of “puberty blockers and hormones to minor 81s for certain medical uses.” 

As all have witnessed since Dobbs, there has been a significantly different outcome between representative government and direct democracy on the issue of abortion. Several states passed ballot initiatives while pro-life governors and legislators in those states who supported early gestational limits were largely reelected. Through elected government, the cause for life has done well. But we have lost 15 of 18 ballot initiatives. Though many states have no legal mechanism for a ballot initiative passed directly by the people, ballot initiatives will continue to be a threat in some states. 

With Dobbs, the dominant control of the abortion issue has moved after 49 years from the Supreme Court to public sentiment. Abraham Lincoln often referred to the power of “public sentiment,” by which he meant public convictions. Lincoln and his anti-slavery allies used majority rule to shape public sentiment on slavery in the 1850s. Majorities are not permanent. Legislative bills and debates, public campaigns, and electoral races can be effective tools to change public sentiment. 

A brighter spotlight should be focused on the risks of chemical abortion, the prevalence of coerced abortion, and the availability of better alternatives through pregnancy resource centers. While important, the wonder of prenatal development will not turn around public opinion alone, because that is not the only factor that influences pregnancy decision-making in American culture. 

As the cause for life has done for more than 50 years, we should continue to disavow prosecuting women for abortion as horribly unrealistic and counter-productive. Since Roe, the long-standing trend, starting in the mid-19th century, has grown to the point where virtually all 50 states now have a policy—by judicial decision or legislation or both—of exempting women and focusing the penalties of the law on the proprietors, providers, and performers. 

Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story, Hills Like White Elephants, portrays the subtle ways in which men coerce women into abortion. It reminds us why we must shine the spotlight on the reality of coerced abortion. The prevalence of coerced abortion, and the moral implications, are too little understood. That reality challenges deep-seated assumptions on the Left and the Right. Why would any woman coerced into an abortion “shout her abortion”? And women who are coerced aren’t using abortion as “birth control.” 

Pro-life and pro-abortion states are being compared by how women flourish. Every pro-life state should publish an annual Women’s Wellness Index of health and socioeconomic data. The data are necessary to make the public argument in support of legal limits. There’s reason to be optimistic that women will flourish in states where abortion is prohibited. Dr. Ingrid Skop of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, for example, has argued that abortion limits could lead to improvements in women’s health by reducing the number of elective abortions and their risks. 

At the same time, we need to prevent erosion of the protection for human life by euthanasia or assisted suicide, or the erosion of human dignity through new biotechnologies that are applied in negative ways. We cannot hope to increase protection for human life in the areas of abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide while the protection of human dignity is eroding from new biotechnologies for which, for example, consumers are denied fully informed consent. 

Success will also require that we organize and work locally to shape our State’s culture and to build organizations that provide alternatives to abortion, care for the terminally and chronically ill, and shape elections. 

Because the negative impact of Roe on law and culture and public opinion was real and severe for 49 years, we will need to persevere for generations to reverse that impact and secure an enduring majority for life. 

Our Nation is starting to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of our nation. This anniversary is an invaluable opportunity in the public square to connect the Declaration that launched the United States to the “unalienable right” to life, and the equal dignity of human beings. The cause for life can speak into our divided society with an ethic of respect for every human being. 

For six decades, the cause for life has survived numerous downturns and rebounded to persevere in overturning Roe v. Wade despite the opposition of many powerful elites in American society, including a series of presidential administrations from 1992-2025. With prayer and prudence, we can persevere with hope.