After Dobbs, time to step up to support pregnant women and their children

Last updated on July 1st, 2022 at 01:43 pm

With the recent Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that struck down abortion as a constitutional right, the pro-life community has much to celebrate. For over fifty years, the pro-life community, especially the Catholic Church, Evangelical Protestants, and Orthodox Jews, steadfastly fought for the life of the unborn child in a mother’s womb and on June 24, 2022, all their efforts finally paid off. Just like dissidents in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1980’s never expected to see communism fall within their lifetimes, pro-life advocates in America in 2010 never expected to see abortion overthrown as a constitutional right in theirs.  Yet communism fell in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991 and now abortion as a federal right fell in America in June 2022. Everything happens in God’s timing.

Yet after we celebrate for a few days (or weeks), hard work remains for pro-life activists. First, now that the Supreme Court has turned the abortion issue over individual states to decide, we have to fight for the right to life of the unborn in states that don’t have trigger laws outlawing abortion. This will require much work and stamina, especially in liberal states in the Northeast and West, but it is work we must do.

Second, we need to create and expand at both the state and national levels the infrastructure needed to support women who now will be carrying their child to term, and the child that will now be born, in light of Dobbs.  Some of the things we need to consider doing include:

1. support and expand pro-life pregnancy centers that support a mother and her child both before and some time after the child is born;
2. provide additional income supports to pregnant women, mothers, and families that are in financial difficulty;
3. provide significant tax credits and deductions for money mothers and families spend on raising children;
4. provide financial support for mothers who will be putting up their child for adoption after birth;
5. provide financial support to families that would like to adopt a child (e.g., by allowing families to deduct any monies they spend in the adoption process);
6. streamline adoption laws to make the adoption process much easier and quicker;
7. expand the childcare tax credit to cover all children, not just those that use daycare, as this penalizes stay-at-home mothers;
8. expand mental health services for pregnant women and new moms;
9. expand domestic violence services for pregnant women; and
10. support and promote community classes, both faith-based and secular, that teach about parenting, successful marriage skills, fathering, etc., that are geared to both men and women, fathers and mothers.

These are just some of things we should look at; you may have other solid ideas. But it is our solemn duty to act if women will now be having children they otherwise would have aborted.

So there you have it. Even though we should be celebrating the overthrow of abortion as a constitutional right, we must now recognize that we have a lot of work in front us, including fighting for life at the state level and providing the supports that women and families need to thrive. We should have no doubt that we can do these things because for half a century we never wavered in the fight for life and won victory at the end. Now let’s step up to the plate.

Photo: Public Domain Pictures