Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - Roe Is Dead, But Abortion Isn’t

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Alan unpacks three steps pro-lifers should take to undermine abortion.

Although abortion's Roe v. Wade decision was overturned almost four years ago, women can still kill their unborn children. Well, what can we do to change that? Well, that's what I want to explain in this episode of my podcast, thinking out loud with Alan Schleeman. Every January 22nd, for the majority of the last 50 years or so, it has been the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, which established a constitutional right to abortion. Now, as you probably know, it was overturned back in 2022 by the Dobbs decision. Now, for someone who's fought against abortion choice for the last 20 or so years, it's rather incredible for me to see Roe v. Wade overturned. Honestly, I didn't actually believe I'd ever see it in my lifetime, but nevertheless, it happened. And so now Roe v. Wade is over.

But despite this momentous milestone, it's still legal to kill innocent. human beings through abortion in the womb. Now, I don't want to downplay what happened, of course. I mean, overturning Roe v. Wade was a major victory. And I don't want to minimize its significance because at least pro-life advocates have worked tirelessly for nearly 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade. And they accomplished that. They overturned it, right? And so this victory is theirs. But it's important to understand that overturning Roe merely meant that there's no longer a constitutional right to abortion. So what the ruling didn't do is it didn't make abortion illegal. You know, women are still able to kill their unborn children in about 30 or so states today,

okay, which is where abortion remains still legal. And in fact, many companies even will provide their employees with a significant amount of money for them to be able to travel out of state to procure these abortions. In other words, the Supreme Court ruling, Dobbs, doesn't do anything to make our laws in the United States consistent. And here's what I mean by the fact

that the U.S. laws now are still inconsistent. Here's basically what it amounts to. Currently, it's illegal. Listen carefully. It's illegal to kill a human being in every state of the union. Strangely, though, those laws have exceptions when the human resides within the womb of a pregnant woman

and she asks an abortionist to kill her child. So in other words, it's illegally killed children unless the child is still in the womb and the mother asks a doctor to kill it. Then it's legal. So as you could see, our work as pro-lifers is far from complete, right? In fact, Roe's reversal has probably done a lot to just galvanize abortion choice advocates, right? And so they're going to just redouble their efforts to try to

codify abortion into law. So therefore, pro-lifers can't rest, right? It's not like, okay, we're done now. There's a lot more to be done, but you might ask, well, what's there to be done? What can we do? Well, years ago, and this is long before Roe v. Wade was overturned, I proposed what I thought we needed to do to make abortion unthinkable, to overturn abortion, to either make it illegal, or to just get it to stop. And I argued that we should take a three-pronged approach to addressing abortion.

And I said we should address it personally, publicly, and politically. So you can remember it with the three P's, right? Personally, publicly and politically. In other words, now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, what would I change about my advice? would I change anything? And the answer is, no, I wouldn't change anything. What we want is for the same protection that is provided to a three-year-old child or a three-month-old baby to be applied to a three-month-old unborn human being. In the words, what we want is consistency. And in order to achieve that,

I think we need to follow these three steps or fight in these three realms, right? Personally, publicly, and politically. So let's address each one really quickly. The first one, individuals must personally commit to not having an abortion themselves. Okay, so this is the personal component. If you're a pro-lifer, or if you're not, right, we have to personally commit to not have an abortion ourselves. Too many people who are attitudinally pro-life aren't behaviorally pro-life when it matters most. And so what ends up happening is they think their situation is different.

And when they're in a bind, they succumb to the pressure to abort. In fact, if you look at Planned Parenthood's own data from their research division, what they say is approximately 13% of women who have abortions identify as evangelical Protestant. 17% identifies mainland Protestant and 24% identifies Catholic. What that means is Christians are killing their own children. Christians are killing their own children. and obviously that's unacceptable, right? It's hard to call a culture to behave morally when we're complicit in the very immoral act.

And so we need to first act consistently with our own values and stop killing our own children. So that's what I mean by personally we have to fight against abortion. So the second area is publicly. We need to stand up publicly against the killing of innocent human beings. And what that means is we need to, for those of us who can, learn the art of pro-life persuasion and make a case against abortion to our friends, to our family, to those people who are in our spheres of influence. And for those of us who might have more advanced knowledge

or have more advanced capabilities, well, that means we need to be writing, speaking, debating publicly, you know, engaging in broader public forums to try to make a big bigger difference. Now, changing minds isn't the only public impact we can make, though, although I think it's an important one. I think it's also important for us to be able to stand up publicly against abortion in the way we serve. So we can serve with our own time, energy, and money by serving women who are facing crisis pregnancies themselves. And in fact, one of the easiest ways to serve these women is to financially support or to volunteer at your local pregnancy resource center. And pregnancy resource centers are the very places that are really on

the front lines of this particular challenge that we face, right? Because they are interacting with women who are facing crisis pregnancies and who are very tempted to abort. But by supporting pregnancy resource centers, well, you can. with your time, money, energy, whatever resources, be able to meet the needs of women who are facing crisis pregnancies and help them to not abort. The employees of these pregnancy resource centers oftentimes come alongside women in all kinds of ways,

and especially these women who might be abortion-minded, and by providing them with the help they need, oftentimes this changes their minds when it comes to considering an abortion. So that's the second way, is publicly engaging against abortion. And the third way that we can address abortion is politically, right? So we need to fight against abortion in the political realm.

So as I already mentioned, Roe v. Wade was defeated. And of course, that had a sort of federal impact. But abortion rights are still being determined at the state level. And so what you have is pro-life politicians and pro-life attorney. are continuing to fight against abortion laws to make the laws of the United States more consistent, which means banning the killing of unborn children, not just when the mother wants her child, but even when the mother doesn't want her child. And one of the reasons why it's important for us to address abortion politically is because laws of our country or laws of our state,

tend to inform the conscience of a culture. In other words, when there's a law against something, it tends to communicate something about the morality of that act. And so when we make a behavior illegal, it helps to communicate the fact that that prohibited behavior is also immoral. And so by addressing abortion from a legal perspective, if we were to make it illegal, I agree it wouldn't necessarily stop abortion instantly, but over time, it'll have a tendency to inform the conscience of the culture and help them to see, oh, man, this behavior is illegal, probably because it's immoral. Of course, I won't affect everybody, but it'll make a big difference. So there you have it, okay? By addressing abortion from all of these three angles, personally, publicly, and

politically, we can continue to change minds on abortion and eventually make the abortion practice illegal. So now is not the time for pro-lifers to kind of rest on our laurels. I know abortion choice advocates are not going to do that, right? In fact, as I said, they're probably going to redouble their efforts and they're going to be galvanized in their fight because of the huge loss they suffered with Roe v. Wade. So this is why we need to keep fighting as well. As other people have said, abortion is the Holocaust issue of our day, right? So let's do what we can to make abortion unthinkable. All right, well, that's all I have for you today. I hope you've enjoyed this episode, and I want to encourage you to share it with a friend if you think that might be helpful to them.

And then also don't forget to subscribe to my podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. And thank you for listening. I look forward to thinking out loud with you next time.