For nearly 50 years, the annual route for the March for Life in Washington, DC, ended at the Supreme Court in a gesture of protest against Roe v. Wade. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, the March for Life selected a different route that took the marchers past the Capitol, where they hoped Congress would enact legislation protecting unborn life.
But this year, pro-lifers are not likely to get any new protections for the unborn from Congress or the Supreme Court, even though both are under the control of conservatives.
The pro-life movement’s ultimate goal has always been nationwide legal protection for human life from conception. From 1973 to the early 1980s, pro-lifers lobbied for a constitutional amendment, which never came close to getting out of Congress. In the mid-1980s, the movement pivoted to a short-term strategy of overturning Roe through the Supreme Court, but its ultimate goal was always securing constitutional protection for the unborn, not merely reversing Roe and returning the issue to the states.
Pro-lifers therefore resumed campaigning for national protections for the unborn as soon as Roe was reversed. A constitutional amendment is out of the question in the current polarized political climate. But some pro-life conservatives such as Robert P. George have said Congress could pass a statute declaring that the 14th Amendment already protects the unborn.
In both 2023 and 2024, several dozen conservative Republicans in the House attempted to do this with the Life at Conception Act, which declares that human beings have constitutional protection from the moment a human egg is fertilized. But even though the House is under Republican control—and even though the Judiciary Committee is chaired by conservative pro-life Republican Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)—the Judiciary Committee has no interest in considering this measure.
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That’s partly because a measure declaring that human life begins at conception would likely restrict in vitro fertilization (IVF), which President Donald Trump and many Republicans support. In 2024, when a Life at Conception Act had 125 Republican cosponsors in the House, some of the Republicans who initially expressed support for the measure quickly backtracked when asked whether they endorsed a measure that could potentially be used to restrict IVF. The next year, the Life at Conception Act had only 68 Republican cosponsors—barely more than half the previous number. (Since then, latecomers have nudged that number to 93.)
And even though the Supreme Court has a solid conservative majority, it has not shown much interest in restricting abortion since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022. Instead, it has punted in abortion cases by issuing rulings that preserve abortion access on narrow procedural grounds while avoiding larger constitutional issues. In June 2024, for instance, the Supreme Court preserved access to the abortion drug mifepristone when it ruled that medical groups challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) approval of the drug lacked standing to sue.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Trump administration has not shown much interest in restricting mifepristone either. On the contrary, the FDA approved a second generic version of mifepristone on October 1.
Today nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States are induced through medication, and most of those involve the use of mifepristone. The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute says the widespread availability of chemical abortions is one reason the annual number of abortions in the United States increased by 10 percent between 2020 and 2023, despite new restrictions on abortion in many conservative states. The FDA’s approval of a new version of mifepristone could lead to even more abortions.
With the Trump administration and the Republican Congress uninterested in restricting mifepristone or implementing new legal protections for unborn human life, there is no reason to expect a politically induced reduction in the number of abortions.
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Furthermore, Trump outraged many supporters of the pro-life cause when he suggested that Republicans needed to be “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment when negotiating with Democrats about extending subsidies for Obamacare. The idea that a Republican president and some congressional Republicans would consider accepting federally funded insurance coverage for abortion has already prompted several pro-life and conservative pro-family groups to threaten to withhold donations to Republican congressional candidates who are “soft” on abortion.
Nor will the Supreme Court be much help, because this year, it does not have any cases on the docket that could result in restrictions to abortion access. Instead, the most that the conservative Supreme Court will likely give the pro-life movement this year is protection for crisis pregnancy centers, shielding them from state attorneys who issue subpoenas against them for allegedly purveying misinformation.
This is not the same as protections for the unborn, but it might be the best pro-lifers can get from conservatives in Washington. And if that’s the case, pro-lifers can use the protections to expand their work in the one place where they might have the greatest opportunity to save unborn lives.
That place isn’t in Congress. It’s not at the Supreme Court. Instead, it’s in crisis pregnancy centers and other local venues where pro-lifers can continue their mission, one life at a time.
Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches.
