VICTOR JOECKS: Giving thanks for lives saved by abortion bans

The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade hurt Republicans politically in the midterms. That’s an acceptable tradeoff for saving tens of thousands of lives.

The data website FiveThirtyEight recently looked at how the Dobbs decision decreased the number of abortions performed. It found, “In the two months after the Supreme Court decision, there were 10,670 fewer abortions as compared to pre-Dobbs estimates.” That number includes both declines in states with abortion restrictions and increases in other states.

Think about the real-world implications. There are more than 10,000 babies alive today who otherwise would have been sucked out of their mothers’ womb by a vacuum. Or had their skull punctured with scissors and their brains vacuumed out. Or murdered by a chemical abortion or another method.

One of abortion advocates’ greatest successes has been to diminish the fact that a preborn baby is alive. The cruelty is out of sight, so many people can’t be bothered to defend the life of those innocent human beings. Never mind that the only reason you have the ability to support or ignore abortion is that your mother didn’t abort you. But now tens of thousands of precious children will be born and get a chance to live.

This projects to an annual decrease of 60,000 abortions or more. Raw numbers can be hard to wrap your head around, so here’s some something to consider. In 2020, the FBI reports there were 17,800 homicides. In the previous three years, the annual number was around 15,000.

Imagine there was a policy that could save as many lives as preventing every murder between 2017 to 2020. That’s how many lives abortion restrictions are likely to save in one year. In any other context, that would be universally celebrated. Pro-life advocates should celebrate it, even while understanding the context. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute estimated there were 930,000 abortions in 2020 nationwide.

That means there’s still work to be done. Locally, groups, such as the Women’s Resource Medical Center and First Choice Pregnancy Services, provide free medical services to pregnant women. They hope that by meeting physical, emotional and spiritual needs that pregnant women will choose life. They’re groups worth supporting.

It also likely that women — and men — in states with abortion restrictions will take steps to prevent pregnancies. Wonderful. You aren’t obligated to create a child, just to take responsibility if you do create one. That obligation should include fathers as well.

Persuading people matters, too. There’s a reason abortion advocates talk so much about victims of rape and incest. Instead of defending killing a baby, they want to make abortion a litmus test on your compassion for abused women.

Stop and answer this question. What percentage of abortions are a result of those two horrors? It’s somewhere between 0.33 percent and 1.5 percent, according to Guttmacher. The public needs to know that. In non-red states, pro-lifers need to accept that political reality may require new abortions restrictions to include exceptions for rape and incest, too.

Life is a precious gift from God. That more children will be born instead of killed is worth being thankful for.

Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.