Across the nation, the anti-abortion movement celebrated in jubilation after the court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade — rejoicing at pregnancy centers and churches, in homes and on the phone with friends. This was the moment imagined for half a century, a dream many refused to believe was impossible, the sign of a new America they had worked for generations to achieve.
‘A Grievous Wrong Was Righted’: Anti-Abortion Activists Celebrate the End of Roe
The staff of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America waited in anticipation at its headquarters in northern Virginia on Friday morning, trying to refresh the Supreme Court website that would not load.
Then, someone called out: “It’s overturned!”
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, looked at images of women outside the Supreme Court who were upset that the constitutional right to abortion had ended. One day, with work, she hoped they would channel that energy into her movement’s cause.
“This moment is about redeeming the past, and moving into the future,” she said. “The experience of abortion was not the great liberator that women were told it was going to be.”
Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, was in front of the Supreme Court, where women from her organization and others, like Students for Life, had gathered to pray regularly since a draft opinion signaling the decision was leaked last month.
“Today a grievous wrong was righted,” she said. “In 1973, seven men decided for the entire country. They halted a conversation that was going. Science caught up with the lie of abortion.”
She felt the scene in front of the court grow rowdy, and decided to leave with her security detail. Everything felt surreal, she said. “I feel such incredible and deep gratitude, first to God, that I got to live to see this moment,” she said.
David Bereit, who co-founded 40 Days for Life, a grass-roots faith-based effort with prayer and fasting campaigns to end abortion, could not stop crying.
He had not been able to sleep, having just landed from a red-eye flight from the California March for Life, wondering when the news would come. When he saw the ruling had been released, he called his wife and they wept together. They called their children. For years they had traveled as a family across the world for the cause.
“When you invest a good chunk of your life into something,” he said, “when you have been disappointed, let down, discouraged, so many times, it seem like an answer to prayer.”
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Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood director who became an anti-abortion activist, was at the Pro-Life Women’s Conference in Indianapolis. Women crowded around, refreshing their phones over and over. “We were screaming and yelling, over and over again, in disbelief it was finally here,” she said. “It for us was a huge victory, and finally came to pass.”
In Texas, John Seago, legislative director of Texas Right to Life, which advanced the state law that bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, refreshed his phone from the parking lot of his climbing gym. He saw the decision and scratched his workout. The court was “brave,” he said.
One of his group’s immediate priorities is to enforce the law, especially as some district attorneys were already refusing to enforce it, he said.
“Technically abortion is prohibited today in Texas because of our pre-Roe statute,” he said. “Committing an abortion is a criminal activity in Texas.”
“Our movement has been close to overturning Roe in the past, and have been let down at the last minute,” he said. “So a lot of us were still skeptical until we actually saw the opinion today. This is a phenomenal moment for the pro-life movement that has been working toward this ruling for 50 years.”
