Dobbs: Two Years On

Abortion carnage continues in post-Roe America

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Today marks two years since the death of Roe v. Wade.

On June 24, 2022 — the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.

After 49 years and more than 63 million dead, the murderous Roe regime was itself put to death.

For pro-lifers in the United States and beyond, the day was one of jubilation. After half a century of painstaking work, the dismantling of America's abortion machine seemed to be at hand.

But very quickly, the exhilaration began to fade.

DEATH BY A THOUSAND VOTES

Dobbs did not ban abortion — it merely returned the issue to the states, enabling the citizens of each domain to choose life or death for their children.

Writing for the majority in Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito noted:

"Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives."

While the death of Roe marked the end of abortion imposed from on high, in the two years since Dobbs, the American people have been building a new regime from the bottom up.

As Souls and Liberty has documented, developments on the abortion front have been almost entirely negative since the summer of 2022.

On Aug. 2, 2022 — just five-and-a-half weeks after Dobbs, voters in reliably red Kansas torched Amendment 2, a proposal to add protections for the unborn to the state's constitution.

In a stunning setback for pro-lifers, six in 10 Kansans voted to maintain the state's liberal abortion regime. And in a prelude of things to come in other states, a post-election analysis of the vote revealed that Republicans were complicit in sustaining the slaughter:

"Voters in big, urban counties such as Johnson, Sedgwick and Wyandotte overwhelmingly rejected the measure. But a number of small, rural counties also voted it down, surprising both supporters and opponents. Additionally, in a large number of other rural counties, the amendment won but by unexpectedly narrow margins. ... The amendment scrambled typical party-line divides in rural areas. Because of the registration advantage Republicans hold in many of these counties, it is all but certain that in some areas a sizeable portion of Republicans voted no."

After the disaster in Kansas, catastrophes followed in California, Michigan and Vermont, where on Nov. 8, 2022, citizens voted to enshrine abortion in their respective state constitutions.

That same day, voters in Kentucky rejected a pro-life amendment to their state's constitution, while in Montana, voters rejected a a "born-alive" proposal to recognize babies who survive abortion as persons under the law.

One year later, on Nov. 7, 2023, the Ohio electorate cast their lot against the unborn, voting to amend their state's constitution to guarantee access to abortion and contraception.

And it appears that worse is still to come, as activists in more than a dozen states — Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Dakota — are working feverishly to place abortion-related referendums on their ballots in November.

Vote by vote, state by state, referendum by referendum, Americans have taken the liberty afforded us by Dobbs and weaponized it against our unborn.

Today, more than ever — far more than in 1973 — we the people are guilty of annihilating our own. Our hands are bloody and our souls stained — this time, directly as a result of our own choosing.

Writer, editor and producer Stephen Wynne has spent the past seven years covering, from a Catholic perspective, the latest developments in the Church, the nation and the world. Prior to his work in journalism, he spent eight years co-authoring “Repairing the Breach,” a book examining the war of worldviews between Christianity and Darwinism. A Show-Me State native, he holds a BA in Creative Writing from Pepperdine University and an Executive MBA from the Bloch School of Business at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

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