Life After Roe: The Pro-Life Issues Beyond Abortion
Roe is dead. It was Dobbs in the courtroom with the decision. For 50 years, the controversy over Roe v. Wade dominated our political discourse and the debate surrounding abortion. Now, almost two years after Roe was overruled, it still dominates the discussion. But it shouldn’t - it’s time our country moves on from Roe and towards a future of practical solutions.
Abortion is a nationally polarizing issue, and that is true. But the lie being told by both sides is that this nationally polarizing issue will be decided on the national level. The US is almost evenly split on abortion - a 2023 Gallup poll found that 52% of US adults are pro-choice and 44% are pro-life. These numbers show that not only is there no clear majority, but neither side has the political power or popular will to completely override the other. Furthermore, even if one side did muster up the political power to push forward national legislation, there isn’t support for it. 73% of Americans believe abortion should be legal at six weeks and by 24 weeks, two-thirds of Americans believe abortion restrictions should kick in. At the same time, 48% of Americans support the 16-week abortion ban that has been proposed by various politicians and activists. The result of these statistics? The abortion issue will, for better or worse, settle into an equilibrium where it is neither nationally banned nor fully legalized, and deviations from this equilibrium will be decided at the state level. No matter how much activists on both sides try to push abortion into the national arena, the next 50 years of the abortion debate will be a path decided 50 times in 50 states. And that’s a good thing for our nation.
The more we can diffuse the artificially heightened tensions around abortion as a national issue, the more we can move towards focusing on the underlying issues beneath abortion. The most important of which, I would argue, is the state of CPS and the foster care system. The foster care system has been plagued for years with the ever-present problem of abuse and mistreatment of children in these homes. In recent years, however, the foster care issue seems to have gotten worse. Over half of US states saw a drop in the number of foster homes, resulting in further traumatic conditions for children removed from their homes only to have nowhere else to go. The 2023 Children’s Rights report shed light on the continued use of group homes or other congregate foster care settings, despite their poor conditions and negative impact on children.`At the same time, foster care faces a dual problem of a broken CPS system. CPS has been criticized for both under-intervening in true situations of neglect and abuse, and over-intervening in minority families, poor families, and families with sick children. This is malpractice that ranges from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to local social workers and affects 414,863 children per day.
The solutions to these problems may not be clear, but the path forward is. Whether pro-choice or pro-life, advocates on both sides of the issue have identified the US foster care and CPS system as an issue, yet time after time have stopped short of actual change. Our hyper-fixation of abortion as the only issue affecting women, children, and families has blinded our nation to the daily, underlying issues that desperately need attention and change. More importantly, the issue of CPS and foster care is an issue that both sides care about. When we remove Roe and abortion as a separating issue, we create a path forward for the many interested parties - foster parents, current and former foster care children, think tanks, politicians, pro-choicers, and pro-lifers - to finally work together politically and socially for a change. The past 50 years have been dictated by the abortion debate and Roe v. Wade. For the sake of our country and our children, we can’t let the next 50 years be the same.
Author: Alexis Childs
