My New Book "Before Dobbs: What the Pro-Life Movement Saw, Said & Did Before Roe v. Wade was Overturned"
Readers may have noticed my absence from Substack over the summer.
Here’s why: I was busy assembling my latest book, “Before Dobbs: What the Pro-Life Movement Saw, Said & Did Before Roe v. Wade was Overturned.”
It’s a warning to the future, a future when many conservative Americans will come to doubt the wisdom of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling that overturned the national right to abortion.
Your patronage helped me publish this important paperback book (thank you!), and for the next five days its ebook version is FREE (the promotion ends on Friday, September 23). Just click on the link below:
Please help spread the word by sharing the book’s link with your family and friends, and leave a review on Amazon if you read it.
From the book’s introduction:
I took a walk down a country road with my wife, Rachel, a year ago while we were vacationing at her parent’s lake house near Birmingham.
I was feeling quite cynical about the state of our nation’s political environment. That year, 2021, began with the U.S. Capitol — a sacred place, I believe — being assaulted by thousands of misguided, powerless fools from the right and then, days later, hosting the inauguration of a single, yet powerful, misguided fool on the left.
Faith in our nation’s institutions, from the media to the military, was in tatters. The response to the pandemic destroyed whatever credibility remained after years of ideological assault and decay, and I was feeling let down on all sides.
Let down by our religious leaders.
Let down by our business leaders.
Let down by our elected leaders.
Scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disappointed idealist, I once heard. That was certainly true that afternoon.
I was on a self-pitying rant, cursing the lot of them, and among the laundry list of complaints about their weaknesses was a passing reference to abortion.
“And they’ll never overturn Roe v. Wade,” I told her, “Never. At least not until we convince a lot more people. They just don’t have the courage.”
A year later, they — meaning the U.S. Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents — overturned Roe v. Wade in a striking, unequivocal, and damning way with their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito tossed out Roe v. Wade, a decision from the 1970s that found a constitutional right to an abortion, and also Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the decision from the 1990s that affirmed it.
There would essentially be no overriding federal law allowing or forbidding abortion, so each state could decide the issue according to the values and beliefs of its citizens.
I was stunned.
Decades of tireless, incalculable advocacy across all sectors and segments of American life had suddenly paid off, and, even though abortion law was left to the states and not outlawed entirely, the pro-life community rejoiced in a victory for the unborn, a victory for our culture, and a victory for humanity.
We had won the day, and clearly momentum was now firmly on the side of the unborn.
And yet …
And yet no sooner had the ink dried on the court’s ruling that talk began in some corners of the conservative movement that perhaps some of the recently enacted state laws restricting abortion were perhaps a bit too restrictive.
Alabama’s law, for instance, essentially outlawed all abortion after one could detect a fetal heartbeat, and offered no exception for rape or incest, a fact that some of the law’s supporters suddenly wanted to change.
It appears that many pro-life politicians were fine acting courageous when they thought it was all theater. But now that it’s really happening, they’re going, as the late Lady Margaret Thatcher once said, “wobbly.”
Here are a few headlines seen since the decision:
“In Arizona, Blake Masters backtracks on abortion and scrubs his campaign website: Masters, the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona, said on his campaign website that he supported ‘a federal personhood law,’” NBC News, August 25, 2022
“Minnesota GOP candidate who once said he’d ‘try to ban abortion’ now declares it a ‘constitutional right’ while holding a baby as he trails in the polls,” The Insider, September 7, 2022
“The great GOP abortion backpedal,” Salon, September 1, 2022
Seeing politicians behave like insecure teenagers competing in a popularity contest shouldn’t surprise anyone. What the pro-life community should note, however, is the genuine possibility that, years from now, those who have grown-up in states free of abortion will inevitably come to question the wisdom of our efforts.
They’ll come to question the justification for our laws.
They’ll come to question the wisdom of this ruling.
They’ll not so much have forgotten the horrors of abortion. They’ll have never known them at all.
What they will know are the myriad of challenges and difficulties that will arise now that abortion is illegal in many states. They’ll hear stories of women being forced to carry a child they do not want, or worse, what happens when a woman tries to end a pregnancy herself.
This will happen. You can count on it. And when it does, and they look back at life before Dobbs, what will they learn?
Will they learn what Roe actually allowed, and the culture of death is created?
Will they know who Kermit Gosnell was?
Will they know that about 800,000 abortions occurred every year in America, with over 30,000 of them occurring after 16-weeks in the womb?
Will they learn how Planned Parenthood harvested and sold parts of aborted unborn children?
And will they ever learn what really happens during an abortion — that someone injects an unborn human being with poison, crushes their skull, tears them limb from limb, and vacuums them into the trash?
Probably not.
Unless you and I make sure they do know.
What follows is my small attempt to add to the record of the past few years.
Part One of this book contains many of the pro-life opinion columns that I published in various newspapers across my home state of Alabama, along with some from my wife, Rachel Blackmon Bryars. I’ve included a couple of her speeches, too, and one from when she testified at Alabama’s State House before lawmakers passed our state’s anti-abortion bill.
While these columns and speeches don’t comprise a complete survey of all pro-life arguments, or even an exhaustive collection of our own, they do provide a slice of what America’s typical pro-life advocates were writing, saying, and doing in the years before Roe fell.
They show what we saw happening around us and how we reacted. They explain how we became pro-life, and why and how we advocated for an end to abortion. They highlight various aspects of the pro-life community, from crisis pregnancy centers to educating children to the issue of passing laws to restrict the procedure. And they expose the dark details of pro-choice policies — viable babies being aborted weeks shy of birth, a multi-million dollar industry fueled by lying to vulnerable women, and how entire countries are aborting their citizens who aren’t perfect.
Part Two of this book contains the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, but without all the references to previous case law and legal citations that jumble court decisions into near unreadable messes.
I combed through the ruling and removed all of that, leaving a very well-written explanation that everyone who is interested in the subject, pro-choice or pro-life, should take time to read. There’s much to be learned there.
So, place this little book on a shelf. Give a copy to a friend. Let it languish away for years until it’s needed, until someone young, maybe who hasn’t even been born yet, comes along questioning why we did away with abortion in most of the states, and someday all of them.
Pull this little book down, flip to any page, and tell them, “This is how things were … before Dobbs.”
(J. Pepper Bryars is Alabama’s only reader-supported conservative journalist. You can support his writing by subscribing at https://jpepper.substack.com/subscribe.)