This is pro-life’s Jim Crow moment

It should have been a triumphal achievement.

After nearly a century of dispute, rancor, and bloodshed, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. Abolitionists had labored for decades to end the abominable practice, but they needed the upheaval of the Civil War to cross the finish line. Success followed success: the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed African Americans the rights of due process and franchise. Congress, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, established the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid America’s emancipated citizens in beginning lives of their own.

But these gains were quickly voided by enduring racism and northerners’ reticence to continue fighting. Southern states conspired to prevent African Americans from voting; the KKK formed to terrorize them; segregation in public spaces, declared legal by the Supreme Court, trapped them into second class status. Not even two decades removed from the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification, these Jim Crow laws, as they became known, ensured that African Americans lived as de facto slaves of superior white citizens.

It took almost another century to right the wrongs of Jim Crow. Taking the baton from the Abolitionists, Civil Rights leaders marshalled African American war-time heroics to demand the equality that Reconstruction had failed to secure. Non-violent resistance, public demonstrations, and support from whites committed to racial equality kindled legal victories that culminated in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. Social and cultural recognition of equality stubbornly followed the law after additional generations of defiance.

The arc of history bent unwillingly and unevenly toward justice, but justice prevailed. Ironically, legal equality was granted to African Americans at the same time a new group of Americans began to lose its own.

Abortion suddenly surfaced as a political issue in the 1960s, when it was deemed a necessary Plan B should the newly invented birth control pill fail. Christian denominations and the two political parties were slow to choose sides, yet whoever was advocating for abortion found a consistent message: children in the womb were not human beings worthy of legal protection. They were just a clump of cells who could be discarded as adults willed.

When in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was permissible in all fifty states, unborn children became society’s newest group to suffer legal discrimination.

As it had done in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court eventually reversed its more recent discriminatory ruling in 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson. Each state could set its own abortion policy, the Court ruled, as was the case before 1973. State legislators went to work, either restricting abortion within early pregnancy or enshrining it with legal protections. Between 2022 and 2023, seven states put the issue directly before voters. In each state, red and blue, voters overwhelmingly voted for legal abortion.

This week ten additional states presented referenda on abortion. For the first time, pro-lifers won victories, but three in ten (Nebraska, South Dakota, and Florida, with the latter surviving because it required a 60 percent threshold) is not a record that strikes fear into the opposition. In blue states, abortion supporters won going away: 61 percent voted for abortion in Colorado; in Maryland, a whopping 74 percent did. Missouri’s vote especially stings, for the people rejected their new law, passed by the Republican-led state legislature immediately after Dobbs, that dramatically limited abortion.

The people have spoken, and they are choosing abortion in droves.

Post-Civil War America, deeply entrenched in its white supremacist ways, crafted Jim Crow to prevent African Americans from exercising their constitutional rights. Post-Dobbs America, deeply committed to sexual liberty and individual autonomy, has created its own form of Jim Crow to deny the unborn the same constitutional protection.

Beyond the votes to continue legal discrimination against the unborn, pro-lifers face an additional challenge: the Republican Party, which in 1980 committed itself to fighting abortion, has, like the northerners post-Reconstruction, quit the contest. In 2024, Republican Congressional and Presidential office-seekers, twisting awkwardly in the political winds, swore they would never ban abortion if elected and enumerated circumstances for justifying it. They somehow forgot to mention the old party line that abortion kills an innocent human being.

Pro-lifers now must learn the lessons of their forebearers in the Civil Rights Movement.

First, they must remain committed to their task while recognizing that success will be measured in decades, not electoral cycles. Today’s pro-lifers likely will not see the fruits of their labors. They must understand themselves as links in a lengthy chain whose end they cannot see.

Second, they must focus on their core message, the one Republican politicians have forgotten since Dobbs: children in the womb are human beings, fully alive and worthy of love, regardless of where or how they were conceived. The right to life is the foundation of all other rights whose exercise can never deny the humanity nor the life of another, no matter how small or vulnerable. Politicians tripping over legal exceptions have already lost the argument.

Third, they must use appropriate legal power whenever possible. Civil Rights legislation passed before many Americans were willing to honor it. Hindsight has proven this legislation correct. Abortion restrictions of any kind, however incremental, state and federal, are steps in the right direction. Nebraska’s counter-referendum to protect unborn children from abortion in the second and third trimesters, though narrowly victorious, offers a possible path forward in red states. So, too, could ballot measures to protect health care providers from being coerced to facilitate abortions. Guaranteeing individual liberty from government coercion has been the tact of abortion supporters; seeing those same words on a pro-life initiative may help convince those on the fence.

Fourth, they must be willing to suffer persecution, as so many Civil Rights leaders unjustly experienced. Once the cultural establishment supported Jim Crow; today it repudiates it. The same shift can happen with attitudes toward abortion, but only if pro-lifers stand in the breach.

Fifth, though the public battles to defend life have been largely fought on secular terrain, pro-lifers should remain close to the faith that motivates them to protect life, and not shrink from it because American public opinion has turned against religion. Christianity provided energy and purpose for the Civil Rights movement, as it has for its pro-life successor movement. Science speaks to the mind, but religion moves hearts. Faith sees beyond the limits of science: the latter shows that life begins at conception; the former offers life as a gift of God to be cherished.

Finally, they must keep the faith. There is no predicting the future. Who could have imagined the abolition of slavery in 1800, or of Jim Crow in 1900?

The sky may portend storms today, yet new life always engenders hope. The humanity of unborn children may well be vindicated across the land and in law, later if not sooner.