The major impact for the pro-life movement last year was the Dobbs decision, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that legalized child termination. In the almost 50 years since that landmark decision, an estimated 63.5 million unborn babies in the U.S. lost their lives through abortion.
But Carol Tobias of National Right to Life Committee tells AFN that in the roughly six months since the Dobbs decision was handed down, thousands of lives have been saved.
"There's an organization called the We Count Coalition and they said that within the first two months after the Dobbs decision that abortions fell by more than 10,000," says Tobias. She argues that if those numbers from July and August were applied to rest of the year, "we could be looking at potentially 30,000 abortions that did not occur."
November's election was a bit rough on the pro-life movement with several states passing constitutional amendments declaring abortion to be a right. But Tobias is optimistic about the 118th Congress, where she says pro-life leaders in the U.S. House have already shown that they will stand up against Democrats who have made unlimited abortion a priority.
"We did not do as well in the Senate as we had hoped in the election, but we do have a pro-life majority in the House of Representatives," she shares, "and they will stop anything that Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden are trying to do legislatively [through the Senate]."
That includes legislation the Biden administration is trying to pass that would legalize abortion up to birth and negate any and all state pro-life laws.
NRLC cites several pro-life measures sponsored by Republicans that are already in the works, including: No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2023 (sponsor: Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey); Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (sponsor: Rep. Ann Wagner of Missouri); and a resolution expressing the sense of Congress condemning the recent attacks on pro-life facilities, groups, and churches (sponsor: Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana).
