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As March for Life hits D.C., Supreme Court hints of a post-Roe v. Wade world

With a spring in their step, tens of thousands of pro-lifers descended on D. C. for the 48th annual March for Life on January 21, 2022.

The unprecedented hope engulfing the Right to Life cause is the impending decision of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health, the case limiting abortion after 15 weeks, expected in late June or July (there’s a good chance Dobbs could come 30 years to the day SCOTUS ruled in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, June 29, 1992, declaring parental and informed consent laws, as well as a 24-hour waiting period, constitutional).

If oral arguments are any indication, a majority of justices are signaling (at long last) a willingness to uphold the Mississippi law, and even go so far as returning the matter of abortion to the individual states.

Could it be, after nearly 50 years of barbaric abortion policy vis-vis Roe v. Wade, unborn children may have their unalienable right to life restored?

As former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant says, “There is no right within the Constitution to take away from the states their authority in the democratic process to prohibit abortion.”

Indeed, better days are ahead for the preborn and the mothers who conceive them! Look no further than a Magnolia State neighbor, Texas. Its high -profile heartbeat law, which took effect September 1, 2021, could serve as amicrocosm for a renewed culture of life in a post-Roe America.

Uniquely crafted, Texas’ S.B. 8 exposes anyone (with the exception of the pregnant woman, considered a victim) who assists in the procurement of an abortion after the unborn child’s heartbeat is detected (six weeks into the pregnancy) to civil liability. As a result, abortions in Texas have been cut by more than half (according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas at Austin) and an otherwise lucrative abortion industry has suspended much of its operations.

Lone Star lawmakers’ preemptive strike has spared the lives of more than 100 babies a day and expanded opportunities for women facing unplanned pregnancies to afford themselves real alternatives to the violence of abortion.

With help from the pro-life movement’s pre-existing network of crisis pregnancy centers (some 150 across Texas), state lawmakers have put their pro-life convictions into practice. A $100-million Alternatives to Abortion program is offering women free counseling, parenting classes, diapers, formula, job skills training - all aimed at empowering women to choose life over abortion.

So, what does Texas’ experience portend for the rest of the nation, in the event the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade?

First and foremost, many innocent unborn lives will be saved — hundreds of thousands possibly each year.

Two dozen states are poised to enact “bold pro-life laws,” once the faulty Roe trimester framework, that the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor characterized ‘on a collision course with itself,’ is scrapped.

For nearly five decades the pro-life movement has had to suffer under the weight of abortion on demand while the indisputably human embryo has had his life eviscerated by a contrived privacy “right” emanating from the constitutional ether.

Many women will be spared abortion’s real emotional, psychological,and spiritual toll.

The pro-life movement has infrastructure to re-create an abortion-free America replete with 2500 non-profit Pregnancy Resource Centers aiding women in crisis. Pat Pelletier, who founded one such center 37 years ago in Fort Worth, sees a world without Roe from the perspective of the “glass being half full.”

“A baby isn’t a crisis,” Pelletier states. “Women are learning that there are so many options available.”

Pelletier says her center maintains relationships with mothers as long as they need help. Some come back for assistance 15 years later. “Our work is the fight to save one single baby at a time thereby changing the entire universe for all of eternity.”

Schu Montgomery, a former WLEX-TV reporter, is a Catholic school teacher and member of the board of directors of Right to Life of Louisville.