This is pro-life’s Jim Crow moment

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

March for Life participants and counter-protesters hold signs in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, in 2018. (CNS photo/Peter Lockley)

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.


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About David G. Bonagura, Jr. 45 Articles
David G. Bonagura, Jr. is an adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and Catholic Distance University. He is the 2023-2024 Cardinal Newman Society Fellow for Eucharistic Education. He is the author of Steadfast in Faith: Catholicism and the Challenges of Secularism. and Staying with the Catholic Church: Trusting God's Plan of Salvation, and the translator of Jerome’s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning.

32 Comments

  1. Prolife leaders somehow perceive the Republican win a win for a right to life. Instead economics, the southern border migration issues took precedence. Far more Catholic votes were cast in favor of abortion than against.
    Christianity, its, that is, the individual Catholic’s not the official Catholic position, overwhelming support for abortion rights overshadows the Republican triumph.
    Bonagura ends with a hopeful note. From an eschatological perspective the abysmal spiritual demise of Catholicism may well parallel the fate of the Nation. Hope, a theological virtue is always the right response.

    • Up until now the Catholic Church in America has been a failure in converting the minds and hearts of individuals about abortion. Why, even a plurality of Catholics support abortion.

    • Well said Father. Good example is found in Maryland which has a large Catholic population b=and yet voted 74% for abortion. It kind of goes hand and hand with the current bishops liberal attitude, The shepherds need to courageously lead the flock.

    • Hear! Hear!, Deacon Peitler. Tell that to synodal enthusiasts who imagine implementing a socialist agenda is the ultimate Christian mission and goal.

  2. We read: “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.”

    About the reality of human conceptions, what is needed in our culture is a tectonic disruption of current conceptual misconceptions…

    The layering of lies connecting contraception first to abortion as a “civil right,” then to “affairs” and broken families as an epidemic, to pre-teen sexual experimentation, to open-range fornication and cohabitation, to the global industry of sex trafficking of even children, to anti-binary-ism and homosexuality, to LGBTQ-ism as a political religion, to pointy-headed gender theory as a version of mad cow disease, to transgenderism as a transformer-toy derivative, and even to suppression of ultrasound imagery, and then an Aztec political party that would open the door to fully obvious, post-abortion infanticide.

    The real and civilizational “seamless garment,” probably worthy of passing attention from a navel-gazing synodal “study group,” with the backwardist Veritatis Splendor added as a possible footnote, or whatever.

  3. ” . . . American public opinion has turned against religion”.
    Yes, it has. And most obviously against Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.

  4. Great points, but we need to build coalitions with pro-lifers of all faiths and of none if we truly want to reach all sectors of society.

  5. I can’t help but wonder what will happen as our population continues to shrink in the U.S., which means less people to do all the necessary work: health care (doctors, nurses, lab, Xray, physical therapy, respiratory, MRI, geriatric and nursing home, etc.), but also teaching, skilled trades, the military, unskilled labor, restaurant workers, farming, food processing and distribution/sales, inventing, IT, business, law, National Parks employees, landscaping, road crews, firefighters, pilots, veterinary workers, fine arts and entertainment industry, church and religious positions/vocations–I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few professions that are short-staffed, often dangerously so (especially health care!). Hopefully our immigrant population, including those coming over the borders legally or illegally, will fill the many “help wanted” situations once they are assimilated unless, of course, they get addicted to social media on their phones like so many other Americans and become zombies. And of course, we will no longer need daycare workers and nannies. But seriously SOMEONE has to do all the work that needs to get done in the U.S. and around the world!!! But we’re killing the people who should be available to do that work! What a stupid thing to do! Maybe robots will help out–but SOMEONE has to invent and maintain the robots, and we’ve probably killed the person who would have been the Chief Inventor of Helper Robots! Sigh. How short-sighted and foolish we are in the U.S.! We will eventually learn the hard way that we need people and that it is evil and detrimental to kill people, including unborn people.

  6. Catholics need more orphanages and other institutions to take unwanted babies especially those with “disabilities” that would likely be aborted; and need to advocate for things that will help mothers choosing life to be able to survive economically; and need to facilitate adoptions.

    • Nancy, it should be a ministry in EVERY parish. There should be billboards all over this country that read: “If you’re thinking of an abortion, contact any Catholic parish and we will help you and your baby.”

      • Deacon Edward, I wholeheartedly agree with your comment, which in turn was favorably commenting on Nancy Mosley’s comment, which I too applaud.

        I also particularly appreciated Sharon Whitlock’s analysis and observations and would respectfully add to her list the point that Social Security will financially collapse because the tens of millions of aborted babies in the U.S. wouldn’t be working and paying payroll taxes for the ever growing number of Social Security beneficiaries.

      • Yes, Deacon, this should be a MUST in every parish. Unfortunately, what we hear at the pulpit is not about the hard issues. Oh, mentions may be made in the intentions, but the clergy doesn’t speak up for fear of man, when they should be speaking up for fear of God (awe).
        Billboards are a great way to reach people, if you can get one to publish a pro-life message. We have before but there are a few that won’t touch us with a 10-foot pole. We must pray, fast, & spread the message whenever & however we can – lovingly, peacefully, prayerfully, trusting that God will work through us.

        • As some-one who travels a bit, and attends Mass in various parishes, I’ve become dismayed to find that a prayer for the protection of children in the womb has been removed from the Prayers of the Faithful almost everywhere I go.
          Who has commanded this ?

      • If only that would work. We tried to get something similar started in NYC and ran into resistance. Even local pastors hate to get involved is supporting causes that are actually Catholic. But I pray for any area of the country that can make this work.

    • Actually, there are several Christian (not necessarily Catholic) organizations that help women in difficult circumstances. I volunteer for a couple of them, one Catholic, one non-denominational. But we really do need more Catholic places like this. There is a little problem though – many co-called Catholic institutions are tied up in promoting contraception, alphabet-crowd drivel, & even abortion. Just look at the CCHD for one. Look up how many “catholic” hospitals promote these things as well – it’s scary. Most of them shouldn’t be able to call themselves Catholic.

      One of the things I’m trying to bring to the attention one the K of C is that we could start a project that would include a hospital for children, ensuring that we observe our Catholic faith in every way. We could also establish authentically Catholic pregnancy centers & homes for poor moms with children. Of course, if the father is involved, all the better. The Knights have the financial clout, but we need someone to really step up & study the idea. Pray for me as I attempt to get the ball rolling!

      • I hope and pray it can work. A true Catholic hospital would have to be tried first in a state that is not super liberal like NY and California, where the legislatures would look for any pretext to undermine Catholic values and practices. Begin with consulting with dedicated Catholic attorneys.

  7. Interesting comparison, one that never occurred to me.

    Not a criticism of this article, but one thing which discourages me is the great difficulty of convincing people of the personhood of the pre-born child. With African Americans the dead bodies of those murdered by the KKK and others were easily recognized as human by anyone with eyes and a heart. With abortion, even the majority of pro-lifers seem not to want to use the similar sight of the aborted children. And in the early stages, it can only be an intellectual argument, not an easily visible one, of the personhood of the child in the early weeks after conception.

    • Thank you for using the term “pre-born” rather than “unborn.” There’s something almost vampiric about the latter term, and “pre-born” better connotes the humanity of the developing child.

    • As a regular participant in the 40 Days for Life campaigns, as well as our parish pro-life ministry & the K of C, I’ve always said that we should actually show the horrible pictures of children murdered in the womb. I think some are starting to agree with me on this. We must show the humanity of the child. It will change minds.

  8. The Church has largely lost the working class.
    These are by definition the people who do a lot of the work.
    Any ideas on how to get them back or should we just write them off?

  9. You were given a choice. Social Justice, i.e. Catholic Social Teaching, or the commandments of God. You choose wrong. I find it interesting that Christ continually speaks of sheep, which is a truth, yet our shepherds… our highly trained, affirmed by God priests have been silent. Matthew 12:35.

  10. It is not to be forgotten that fear is a significant part of our virtue in our fallen state. Fear that the new nations that arose with the end of the colonial empires would align with Russia and not with us spurred us to get our act together on race. (And Alaska’s and Hawaii’s entering the Union significantly strengthened the Civil Rights thrust.) When contraception seemed to remove the fear of pregnancy, the educational establishment rather swiftly opened coed dormitories, Catholic colleges generally too. This was an abdication of adulthood on the part of educators. The climb out of this abyss could begin with Catholic colleges showing the way by again having separate men’s and women’s dorms with a no visitation policy.

  11. You are bungling the analogy to slavery here. No way is Dobbs the equivalent to thirteenth and fourteenth amendment, bought with the blood of Union soldiers and truly abolishing slavery. That blood *should* have been potent enough to guarantee the other inalienable right (life) a hundred years later, but the same forces who brought us jim crow segregation found a way to muddle people’s heads about dealing with abortion *incrementally*

    Dobbs could be more compared to antebellum dred Scott states rights era. Dobbs *hobbles* the abolition aspiration by robbing the right to life of its inalienable nature. By allowing states to decide about abortion, it stripped the winds of inalienable from the sails of created equal.

    Dobbs decision *could* have been to abolish abortion, rather than put it to states. But that was not the mindset of president warp speed, who went on to molest the abolition ready GOP platform, leaving it in the type of heap one would expect from someone who was probably a Democrat planted to smear GOP (and fool conservatives into locking down who would not have under a president who admitted to be Democrat).

    You can read more detail about this deception at momanddadmatters.substack.com . Abortion is technically very easy to abolish given DNA testing to identify and garnish rape fathers, which would be a huge deterrent on rape, and therefore need for abortion, itself. All other crisis pregnancies could be solved by transferring the woman’s locus of choice to closing legs in the first place. The real plan should be to abolish abortion for created equals birthday in 2026!

  12. Pro-life is a multi-faceted mission and shouldn’t be defined merely as or relegated into a civil rights cause. Among the many facets is healthy positive laws for the medical profession where laws and officers of law can not be at odds with with themselves. In order to get at that the assembly of law-making and lobby has to have a certain cogency and a certain coherence.

    Found at 1P5 -:

    Decisions For Life | SJBPro-Life League | Jul 4, 2024
    Teenagers discuss abortion
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5dI37S_OU8&t=118s

    https://immaculateheartschool.org/project/decisions-for-life-video/?cmn_cld=310129020211027T1152447239F8CA5A2877B420593B057A759934C2C_564520241111T215452157E62A91B76CA84856AA0EA4603E8AC377

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  1. This is pro-life’s Jim Crow moment – seamasodalaigh

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