Now that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has overturned Rowe v. Wade, these words from the famous American humorist Mark Twain are an admonition to pro-life supporters working to end abortion in America. When laws are so restrictive that people’s lives and livelihoods are put at risk, the consequences become too painful for society to condone.
The lessons from history trace back to Prohibition in the U.S. when alcoholic beverages were banned for 13 years. The cause seemed noble: at the time, the average man drank nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year – three times as much as today – and many lives were ruined. Thus, Methodist and Baptist clergymen together with thousands of Christian women fought for the cause of temperance and rejoiced when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect on January 17, 1920 and America became officially dry.
But almost immediately, the consequences of Prohibition became apparent. Restaurants failed, theater revenues declined, and thousands of jobs were lost to the closing of breweries, distilleries and saloons. Additionally, the federal government lost $11 billion (in 1920 dollars) in tax revenues while an estimated 1,000 Americans yearly lost their lives to poisonous moonshine. But the greatest consequence was the precipitous rise of organized crime, which allowed bootleggers and smugglers to operate with relative impunity while cities turned into violent battlegrounds of shootings and assaults.
Prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment and the warning that well-intended national bans can have terrible consequences. And this is what is now happening as 19 states have passed near total bans on abortions or banned the procedure very early in pregnancy. This includes 14 states that ban abortion in almost all circumstances: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Additionally, three states – Florida, Georgia and South Carolina – ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy, while Nebraska and North Carolina ban abortion at 12 weeks.
Then, there is the attack on the abortion pill mifepristone, approved by the Food and Drug Administration for ending a pregnancy up to the 10th week of gestation. Often combined with the drug misoprostol, mifepristone is safe and up to 99 percent effective, according to FDA’s analysis, and have been used by about 5.9 million US women since the drug was approved in September 2000. Yet, the Christian right and specifically, a group called the Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine has gone to the Supreme Court to reverse mifepristone’s approval or to ban mail-order access and impose restrictions on its use, even in states where abortion remains legal. The argument, not backed by clinical evidence, is that doctors may suffer real injury because patients who take mifepristone may overwhelm emergency rooms as they seek care.
But just as the consequences of Prohibition became known quickly, so too has the impact of the Dobbs decision. Consider these developments:
- Young girls who are raped and become pregnant now face the prospect of a forced birth with severe repercussions for their bodies, such as organ trauma and preeclampsia, which causes seizures. This reality came to light when a 10-year-old girl from Ohio had to travel to Indiana for an abortion because the Ohio law does not have a rape exception.
- Women with an ectopic pregnancy, when a fertilized egg develops in the fallopian tube, face the risk of not getting surgical treatment in states with near-total abortion bans even though women die every year from an ectopic pregnancy. In one case, a woman in Texas had to drive 18 hours to get care.
- Women experiencing life-threatening pregnancy complications or whose fetus has a deadly abnormality (like not having a liver or parts of the brain) cannot end their pregnancies in states like Texas until they develop severe infection, or the fetal heartbeat stops. This suffering and heartbreak led 20 women and two doctors to sue Texas over how the state’s narrow exceptions force doctors to delay or deny care even when the woman’s nonviable pregnancy puts her at risk of death. This suit marked the first time that women directly affected by new abortion laws have challenged a state in court.
- Doctors are leaving states where they once practiced due to abortion bans, putting basic health care at risk in many communities. A 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds 20 percent of OBGYNs “have personally felt constraints on their ability to provide care for miscarriages and other pregnancy-related medical emergencies” since Roe was overturned. In states where abortion is banned, this number doubles to four in ten OBGYNs (40 percent).
The other major development since Dobbs is a significant increase in public support for legal abortion and growing uneasiness about the severity of many state abortion laws. Not only do two-thirds of the public, including majorities of Democrats (86%) and independents (67%), support a law guaranteeing a federal right to abortion but a CBS poll finds that 57 percent of the public believe overturning Roe harms the country because the “health and lives of women are more at risk.”
For many people of faith, protecting the sanctity of life is a moral imperative. The question now is whose life is sacred? If the pro-life movement only focuses on the unborn and lawmakers continue to enact rigid abortion bans, girls, mothers, families and physicians will be harmed and public concern about the well-being of women will only increase.
History provides a warning: Bans that strip people of their rights and impact their health ultimately fail. Common-sense policies on abortion must recognize and respect women and their need for reproductive health care.
