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At the recent Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America gala in Washington, D.C., organization president Marjorie Dannenfelser issued a stark warning: either the pro-life movement will place abortion “on the path to extinction,” or abortion proponents will push until it is legal in all fifty states.
She is right. And the most uncomfortable fact in American pro-life politics today proves it. According to the abortion industry’s Guttmacher Institute, more than 1.12 million abortions were performed in 2025 — a 21% increase over 2020, the last full year before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Women are traveling from protective states to permissive ones. Abortionists are mailing abortion pills across state lines, undermining laws meant to protect mothers and children. State after state has enshrined abortion in its constitution by ballot initiative.
The legal victory the movement fought 50 years to achieve has not produced the cultural victory we assumed would follow. That is the lesson buried inside Dannenfelser’s warning, and the pro-life movement cannot afford to miss it.
In 1998, Planned Parenthood announced plans to build an abortion facility in my hometown of Bryan/College Station, Texas. We didn’t try to out-shout Planned Parenthood. We decided to out-build them.
We organized 60 local churches and thousands of volunteers into a sustained, peaceful witness of prayer and sidewalk counseling outside the facility. But the harder, more decisive work happened where the public didn’t see it. The nearest pregnancy resource center kept hours that didn’t overlap with Planned Parenthood’s, meaning a woman in crisis on a Saturday morning had nowhere else to turn. So we worked with the center to synchronize its hours. Then we helped a second resource center relocate directly across the street from Planned Parenthood, so the moment a woman considered walking in, an alternative was visible from the curb. We fortified supply networks for diapers, formula, medical care, legal help, and practical assistance so that no mother facing an unexpected pregnancy felt abortion was her only option.
We didn’t just protest the problem. We built the infrastructure to solve it.
The results compounded. Planned Parenthood was removed from local schools and stripped of state taxpayer funding. Abortions at the facility fell year after year (2%, 15%, then 28%, according to Texas state health data) as the new infrastructure took hold. Eventually, that abortion center closed for good.
We didn’t win because we won arguments or cared more. Plenty of people elsewhere made good arguments and cared deeply, yet still lost. We won because we built the infrastructure that made choosing life not just morally compelling but practically possible.
That is the lesson Washington must learn.
The pro-life movement has, rightly, invested enormous energy in legal and political strategy. Stripping roughly half a billion dollars in federal funding from Planned Parenthood was a significant achievement. Leaders like Senator Bill Cassidy and House Speaker Mike Johnson have shown that principled, strategic pro-life leadership in Washington is alive. The Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America team’s political work ahead of 2028 is essential.
But politics alone will not produce a pro-life America. Neither did overturning Roe. The 21% abortion increase is not a referendum on the Dobbs decision. It is a referendum on the assumption that legal change drives cultural change. It does not. Cultural change drives legal change. And only when cultural change is supported by real infrastructure does the law hold.
What the other side taught us over the last 50 years is painful but unmistakable. They didn’t just win court cases. They built the architecture — clinic networks, professional standards, medical curricula, entertainment narratives, corporate policies — that made their vision the path of least resistance for ordinary Americans. The law followed. And when the law eventually moved against them at Dobbs, the cultural architecture they had built held.
We can do the same, but for life and grounded in truth. Nearly 3,000 pregnancy resource centers and maternity homes are quietly outperforming Planned Parenthood on the metric that matters: women genuinely served and supported. The recent launch of moms.gov uses Heartbeat International’s Option Line to help women locate their closest life-affirming pregnancy center. The American Association of Pro-Life OB/GYNs is building a credible medical alternative to the establishment that gave us abortion on demand. Live Action and Students for Life are forming a generation to carry this work for decades. The 40 Days for Life movement I started has mobilized more than 1 million volunteers across 60 nations and helped save more than 26,000 lives. The latest science-backed research about life in the womb illuminates the undeniable humanity of unborn children through resources like Charlotte Lozier Institute’s Voyage of Life platform.
These are not mere campaigns or protests. These are institutions and infrastructure. And their growth is the real reason the pro-life cause has a future.
Dannenfelser said the abortion fight will be decided by whoever cares more. She is right. But caring is only the precondition. History shows what comes next: take that caring and build with it.
That is what it will take to make America the most pro-life country in the world.
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David Bereit founded 40 Days for Life and serves as executive director of the Life Leadership Conference. He has spent three decades studying social movements and cultural change.
