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Podcast: The Dark History of Abortion in America (Leah Savas)

January 23, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Abortion from the 17th Century to Today

In today's episode, Leah Savas talks about some of the forgotten history of abortion and about the efforts to protect unborn life in America that extend back over 300 years, even before the nation's founding.

The Story of Abortion in America

The Story of Abortion in America

Marvin Olasky, Leah Savas

Authors Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas detail the long history of abortion and its impact on American culture through vivid personal stories that humanize people on both sides of the debate.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:47 - The Importance of a Street-Level View of Abortion History

Matt Tully
Leah, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Leah Savas
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
You’re a journalist who’s been reporting on abortion in America for a number of years now. Obviously, the biggest news related to this issue today is the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, this really famous legal case that kind of set a tone, set a trajectory, for the abortion conversation in America for many years. I just wonder what your initial reaction was to that news as it broke? Again, coming from your perspective as a journalist who’s covering this issue.

Leah Savas
When I heard about the leaked draft opinion in May, I was pretty surprised. I wasn’t expecting a full overturn of Roe v. Wade. I was trying to stay a little tempered in what I was expecting, so I thought it would be upholding the Mississippi law protecting babies after fifteen weeks.

Matt Tully
A more narrow upholding of that law.

Leah Savas
Right. I didn’t think it would be a total overturn of Roe v. Wade, so it was definitely a moment of shock for me to see that written down by Justice Alito. It was obviously just a draft, and that’s why everyone was saying leading up to the final release of the opinion, It’s just a draft, so we’ll have to see what they say. But when it was eventually released that it was the full overturn of Roe v. Wade, I was like, What is going to happen now? It’s totally uncharted territory, so many things will be changing, and that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing the last few months.

Matt Tully
Take us back a little bit to what your reporting has been like on this issue over the last few years. You work for WORLD News Group, and in particular you cover the abortion issue. Is that the main focus of your work, or are you also looking at other things?

Leah Savas
That is the main focus. I am the life beat reporter at WORLD, so sometimes I will also write about euthanasia, or things just related to death. For instance—

Matt Tully
So you have some really difficult things to be covering.

Leah Savas
Yeah, that’s true. For instance, there was a boy in the UK that recently was pulled off of life support. I follow cases like that, but abortion does tend to be my main focus

Matt Tully
When it comes to abortion, we can often be so focused on that legal side, on the laws that have been passed or been repealed, the court decisions that have an impact on all this, and rightly so. But you and your coauthor on this new book, Marvin Olasky, you note in your book that the legal history of this issue of abortion in America is really only like 10% of an iceberg that you see from a boat—the 10% that’s sticking up above the surface. But below that 10% is 90% of that iceberg, and that’s more of the street-level history of this issue. I wonder if you could explain that a little bit more. Why is it that if we’re overly focused on the legal history we might miss the bigger picture?

Leah Savas
When we talk about the laws and the politics of abortion, it’s easy to speak in generalities. But when you actually look at who’s behind these new laws that are coming up in early America, who’s behind the cases of abortion that led to laws, you can really see how abortion affects individual lives and it affects individual humans—especially the unborn baby that’s being aborted, but also the community around that baby. So it’s important to think of it in those terms because then we’re able to really see the effect of abortion and understand that it does affect individuals.

Matt Tully
I guess speak to the pro-life person listening right now. How would having a more street-level view, so to speak, of the history of this issue in our country help him or her to maybe better understand the broader topic?

Leah Savas
It definitely can help with compassion. Having compassion for not only the woman who is going through a difficult pregnancy, but also the baby who is facing a life or death situation, even though we can’t see that baby necessarily, unless through an ultrasound screen. But kind of having that thought of the individuals and how the laws actually affect them. We can really think through more what does a law mean when it allows for abortion? For instance, in the book there is one part where I got to write about this woman named Hannah. She’s a twenty-something who already has two kids, she’s not married, and she found out she was pregnant with another child. At the time she found out she was pregnant, she actually thought that abortion was illegal in her state. And this was before the overturn of Roe v Wade, but she’s in Texas and they had the heartbeat law that was going into effect in 2021. She thought it was already in effect, but then when she discovered it wasn’t, she said it just added a whole other level of difficult decision making to her situation. Before she thought, No way! I’m not going to get an abortion. But now that she recognized that it was legal, and then the people in her life who thought that she should get an abortion because it was the most obvious solution to her situation, she eventually gave in and did begin the chemical abortion process. Fortunately, she was able to take progesterone treatments to stop the effects of the abortion.

Matt Tully
So she changed her mind.

Leah Savas
Yeah, she saved the baby ultimately. But without that support of the law prohibiting abortion and a community actually supporting her in the unplanned pregnancy rather than pressuring her into getting an abortion, that was the obvious choice. So when we see situations like that we can really understand what effect the laws have on individuals and the choices that they make.

Matt Tully
You’re pro-life, and you work for a pretty openly pro-life organization. But nevertheless, you and your co-author, Marvin Olasky, seemed to try to write a book that wasn’t overtly polemical and wasn’t overtly political even. Why was that? Why make that decision?

Leah Savas
We want people to read it and actually hear the stories that we’re telling. We don’t want them to just assume like, Oh, they’re just pushing an agenda. Obviously, we are coming at this with a particular worldview, specifically a biblical worldview, but we want people to understand that just because we have this perspective doesn’t mean that these actual historical stories aren’t true. We need to take these historical stories for face value. What actually happened? What did the people at the time actually think about abortion? For instance, the first abortion in America in 1652—what did people say once they found out that Captain William Mitchell had forced an abortifacient on his servant, Susan Warren, after impregnating her? Well, they put him on trial for murder. So what does that tell us about that time period and what they actually believed about abortion? They saw it as murder. They saw the unborn child as a real human being that deserved to be protected. It was not a political issue to them. So, obviously, in some ways it is political today, but that’s not the only thing abortion is. It’s a life and death situation for the baby, and in some cases for mothers as well.

09:37 - Misconceptions about the Story of Abortion in America

Matt Tully
As you think about the research that you did for this book, the stories that you were able to tell in this book, what are some of the misconceptions about the story of abortion in America that you think pro-life people would see dispelled by reading this book? And then similarly, for a pro-choice person, what are some of the misconceptions or misunderstandings that might be dispelled as they engage with this?

Leah Savas
One thing that I’ve seen come up a lot in conversations about working on this book is I think people seem to assume that if you’re writing a story about the history of abortion in America, it’s going to start in the 1970s with Roe v Wade. But the reality is that in our research we found that the first recorded abortion in the country was from 1652. I think that’s one big thing that is surprising to a lot of people. They don’t expect that abortion has been going on that long, that it has been an issue for that long. So it’s a good reminder for pro-lifers that abortion didn’t start with Roe v. Wade, and it’s not going to end with the overturn of Roe v. Wade. It’s something that will always be an issue that pro-lifers will have to continue to fight against, not only through legislation but also through helping people come to a new conviction. I think for people on the pro-abortion side, one big myth that this book hopefully helps dispel is in the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that—he asserted—that basically up until sometime in the 1800s, abortion was acceptable in early America up until quickening, which is about five months, when the mother can start to feel the baby inside of her. And he kind of makes this assertion that, Oh yeah, in America’s tradition it was acceptable. But we’re able to look at these stories of these early abortions from the 1600s, such as the case of Captain Mitchell and Susan Warren that I mentioned earlier, and we see that these abortions are happening, but it’s obviously not acceptable—based on how the community is responding, based on the fact that, for instance, Captain Mitchell goes on trial for murder. If abortion was acceptable up until quickening, then why would he go on trial for murder? And I guess we have an even better example a few years later of another case where a woman has an abortion. A community member—actually, I think a midwife—is there and sees the unborn baby after it’s aborted and says that it was about three months. So that’s obviously before quickening. But the man who forced that abortifacient on the woman also went on trial for murder. So we have a very obvious example there of a pre-quickened child who was aborted, and the person behind the abortion goes on trial for murder. So right there, Justice Blackmun’s assertion kind of falls apart with those examples.

12:42 - Unsafe, Illegal, and Rare

Matt Tully
That’s actually a really good segue into a conversation about all the different periods in American history that we often don’t think about. As you said, our memory today of abortion often just goes back to the 1970s, but there is this longer history back all the way before the founding of our country where abortion was being discussed and debated and was controversial at times. And so you divide the book up into a few different parts that focus on different historical eras. That first era starts before the founding and the country all the way up through the middle of the 19th century. You summarize that era as a time when abortion was “unsafe, illegal, and rare.” I wonder if you could just unpack those three words and explain why it is that those characterize the country’s disposition towards abortion at that time.

Leah Savas
Definitely in early America, obviously we don’t have antiseptic procedures. There is not a good sense of actually the science involved in unborn life and in abortion. We don’t have antibiotics for cases where someone gets an infection, so it really was pretty unsafe. So it was usually in cases of great desperation that someone would actually get an abortion. Or, like I mentioned before a couple of times, Captain Mitchell forcing an abortifacient on Susan Warren. He hid it in a poached egg. That was an example where she wasn’t desperate, but he really forced that on her. So we see it was really dangerous, and it wasn’t accepted. People would go on trial for murder, for being involved in these abortions. In a lot of cases, they just simply weren’t able to prove the murder because often they couldn’t prove the pregnancy. There wasn’t enough to really kind of lead to that conviction, but the community definitely did not approve of these abortions. Captain Mitchell, for example, was not allowed to hold public office again, and he had a political role before that. He had to pay a big fine. So definitely I think the dangers involved and the community pressures against abortion made it very rare as well.

Matt Tully
Where do we learn about these kinds of historical cases, especially going back that far in our history? What are the primary sources of documentation where we learn these stories?

Leah Savas
A lot of the very early stories come from the archives of Maryland—the historical records of the area, just looking through court records, court documents. And through those court records, we can hear what a lot of witnesses, people from the community, were actually saying about the abortion.

Matt Tully
Because those were recorded as well.

Leah Savas
Yeah. We have even Susan Warren’s reaction to the abortion where she says that the extramarital pregnancy itself was a great sin, but then she called it a greater sin to make that pregnancy go away. So we kind of see what was going on in her mind and her concept of what is acceptable. And she saw that this was wrong.

15:53 - A Time of Specialization

Matt Tully
So the next era that you and Olasky explore in the book is the period between the mid 1800s to the end of the 1800s—somewhere in there. And you described that time as “a time of specialization”. What do you mean by that?

Leah Savas
We have some abortionists who become very skilled at what they’re doing. One abortionist was described as having million dollar hands, just really steady hands, very capable at what they’re doing. When an abortionist knows what he or she is doing, they’re able to result in just one victim of the abortion rather than two. By that I mean just the baby dies, not the mom. So as this specialization increases and continues, abortion is becoming more and more safe—for the mom, obviously not for the unborn child. We also see abortion doctors, or I guess I shouldn’t say “doctors,” but abortionists who make lots of money doing this.

Matt Tully
I was going to ask if that is a motivation for the growth of this industry, so to speak? Did it become lucrative for some of these doctors?

Leah Savas
It definitely was a money maker for a lot of abortionists. We have Madame Restelle, for example, just described as having all these furs and a fancy house. We kind of get to see her lifestyle. She was operating in New York, and abortion, obviously, was not legal at the time that she was performing these abortions, but she made lots of money off of them. And she also was able to prevent the city from enforcing the laws against her by paying off people in high political positions.

Matt Tully
So, bribing people.

Leah Savas
Yeah.

17:45 - Supply and Demand

Matt Tully
So the next era that you explore is 1871 to 1940, which you title “Supply and Demand.” What are you getting at with that? Those are kind of economic terms. What’s behind that?

Leah Savas
The supply side is we have abortionists who are performing these procedures. Demand side id do you have women who are seeking out abortions? Christians and other pro-life people in communities in this era were opening up organizations to help women who are facing difficult situations, facing unplanned pregnancies. They were opening organizations to help men who are moving to new cities and don’t have accountability with their families because they’ve moved to a new location. These organizations just help make sure that men and women are making wise decisions, that they’re not being promiscuous with their lifestyles. And if they are, they also provide opportunities for these people to continue pregnancies, even when they’re unplanned, to decrease the demand for abortion.

Matt Tully
So these were almost like precursors to today’s crisis pregnancy center? Is that a fair way to describe them?

Leah Savas
Yeah, in a lot of ways. And we do especially see examples of early maternity homes run by pro-life women who not only want to protect unborn life, but also want to help bring about a change in the women that come to them. They want to see a change in their hearts and help them see the value of a more godly lifestyle, like following God’s word and the value of prayer. So those are definitely really crucial in this period to decreasing demand for abortion. As you know, we have these people who are more specialized, who are good at what they do, who can pay off politicians and police officers to prevent themselves from being arrested. When you have that increased supply, you want to fight against the supply by decreasing demand.

Matt Tully
Were a lot of these organizations explicitly Christian? We think of crisis pregnancy centers today and they often have a pretty holistic approach to helping these women who are in crisis, helping these children who have needs, whether it’s job training and other kinds of economic security measures. Is that the approach that these organizations took back then?

Leah Savas
A lot of them were run by Christian people, so it has been kind of a continuation to the present day where we see a lot of pro-life pregnancy centers run by Christians or maternity homes run by Christians. One example is Heartsease’s Home. This is in the 1900s, and it was a home for pregnant mothers. That’s one of the organizations that encouraged a heart change in women, trying to see them change their path and help encourage prayer. It has very strong religious connections, but even some of the reporters in the area who were reporting on this home saw the value of it and thought, Wow! This is something we really should report, or support, as a community. There were those religious leanings, but that didn’t deter even secular reporters from saying, This is a great thing. We should be doing this and supporting this.

21:05 - Roe v. Wade

Matt Tully
The fourth era that you document in the book is between the years 1930 and 1995. We’re kind of getting closer to the present day and what most of us have experienced in terms of the abortion issue. This is obviously the period of time when we have Roe v. Wade, that really monumental Supreme Court decision in 1973. I wonder if you could just walk us through that. What was the significance of that decision? What did it mean? What were the basic contours of the decision? What impact did that have on how we, as Americans, approach this issue since that time?

Leah Savas
That decision asserted a right to abortion that said there was a right to abortion in the Constitution of the United States of America. And it’s interesting because we hear that language all the time today, especially even after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. People talk about it in terms of—

Matt Tully
I would dare say that the understanding of what Roe v. Wade was about is greater today in the wake of the Dobbs decision than it probably was before. People just had a more vague sense than what it was actually saying.

Leah Savas
Now we’re hearing all this language of, They removed the women’s constitutional right to abortion, when in reality, there was no—kind of as we’ll see in the Dobs v. Jackson opinion, Justice Alito wrote that it’s not founded in the history of tradition, or tradition of the country.
But that’s something that the justices then asserted, that it was a part of our history and tradition to have abortion as a right. And as I mentioned earlier, Justice Blackmun said that up until quickening it was acceptable in early America to have an abortion. So that became the narrative, really.

Matt Tully
At the time when Roe was first handed down, were there pro-life advocates or historians saying, Hey, I don’t actually think that history and tradition is as simple as maybe you presented it to be?

Leah Savas
Yeah, definitely from the beginning there were pro-lifers pushing back on this saying, This is one of the worst decisions we’ve ever seen. Even some pro-abortion people would argue that Roe v. Wade was awful. Just the decision itself was poorly written.

Matt Tully
The legal justification was not there.

Leah Savas
Yeah, exactly. So from the beginning, there have been people pointing that out and trying to show that no, this is not what we’re about as a country.

Matt Tully
So then that obviously sparked decades of a precedent that then had huge implications for not just the laws that were passed, but the politics and even the actual fact of abortion and how it was carried out. In 1992, there was another famous Supreme Court case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. I wonder if you could explain what was going on with that case and how that sort of modified Roe v. Wade.

Leah Savas
With that case, a lot of pro-lifers at the time who I’ve spoken with about their memories from the 1990s, they would tell you, Oh, we thought for sure Roe v. Wade was going down with that decision. They thought that Planned Parenthood v. Casey would mean the end of Roe v. Wade, that they would be able to pass laws to restrict abortion more. But ultimately, that decision did allow for laws to restrict abortion, but it was almost as if the law actually made any significant impact on a woman’s access, that it wasn’t okay. I guess you could say it as, You can pass laws, as long as they don’t do anything. So that’s kind of what we ended up with in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, so it was a big disappointment—going from expecting a total overturn of Roe v. Wade to getting this decision that just affirmed the right to abortion. It affirmed Roe v. Wade and only gave a little opening for pro-lifers to chip away at abortion. What a disappointment, to be honest.

Matt Tully
As you’ve talked with people and reported on this issue, talked with those who were there when that decision was handed down, did the pro-life side have to sort of change tack? Was there a new strategy then that was employed to get us to where we are today in a post-Dobbs world?

Leah Savas
Definitely, in one sense. I think there were multiple ways that things changed because of Casey, but one big thing was pro-life pregnancy centers took off. There was one big pregnancy center organization, known as NIFLA, that took off and that began in the 1990s. Their goal was to help pregnancy centers transition to offer medical services. Generally, the medical service that these pregnancy centers would start introducing is ultrasound technology so that women can see unborn life inside of them.

Matt Tully
And that right there is probably not something to jump over in this story—the advent of the ultrasound. What impact did that have on how the pro-life cause and how the case was made?

Leah Savas
The man who actually introduced ultrasound technology to obstetrics, Dr. Ian Donald, he actually even said, Now that we’ve introduced this to obstetrics, we’ve killed the dirty lie that abortion is just taking out a clump of cells.

Matt Tully
What year would this have been?

Leah Savas
This was in the 1950s that it first got introduced to obstetrics. Of course, it’s kind of a slow rollout from there of it actually becoming widely available.

Matt Tully
So it kind of sounds like there was almost a mirroring of a previous era where the pro-life camp after Casey recognized, We have limited options in terms of fighting this legally now, so we’re going to, again, attack the demand side by starting these pregnancy centers.

Leah Savas
Definitely. It was kind of an attack on the demand side, with the focus on switching pregnancy centers, because there were already centers offering services to women with more of material help, but this shift in the 1990s was towards doing the medical services, helping women get free ultrasounds so they can see unborn life inside of them. This was kind of doing what the 1939 World’s Fair did in showing those sculptures of unborn babies, except this is your own baby inside of you. We see these popping up, these pregnancy centers that offer medical services, and at the same time, like people my age, I was born in the 90s, and we grew up seeing ultrasound images like in scrapbooks.

Matt Tully
It’s very normal.

Leah Savas
It’s a very everyday sort of thing, pretty much, what an unborn baby looks like in a way. And as the technology advances, you get more details. Now we have 3D ultrasound technology where you can really see and say, Wow! That looks just like a picture of a baby that’s born! As that’s happening, people are becoming awakened to the reality of unborn life, but we still have a strong pro-abortion side that is saying, It doesn’t matter if it’s life. What matters is the woman’s life, and is this what she wants?

28:17 - Still Unsettled

Matt Tully
The final section of the book is titled, “Still Unsettled.” It explores the years from the mid-90s all the way through today. I wonder if you could help us to understand the last couple decades, which I know has been your focus of reporting and work. How has that conversation changed since that time?

Leah Savas
Definitely as ultrasound technology has spread and the knowledge of unborn life has spread, you see more of an acknowledgement of the reality of abortion, but also some hard-heartedness from people on the other side of the aisle who, like I said earlier, think, abortion is the best option for the woman.

Matt Tully
It seems like on the pro-life side there was hope that with medical technology developing and our understanding of life in the womb growing and increasing, and certainly since the mid-90s there have been huge improvements in our understanding of what’s actually happening and our ability to see what’s happening, there was hope at a time that maybe that would help to reduce the public acceptance of abortion. But it doesn’t seem like that really happened.

Leah Savas
I think in part, just based on what we’ve tracked in the book, it also goes back to what our understanding of Scripture is and what our understanding of what God says is. Because in early America, there’s definitely more of a concern for God’s word, for obeying God’s law. For instance, Captain William Mitchell, who was involved in that very first abortion that we found records of in the 1650s, the community around him, and actually one of the prosecutors in the case, got after him for blasphemy, actually. He basically asserted that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are just a man and a pigeon. He didn’t take God’s word seriously. He didn’t take Christ seriously.

Matt Tully
And that right there was a problem for everyone.

Leah Savas
Yes. They automatically saw, There’s a problem with this guy. He’s rejecting God’s authority. But today, there’s definitely less of a concern when it comes to biblical matters. We even see a small—I guess I don’t know the exact size—but there is a subset of churches—self-identifying Christian churches—where pastors support abortion because they think, God created us with free will, so we think abortion is an essential part of our Christian beliefs. Women should have free will about this issue. And even Planned Parenthood has a clergy advisory board, trying to get the religious—the “Christians”—on their side to advance abortion as a positive thing from a Christian perspective. So there is a lot of this pushback. People are looking at Old Testament passages and trying to say that these passages show that God’s okay with an abortion and he supports abortion. But that was not the understanding of early Americans, and that’s certainly not actually what Scripture tells us about unborn life or what God thinks of murder. So I think in a big way just the failure of a lot of churches to actually preach God’s word has led to just an insensitivity to the reality of abortion—that it is sin, that it is murder. So you kind of have to have those things hand in hand. You have to have the knowledge about the reality of unborn life, but you also have to have the conviction of what God says about it.

32:02 - The Dobbs Case

Matt Tully
We’ve mentioned the recent Dobbs decision a few times already, but help us understand. We’ve got Roe v. Wade, a really important case; we have Casey; and now this past summer we have the Dobbs case. How does that fit into this whole story? What exactly happened there? How has that now changed the conversation for us today?

Leah Savas
One of the big focuses of pro-life groups after the Roe v. Wade decision was once they figured out that from a federal level in Congress they couldn’t pass a law that would basically remove this “right to abortion,” they started focusing on restructuring the court—getting pro-life justices on the bench who would overturn Roe v. Wade. And leading up to Casey, they thought that they had the right people. They thought they had enough votes, but they didn’t. So that continued then for decades, trying to get these justices on the court that will actually uphold the tradition and history of America on the abortion issue and stay true to the text of the constitution. So when we come now to the Dobbs decision, we do see the results of all those efforts. So for instance, Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, he talks about history and tradition, and he basically gives the interpretation that pro-lifers have been fighting for all along. They’re like, No, this is not in our history and tradition. Abortion is not okay. So he’s pushing back basically saying in his majority opinion that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided from the beginning. It was not good. And so pro-lifers are like, Yes, thank you. That’s what we’ve been saying all along.

Matt Tully
I think a lot of these attorneys and judges might even say, I have a pro-life personal opinion, but they’re making an explicitly legal case oftentimes. They’re not necessarily coming from a religious or even ideological perspective on this issue. Is that right? I think Alito, for example, he writes his decision, but he’s not coming in saying, I’m pro-life. I want to stop abortions. He’s saying, This is a very poorly decided legal case that is just not constitutional. And that’s his argument. It’s less of, I’m a pro-life Justice who has an agenda. Is that fair? Is that right?

Leah Savas
Yes. He’s definitely not coming at it as saying, I’m a pro-life Justice, so I’m going to write this opinion. He’s saying it’s not in our history and tradition, he’s looking at the laws from early America—what did they actually say? And it doesn’t back up the arguments of Roe v. Wade, that this is a part of our history and tradition. But another interesting thing is the dissent. It’s a well-written dissent. They ask some hard questions. But one thing that they ignore altogether is the reality of the science of unborn life. Even before Roe v. Wade, doctors already knew that life begins at conception. Some doctors, of course, still supported abortion before Roe v. Wade, but other ones opposed it because they knew that it was ending an individual’s life. It’s their second patient—that unborn baby is the second patient.
But now, we’re even more without excuse. With the Dobbs decision, we have all these years of ultrasound technology, of advances in science and medicine to understand human life. So really, there’s no excuse for the dissent to absolutely ignore the question of human life. They don’t touch on that question at all. So, in their efforts to assert this right to abortion, they’re totally overlooking all of these advances in science and technology that just affirm what we’ve known all along, that unborn life is human life, and it is extinguishing a human life to commit an abortion.

36:05 - The Story of Abortion in America after Dobbs

Matt Tully
As you have reported over the last few months and talked with pro-life people, what’s your prediction for how the pro-life movement will change and how the story of abortion in America will change going forward in the face of Dobbs?

Leah Savas
I think the Dobbs decision has definitely brought abortion to the forefront of just the American mind in a way that it hasn’t been necessarily for at least since the Casey decision. And I guess I wasn’t there then, so I don’t know for sure, but it definitely has brought the issue up, and people are thinking about it a lot more. People have very strong opinions. We’ve seen increased vandalism, or at least in 2022 immediately following the draft leak and also the decision in Dobbs. There has been increased vandalism of pro-life groups and especially pregnancy centers. Tech companies are cracking down on pregnancy centers for what they call “deceptive advertising practices.” For instance, the fact that if you search “abortion near me,” sometimes a pregnancy center will pop up in Google results. So, just a lot of crackdown on stuff like that. I think pro-abortion people are a little riled up because they see that this “right” that they’ve had for the last almost fifty years is now taken away in a lot of states. They’re going to be fighting probably in a way that the pro-life movement has been fighting the last fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade. They’re probably going to continue fighting to reinstate something like Roe v. Wade. So we’ll have to keep our eyes at the federal level and what happens there. At the federal level, we see these pro-abortion democrats who are pushing for a law. For the last several years they’ve been pushing for this law that would go farther than Roe v. Wade in protecting access to abortion and restricting a state’s ability to pass laws to protect unborn life. So we’ll have to keep our eyes on that and see what happens there. But also, states will be wrestling through, How do we restrict abortion? What sorts of exceptions do we allow for? Do we allow for rape and incest exceptions, or do we think that life is valuable no matter how the baby was conceived? What sorts of life of the mother and health of the mother exceptions should we include? How do we write the language? So there’s going to be a lot of wrestling through these new questions that have come up since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. But in a lot of ways, the work of pregnancy centers especially will probably be very much the same as it always has been. We’ll have women who are facing unplanned pregnancies coming into pregnancy centers looking for help, women who are seeing their babies on ultrasound screens and for the first time kind of understanding maybe more than just seeing another picture of someone else’s baby on an ultrasound screen—understanding and feeling a connection with their own child. We’ll see counselors advising women, sharing the gospel with them. That’s a really important part of the pro-life movement is the gospel. Some pregnancy center workers I’ve spoken with have talked about how abortion is ultimately a problem of the heart. You can see that ultrasound image, but if you don’t care about God and what he says, and if you don’t care about your unborn neighbor—your own baby—then whatever decision that seems right to you and that seems best to you is what you’ll do. So, women will probably be increasingly accessing abortion pills online and taking those in their own homes. So there will probably be a lot of abortions that we don’t even know about, because those are very available and they have been for a while. The abortion industry has been gearing up for increased access to abortion through online sources. So, pregnancy centers will also have to deal with how to fight back against that increased access to the abortion pill reversal method, which I mentioned earlier in talking about the story of Hannah, who was able to save her unborn baby by taking progesterone treatment. Pregnancy centers will be introducing that and kind of gearing up for welcoming these women who regret what they did and trying to help them reverse that process.

Matt Tully
It’s very much that the job is not done. There’s much more to be done yet.

Leah Savas
Yes. Lots of new questions, but also a lot of old problems that are just continuing.

Matt Tully
I’ve heard some pro-life people just speculate that they worry that perhaps the pro-life movement could fracture, to some extent, and could sort of start to disintegrate and not be quite as unified and coordinated in the wake of Dobbs because Roe v. Wade was this big thing that kind of unified a movement. There was a lot of agreement about how that was legally not a good decision and how it sort of usurped the democratic process on this front. Do you think there’s truth to that? Have you seen evidence of that in your reporting that there’s going to be different people doing different things and it might ultimately water down the impact of the pro-life movement?

Leah Savas
I think that will definitely be something that continues, but I wouldn’t say it’s new. I think it’s been going on for a while already. There have been different groups that push for different sorts of laws from the beginning. As soon as the Roe v. Wade decision originally came out in the 1970s, you kind of had these different factions of the pro-life movement—people who pushed for different solutions to the Roe v. Wade problem. And even from the beginning, I think pro-lifers would tell you that those divisions stalled a lot of pro-life progress. So I don’t think that’s a new thing. I think it will continue and it will probably continue in the realm of what sorts of exceptions do we allow for in pro-life states. Obviously, there will be a lot of still pro-abortion states like California and New York that will just allow pretty much unrestricted access to abortion. But in those states where they do have freedom to protect unborn life, you’ll see the question of, Do we allow for rape and incest exceptions? Do we allow for a health of the mother exception, or do we just do life of the mother? There’s this small faction of pro-lifers who think that women should be punished for abortions. Not abortions that they’ve done in the past, but moving forward, there should be punishments for a woman who accesses abortion if we’re going to prevent the at-home chemical abortions.

Matt Tully
Because historically it’s been that any kind of legal punishments have been typically against the doctors who provided that.

Leah Savas
Yeah. But I think as they’re seeing the increase of abortion pills, they’re just concerned: How are we going to prevent people from taking the abortion pills in the confines of their own home after purchasing it illegally from someplace overseas? So these questions of, What do you do about those abortions? These will always be coming up. These questions will be coming up in the coming years, and pro-lifers will definitely be wrestling through and being on different sides of the aisle on these issues.

43:47 - Practical Advice for Those Who Want to Help the Unborn

Matt Tully
I wonder if you could then speak to the Christians listening right now who do love these unborn children and want to do what they can do in the world that we live in today to help defend their lives, to help protect them, to help serve their moms as well. What advice would you give to Christians who would be in that camp right now?

Leah Savas
I would say that it’s very important to be the hands and feet of Jesus to these women who are facing unplanned pregnancies—to serve them with material aid, to show them unborn life through ultrasound technology, to give them diapers and clothes for their babies and strollers and swings and all those material needs. But I would also urge them not to forget that these women have very real spiritual needs as well. The ultimate solution to the problem of abortion is not a law, it’s not science; it’s ultimately a conviction of what God’s word says, and the willingness to obey God by loving him and loving your unborn neighbor. So I think a lot of pregnancy center workers that I speak with have mentioned how it’s awkward bringing up the gospel when a woman comes to you wanting help for this unplanned pregnancy. And yeah, it is awkward. Bringing up the gospel is just awkward because it involves sin and repentance of sin, and no one wants to hear that they’re a sinner. But without hearing the bad news, you can’t really understand the good news of what a powerful God we have and how Christ has taken the punishment for sins, including abortion. And if we repent and accept him as our savior, then that is ultimately the best decision we could ever make—even more important than becoming pro-life. So I think that’s a really important message, not only for women who are considering abortion but especially for women who have already had abortions. I’ve talked with women who feel so much guilt because of what they did and knowing that what they did was murder. They were involved in killing their own child. What an incredible amount of guilt to deal with. But they tell me that when they finally understand the gospel and how it applies to their specific situation, how Christ’s punishment paid for the sin of their abortion as well, what freedom that brings. So, not only is it helpful for women who are in the midst of a crisis, but also for women who have already been through it—even for dads and other people in communities who have been involved and feel the guilt. That is such a help. It’s an offensive help in a lot of ways because people don’t want to hear that they’ve sinned, that they’ve been involved in something that’s a sin that God hates. But what an incredible thing to recognize that we have forgiveness in Christ Jesus. What freedom!

Matt Tully
For those with ears to hear, it’s the ultimate message of hope. Leah, thank you so much for giving us just a little bit of a taste of the complicated, difficult to read (at times) history of abortion in America, and then for helping us understand even the moment that we live in today.

Leah Savas Thanks for having me.

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