Now the work starts

Pro-lifers should take heed of the ferocious blowback to Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. They need to keep their wits about them in the coming months and focus on the long game: changing public opinion.

Abraham Lincoln was right when he said that in democracies, “public sentiment is everything … [H]e who molds public sentiment … makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” If Americans believe abortion is wrong, then abortion opponents will prevail.

Public sentiment today, however, is nuanced, but favorable to abortion rights. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe a woman should have a right to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy.

But those polls also show that majorities favor banning abortion after that point. So long as this sentiment prevails, it is folly for pro-lifers to try to advance any nationwide ban on the procedure.

Majorities in many states, however, take a different view. In some deeply Republican states, a clear majority of voters oppose abortion, either from conception or after the point where a fetus develops a heartbeat.

Majorities in swing states likely fall in line with the national median, backing bans after the first trimester but not beforehand. This means it’s essential that, immediately after Roe falls, states with anti-abortion majorities move to enact laws that reflect the consensus in their state while eschewing any federal action.

In the long term, pro-lifers should work toward convincing the public that an unborn child in the first trimester is truly a human being worthy of legal protection.

The anti-abortion cause will start to prevail when a majority of Americans see this entity as a human being worthy of legal protection rather than a proto-human that is essentially an extension of the mother’s body. Changing minds will take time.

Pro-lifers should also consider how to use public power to advance the debate. Would it be inappropriate, for example, to require sex education classes to teach the basic facts of embryonic development?

The federal government and some states give public funds to abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. Would it be improper for states such as Florida to fund crisis pregnancy centers to help mothers cope with their burden?

Inventive minds can surely come up with many ways for government entities to legitimately support the cause without overstepping legal bounds.

This advice will surely strike many abortion opponents as frustrating. How, they might ask, can I counsel patience when millions of babies are dying every year? That, however, raises the question: How can they protect those babies when a majority of their countrymen don’t want to?

The answer some propound—the Supreme Court should find a right to life in the 14th Amendment and ban abortion nationwide— would be as destabilizing and anti-democratic as Roe v. Wade. They should recall that it was the democratically enacted Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, not a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision, that irrevocably set Black Americans on the course to real freedom.

Public opinion, not judicial fiat, is the only secure foundation for anti-abortion laws.