Make Birth Free
Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs came down, anti-abortion groups began distributing press releases celebrating their victory and vowing to get around to something the movement has politically neglected for the past several decades: helping mothers afford children. For so many millions already distraught by the ruling, the ready promises of help on the way came not so much as a comfort but as an insult. The fact that American mothers and infants have access to relatively few resources compared with the women and children of our peer nations notwithstanding, better welfare policy wasn’t exactly what the majority of abortion-rights activists were demanding at the moment.
There was perhaps a time when America’s pro-life movement, in its incipient stages, could have mobilized for broad political reforms along these very lines. The largely progressive politics of life dreamed up by Catholic theologians and mainline Protestants in the first half of
