What Can the Pro-Life Movement Do Now to Save Babies From Abortions?

Difficult days have descended upon the pro-life movement. Just four years after the historic reversal of the dreadful Roe v. Wade decision, the abortion toll in America appears to be settling in at more than 1,000,000 lost nascent human beings per year.

U.S.-style in vitro fertilization appears to enjoy bipartisan support, without a solution to its concomitant problems of genetic screening and mass embryo freezing and destruction. The Democratic Party continues to steam ahead, promoting state constitutional amendments that literally wipe out all vestiges of a right to life for the next generation. The Republican Party, having risen to power by sweeping into its ranks voting blocs of Catholics, evangelicals, and others alarmed by the decline in common values, now seems embarrassed by its ties to these bedrock Americans.

Some of these challenges are distinct to the issues themselves, contested questions on matters of sexuality and the value of human life. But there is also fog-like pea soup in the public mind. Nastiness on all sides is rewarded daily. Standards of behavior are so low that politicians routinely utter ideas and phrases that once would have gotten mouths roughly washed out with maternal soap. Merely witnessing the caliber of recent candidates from the major parties is enough to see that moral fiber amounts to crumbs in our national diet. “Imposing one’s values” is a damning phrase in a culture where the buying and selling of access and political favors have become an international sport.

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But these value contests are not taking place in a psychological or social vacuum — elites across the partisan spectrum spend their waking hours preaching doom and gloom everywhere from Davos to downtown L.A. The apocalypse is always now. The next pandemic, tornado, or heat wave will end us all.

How does a bruised and battered pro-life cohort respond in such an era? The most honest thing for this writer to say is that he does not know. Entering the ranks of right to lifers in 1972 at the University of Notre Dame, I can attest that despite the odds, our attitude was hopeful. The wave of liberalization of abortion laws in the 1960s and ‘70s seemed to be receding — even the New York State General Assembly was voting to repeal a permissive abortion law that had made the state a travelers’ hub for abortions up to 20 weeks (Alan F. Guttmacher of Planned Parenthood famously proclaimed at the time that he was surprised how so permissive a law had gotten passed in the first place).

Notre Dame Law School Prof. Charles Rice, who had published a book titled “The Vanishing Right to Live” in 1969, soberly inspired the formation of a student pro-life group at the University. Its leaders included an evangelical graduate student and a clutch of eager Catholic undergrads. His book’s subtitle was “An Appeal for a New Reverence for Life.” We thought that goal was achievable.

Rice warned us, however, of what was coming. The 1970s had more than its share of pressing issues, especially for young people. The Sexual Revolution, the war in Vietnam, the wake of a decade of battles over civil rights, drug use, draft-dodging and student deferments and sit-ins. The last thing the times needed was a battle over who counted as human. In January 1973, the roof caved in. A ruling that may have been more sweeping than even Charlie Rice feared was handed down on a cold January day in Washington. By a 7-2 margin, with five Republican appointees in the majority, the Supreme Court struck down virtually every law in the nation that had supplied protection for more than a century to developing children in the womb.

The ruling stoked attempts to create a coherent national movement to check Roe and chart a new course. Retrospection likely makes it seem less chaotic than, in fact, it was, but one of the first student actions of the time was the formation of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition (NYPLC). Student-run, poorly funded, and formally dedicated to non-violence, the NYPLC published its charter, as recapped by its co-founder, Tom Hilgers, M.D.:

“The NYPLC has taken strong positions against abortion and abortifacient ‘contraceptives,’ euthanasia, fetal experimentation, government birth regulation, and for positive solutions to human problems, cooperation with nature, the poor, the elderly, the mentally and physically handicapped, prisoner rehabilitation and peace. All of the positions revolve around intensifying the value and dignity of every human life and the leaders of the NYPLC firmly believe that this is where the ultimate strength of the pro-life movement lies. …The NYPLC openly admits that it does not have all the answers; nonetheless, it maintains that the use of violence to solve human problems is unconstructive, non-progressive, and ultimately always destructive.”

Over time, the NYPLC, with all its youthful energy and vision, dispersed, and the pro-life movement diversified into lobbying organizations, student networks, pregnancy center groups, political action arms, religious projects, child loss ministries, and more. With that specialized effort, millions of lives have been saved and millions of mothers and fathers supported. Once again, however, it is clear in 2026 that we have fallen short and must openly admit we do not have all the answers. What, now, would an appeal for renewed reverence for human life look like? What follows is only a sketch and represents only the views of the author, but here goes:

Expand Support and Alternatives to Abortion. All criticism from the Left aside, this has been a strength of the pro-life movement for decades. The pregnancy center movement, almost always privately funded for fear of government interference, is one of the largest charitable outreaches in history. Public policy has advanced over time with gains in the form of child tax credits, expansion of Medicaid postpartum coverage, federal and state grants, adoption tax credits, child support enforcement, and other positive measures. Much more, however, remains to be done. Leading pro-life groups could combine their analytical power and produce an annual Consensus Compendium of public and private policies to expand support for families and safeguard life.

Pro-Life Solutions to Root Causes of Infertility. Blame AI, perhaps, but searching online for resources on infertility returns a list of groups and articles that represent the worst practices of the IVF industry while including only a few initiatives to deal with underlying factors. An estimated 1.5 million embryonic humans are kept in frozen storage in the U.S. Many more have been discarded. One AI summary cheerfully says, “Discarding embryos is an inherent part of the IVF process.” It needn’t be. More medical and policy groups are forming in the effort to ensure that no human being is discarded in the effort to remedy infertility. The pro-life effort in this area needs to be redoubled, for the sake of other once-frozen children like Hannah Strege and Noah Markham.

Pictures Are Worth a Million Words. Nothing so rattles an advocate for abortion as the idea that a woman or girl will see a vivid ultrasound of her developing child. To avoid that prospect, they will omit that medically necessary step by prescribing abortion pills without a doctor’s visit or asking the woman if she would rather not see the image. In truth, every child in America should see ultrasound pictures well before the age at which she can conceive a child. When I showed these beautiful images to a classroom full of girls at the Cesar Chavez Charter School in D.C. (right after they had visited a Planned Parenthood facility and evidently seen nothing), it brought the house down with the teenagers’ ooh’s and aah’s. The side that wants you blind is the wrong side.

Support Criminal Penalties for Purveyors of Abortion. In a frustrated movement, the search for effective answers becomes more intense. The appeal of an “equal protection” argument that would impose severe penalties, including imprisonment, on women obtaining abortions is that it is relentlessly logical and treats women as moral agents in an abortion decision. Such a policy might be conceptually just. The counter view is illogical to a degree, but it has these virtues: abortions result from a network of abandonment, among which the last is the woman’s, which may be deliberative or, just as often, despairing. Her isolation is the source of her harm, which threats of jail or physical punishment do not nullify but instead amplify.

From the beginning, the pro-life movement, born in the throes of a culture of assassinations, riots, and war, has stood for non-violence, yearning for an end to all the bloodletting. Some argue that there is a biblical basis for criminalizing the mother. In the Old Testament, acts of adultery were to be punished by stoning (Leviticus 20-10). In the New Testament, Jesus disarmed the crowd bent on stoning the woman taken in adultery. He saved her from death and then commanded her to repent (John 8: 1-11). The appeal of abolition is real, but its advance would end the hope of enactment of a Hippocratic legal and social regime that binds the physician never to wrong his patient. The penalty should be on him and the sellers and shippers who strike the unborn drone-like from afar. Government officials who approve these drugs should be defeated for office.

New Resources for the Perinatal Frontier. Few things illustrate the folly of Roe and its trimester scheme more than advances in perinatal medicine. “Viability” is a concept rooted in the capability of medicine, not the reality of the child. You and I are not viable in our birthday suits on the surface of Mars. The unborn child at 16 weeks is perfectly viable where he or she is. Since 1973, the median gestational age at which an unborn child may, with the best medical care, be viable has moved lower by seven to eight weeks.

Improvements in fetal surgery and advances in perinatal care are rapid. Children with Down syndrome are living much longer and healthier lives, and leaders like Tim Tebow are engaged in social support that counters the images too often cast up by diagnosticians. America should have one or more dedicated institutions specializing in caring for babies and families in these situations. The appearance of new colleges and existing universities adding medical schools should open the door to the building of future “Children’s Hospitals for the Unborn” that will move the frontiers of care for these youngest of our brothers and sisters.

If nothing else, the pro-life movement today should seek to renew reverence for life by recovering as much as it can of its original idealism and optimism. Today it is reluctantly partisan and yearns for new consensus. It leads by example and not by force. Its imagery is still that of mothers and fathers’ interlaced fingers, the playground, the laughing child, the birthday candles, and brilliant balloons. It campaigns against the darkness and sees hope in and for everyone. It believes that it is never too late to leave the killing fields and come truly home.

LifeNews Note: Chuck Donovan is a 50-year veteran of the national debate over the right to life and served from 1981-89 as a writer in the Reagan White House. He is the former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.