Today marks the fourth anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that overturned fifty years of constitutionally dubious precedent and returned the question of abortion to the democratic deliberation of the American people. It is a moment worth pausing to examine honestly — not with the triumphalism that sometimes tempts the victorious, nor with the despair that sometimes afflicts the honest observer. It demands, rather, the kind of sober analysis that has characterized the best of the American political tradition.
The results, four years on, are mixed. And the honest pro-life movement owes it to itself to understand why.
Let me begin with a historical observation. When the temperance movement achieved its great constitutional victory with the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, the reformers could be forgiven for believing they had won. The Constitution had been changed. Federal law now prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages. The long moral campaign of Carry Nation and Frances Willard had achieved its ultimate legislative expression. And yet within a decade, the law was being systematically evaded. Speakeasies multiplied. Organized crime built an empire on the distribution of prohibited goods. The culture had not moved with the law. It had moved against it.
The prohibition analogy is imperfect — important moral distinctions exist between the temperance cause and the defense of unborn life — but its structure is instructive. Law without cultural undergirding is law without enforcement. And enforcement without consent is law without permanence.
Consider what four years of post-Dobbs America has produced. Abortion rates in the United States are not declining. By every serious measure, they are increasing. The pro-life movement's own leaders have said so publicly. This is not a matter of contested data. It is an acknowledged fact. Blue states have fashioned what their legislators call "shield laws" — statutory instruments that permit abortion providers within their borders to mail abortifacient pills into states where the procedure has been restricted. According to a report issued this month by a pro-life research organization, nearly 330,000 abortion pills have been shipped from blue states into abortion-restricting states since 2023. The law of one sovereign reaches across the territorial border of another through the mechanism of interstate commerce.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who understood the genius and the peril of American democratic self-governance better than most native-born commentators, warned that democratic societies tend to centralize power not through open tyranny but through the gradual absorption of local authority into distant administrative and commercial structures. The abortion pill fulfills Tocqueville's warning almost perfectly: a product developed, approved, marketed, and shipped through national commercial networks, rendering the democratic choices of individual state populations effectively unenforceable. The people of Mississippi voted, through their elected representatives, to restrict abortion. But the pharmaceutical and logistics infrastructure of the national economy does not recognize state borders.
This is not merely a legal problem. It is a civilizational one. And it admits of no purely legal solution.
What the pro-life movement did correctly was this: it fought for decades, with remarkable patience, to correct a constitutional error. Roe v. Wade was a fabrication. Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in 1973 discovered in the penumbras of the Fourteenth Amendment a right to abortion that had gone unnoticed by every preceding court for 186 years of constitutional jurisprudence. It was, as even liberal constitutional scholars quietly acknowledged, an act of judicial legislation masquerading as interpretation. The Dobbs majority was right to correct it. The Constitution says what it says, not what progressive judges wish it said. That correction mattered enormously, and it was worth the fifty-year effort it required.
But Thucydides observed, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, that it is the nature of democratic societies to pursue their desires rather than their interests when the two diverge. Athens had achieved unprecedented democratic power. It used that power not to cultivate wisdom but to satisfy appetite. The Athenian assembly at Melos did not ask what was just. It asked what it could do, because it was strong. Strength in the absence of virtue is not stable. Athens fell.
The United States in 2026 has developed an extraordinary technical and commercial capacity to satisfy every appetite the marketplace can serve. The abortion pill fits seamlessly into the same distribution infrastructure as any other pharmaceutical product. It is ordered online, delivered in unmarked packaging, consumed in private. The same civilization that can put a reusable rocket on the moon and deliver groceries in thirty minutes can distribute abortifacients to every zip code in the country. The question of what a civilization should do cannot be answered by its courts alone. It requires a culture that has internalized the answer before the question reaches a judge.
The American founding generation understood this. They placed republican virtue — not in a soft, sentimental sense, but in the classical sense of civic capacity joined to moral seriousness — at the foundation of their constitutional experiment. John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made for "a moral and religious people" and was "wholly inadequate to the government of any other." He was not speaking rhetorically. He was stating a structural requirement. The mechanism of self-governance functions only when the people governed have internalized certain prior commitments: to truth, to the common good, to obligations that exist independently of individual desire.
When a civilization defines the human person primarily as a unit of economic production and personal expression; when marriage rates collapse, birth rates fall below replacement, and children are treated in policy and in culture as an optional life accessory — in such a civilization, the legal protection of unborn life will always be contested, always be under attack, always be reversed the next time the political winds shift.
The pro-life movement's challenge is therefore the challenge that William Wilberforce faced in the British antislavery campaign. Wilberforce was told, repeatedly and by serious people, that his cause was lost. He was told it was politically impossible, economically destructive, culturally untimely. He persisted not because he believed the law would solve the problem, but because he understood that moral reformation required patient institution-building, cultural persuasion, the work of changing what a people valued at the level of their daily lives — in their churches, their homes, their stories about who they were and what they owed to one another.
Dobbs was a necessary correction. It was not a conclusion. The court returned a question to the people. The people must now answer it — not in legislatures alone, but in every domain of culture where the meaning of human life is actually formed.
That is the long work that remains. Russell Kirk called these foundational commitments "the permanent things." They cannot be defended by any court. They must be lived, taught, and argued for, generation after generation, until the culture catches up with the law — or the law will keep losing to the culture.
Four years in. The work has barely begun.
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06.24.2026