Abortion

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | From the October 2024 issue

Audra Worlow thinks of herself as pro-life. A 32-year-old, married stay-at-home mom in Ohio, Worlow takes her Catholic faith seriously. She's against both in vitro fertilization (IVF), which she calls "another form of eugenics," and surrogacy. She thinks abortion is not only harmful to babies but also "psychologically damaging to women."

Yet in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Worlow isn't excited about states' new ability to ban abortion at any point in pregnancy.

She still wants to see an end to abortion. "I just don't know if the legal system is the right route to go with this," she tells Reason. "I'm worried that babies and women are going to die."

She points to the Brittany Watts case in her state. Watts' water broke at just 21 weeks pregnant, and a hospital refused to intervene. If medical staff had taken action, Worlow suggests, there's a chance the baby could have survived. Instead, Watts went home, miscarried, and was charged with "abuse of a corpse." A grand jury refused to indict.

"I want doctors to have the freedom to be doctors," says Worlow. She was trained as a hospital administrator, and she worries about the effect risk-averse administrators will have on doctors' treatment of pregnant women with complications. In places with abortions bans, doctors may be left "basically waiting around for the baby to die before they do anything." In the interim, she says, women can develop life-threatening conditions like sepsis. "I like the term pro-life. But I care about everybody's life. I…care about the woman's life, too."

The idea that Americans might personally oppose abortion but also disfavor banning it isn't new. But in the aftermath of Dobbs, this idea is taking on new salience. To help understand why, I sought out people who consider themselves pro-life but question the ethics or efficacy of abortion bans. I wanted to peer beyond the polls—which show significant shifts in abortion views since the Dobbs decision—and hear how individuals square competing values in this realm.

Dobbs was the biggest legal victory in the pro-life movement's history—a culmination of 40 years of activism and political strategy. The decision ushered in a wave of state abortion bans that weren't permissible under the Roe paradigm, in which only minimal restrictions were allowed before fetal viability.

But a strange thing happened in the aftermath of the pro-life movement's great victory: America became more pro-choice.

Although Americans' views on abortion are complex, surveys show a decisive shift toward pro-choice positions, even among some who believe in rights for embryos and fetuses or who question abortion's morality. When given the opportunity to weigh in on reproductive freedom measures directly, American voters—even those in decidedly red states like Kansas and Kentucky—keep taking the pro-choice side.

What happened? The reality of abortion prohibition set in. It is not unusual these days to hear the phrase "I'm pro-life, but…" followed by words of disapproval for the policies and tactics favored by prominent pro-lifers—and concern about what such policies will mean for women, children, and society.

It's a remarkable turnabout, and it's a reckoning for the pro-life movement that worked so hard to bring about Dobbs. The end of Roe turned out to be the biggest boost the pro-choice movement has ever had.

A majority of Americans now identify as "pro-choice"—54 percent in a Gallup poll from May 2024. That's a near-record high, and it reflects a measurable shift in public opinion.

Yet polling on "pro-choice" vs. "pro-life" labels doesn't tell the whole story, since views differ on what exactly these labels mean. Some think being pro-choice means support for legal abortion throughout pregnancy. Others suggest it aligns with the Roe paradigm where restrictions vary by trimester, with few at the beginning and a lot after viability. To some, "pro-choice" just means people should be allowed to choose abortion, while others think it necessarily endorses that choice. On the flip side, some use "pro-life" to describe personal opposition to abortion, while others think it must mean support for total or near-total bans.

What is clear is that these binary labels don't fully capture many people's views.

"The labels are messy, because people are way more nuanced," says Jordan Willow Evans, a 33-year-old woman living in New Hampshire. She opposes abortion as well as the death penalty, "unjust war," and euthanasia, so the pro-life label has "always........

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