Just a few days after celebrating a holiday that recognizes the end of slavery in the United States, today we mark one year since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
It still seems a touch surreal. When I was active in pro-life efforts as a college student and young adult, Roe was the boss monster at the end of the level that we could sometimes manage to take a few whacks at but never defeat. Time and again, we put our hope in legislators and presidents and judges only to have them let us down. We had to be content with nibbling around the edges of the law—parental consent here, partial-birth there—while keeping the focus locally on aiding and persuading women in crisis pregnancies and nationally on “changing hearts and minds.”
In fact, whether due to discouragement, mission creep, or an ultimate lack of conviction, in some pro-life quarters “changing hearts and minds” became the only goal—the most we could hope or rightly want to do. I recall many a debate over the years with other self-identified pro-lifers who claimed that it was imprudent, even wrong to change the legal abortion paradigm in America without first changing how Americans felt about abortion. And of course, the other side was all too happy to echo this rhetoric. (Though they weren’t keen on “changing hearts and minds, either, so they invited us instead to “reduce the root causes” of abortion, usually by expanding the welfare state.)
Now, changing hearts and minds is great. It’s the core of our mission here at Catholic Answers. But there’s another great truth we need to remember: the law is a teacher. That is, laws are not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of persuasion—they are instruments of persuasion, too.
As Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons remarked when asked whether the arrival of legalized gambling to Springfield was a sin, “Once something is approved by the government, it’s no longer immoral.” It was a dry joke that underscores a truth of human experience: people look to the law for moral guidance, even when it’s bad.
We have seen this principle in action. Prior to 2012, same-sex marriage had been put to popular vote in states thirty-two times—including in California’s Prop 8 in 2008—and lost each time. Legislators and state courts in “progressive” states, unconcerned with changing hearts and minds first, kept testing the ramparts of the popular will: a half-a-loaf measure here, a seemingly harmless executive order there, in each case teaching the people just a little more. Just prior to the Obergefell decision that mandated legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015, national support for it was in the low 50 percent range. Today it’s in the mid-70s. A Prop 8 today would have a vastly different result. We have been taught.
We could point to a similar pattern with other historical issues: divorce, contraception, abortion, marijuana legalization. Revolutionaries use the instrument of law to gradually shift majority opinion as well as the “Overton Window” of socially acceptable viewpoints.
This phenomenon occurs because we reflexively equate legality and morality—and for reasons that make sense. We have implicit trust in the wisdom of our lawmakers and in the inherent rightness and validity of law. Plus, being opposed to the legal status quo is psychically exhausting over time. Most people aren’t moral philosophers or cultural boat-rockers; it’s easiest just to let the law inform our values, even if sometimes imperceptibly slowly.
Today, as we mark Dobbs+1, we hope that new state-level abortion laws will save lives, indeed as they have already done. But we can also expect such laws to teach—this time for good. That pro-life activism has managed to keep the fires burning for so many years in the face of Roe’s chilling effect is truly extraordinary; a work of God. Now, post-Roe culture will have to think and argue about abortion without the conclusion having been predetermined by nine judges from 1973. State laws banning or restricting abortion will form citizens and institutions in new habits of thinking about the humanity of the unborn. What was once unthinkable under the old, radical abortion paradigm—that the “right to choose” was anything but sacrosanct—is now the new normal, the baseline for further battles in capitols and courts.