Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the U.S. abortion rate has steadily increased. New estimates show that abortions have risen from an estimated 955,000 abortions in 2022 to about 1.19 million in 2025.

These numbers don’t undermine Dobbs as, on its own terms, an enormous legal victory, the fruit of decades of hard work by the pro-life movement. But they do suggest that the Dobbs decision arrived in a country generally inclined to embrace legal abortion, and pro-life efforts failed to anticipate and plan for that reality effectively enough.

How should we understand this steep increase in abortion given that, post-Dobbs, about half of U.S. states enacted meaningful legal protections for unborn children?

Some amount of the rise is attributable to women crossing state lines for an abortion. In 2024, about 15% of abortions performed in states where abortion is legal were for women who traveled from out of state.

But most of the increase is due to a rising reliance on chemical abortions, which now account for about two-thirds of all abortions each year and which take place early in pregnancy. Chemical abortions are self-administered by women at home, and thanks to federal regulations, they are easily obtained in states where abortion is illegal or limited.

Under the Biden administration, an executive action removed existing safety regulations on mifepristone — the main drug used in chemical abortions — to allow women to obtain the drug without ever seeing a doctor in person.

Despite the fact that it’s illegal under federal law to mail mifepristone for the purposes of abortion, the law is currently unenforced, and the FDA currently permits women to obtain the drug via telemedicine. These new abortion estimates suggest that, in the first half of 2025, more than a quarter of all abortions were provided via telemedicine appointments.

In other words, state pro-life laws have been rendered largely toothless by federal policies that allow easy access to chemical-abortion drugs. 

Thus far, the Trump administration has left the Biden policy in place, a stance in keeping with the position Trump and Vance staked out during the 2024 campaign. The administration has simultaneously opposed the efforts of pro-life states to regulate mifepristone, contradicting their position of allowing states to decide their own abortion policies.

The rising challenge of chemical abortion demonstrates the importance of pro-life policymaking. The current administration could, with little difficulty, reinstate the pre-Biden safety regulations that required women to visit a doctor in person before obtaining mifepristone.

This would be a good thing for women’s health and safety alone — allowing for informed consent and essential checks such as verifying how far along a pregnancy is or determining whether a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, as well as ensuring that women can obtain prompt emergency care if serious complications arise after taking the drug at home.

But it would also go a long way toward limiting the increase in the abortion rate and toward affirming the power of states to set their own abortion laws. 

Both Trump and Vance have argued that U.S. abortion policy should be settled state by state. Setting aside the injustice inherent in this position — do unborn children in California have less of a right to life than those in North Dakota? — we cannot ignore that current federal policy undercuts pro-life laws.

If women can easily obtain chemical-abortion drugs no matter where they live, the concept of settling abortion state by state is a fig leaf. We are tacitly permitting legal abortion throughout the U.S. by executive fiat.

In light of these grim statistics and the current prospects for meaningful pro-life policymaking — even under a Republican White House and Congress — pro-lifers ought to think of Dobbs as having inaugurated a new era that requires creativity and fresh thinking, not continual efforts to rerun a pre-Dobbs political playbook.

Dobbs marked the end of an era in which the pro-life movement was united around one clear objective: bringing an end to the legal regime that sanctioned abortion on demand. The post-Dobbs years have shown that the pro-life movement has yet to develop a sophisticated strategy for grappling with the fact that abortion is driven primarily by cultural factors — factors that aren’t entirely controlled by changes in the law.

Most Americans view abortion from a sort of “mushy middle,” represented by common refrains such as, “I wouldn’t choose abortion myself” or “I wouldn’t want my girlfriend to have an abortion.” But then these same people add, “I can’t tell anyone else that abortion is wrong for them.”

Likewise, many Americans say, “I wouldn’t want to have an abortion myself” or even “I don’t think abortion is right.” But then they add, “If I were in a tight spot, or my girlfriend or my friend were in a tight spot, I think abortion should be available.”

We might summarize it as: “Abortion for thee but not for me, and abortion for me if push comes to shove.”

Opinion polling on abortion bears this out. In 2025, a Gallup survey found that 43 percent of Americans call themselves “pro-life,” but just 13% of Americans believe abortion should always be illegal. The majority of respondents (55%) now say that abortion should be legal “only under certain circumstances,” a position that has risen in popularity since Dobbs. 

In other words, Americans tend to be uncomfortable with abortion, but they want loopholes. The idea of abortion as a necessary evil to safeguard adult priorities — to keep one’s life on course or to protect women’s autonomy — is a powerful one.

This helps us understand why, since Dobbs, Americans have consistently voted to protect legal abortion, including in red states. Nearly 20 times in the past three years, states have considered abortion-related ballot measures, and in nearly every case, a majority of voters opposed pro-life measures or supported pro-abortion ones.

Pro-life groups have been quick to blame these losses on having been outspent by the pro-abortion side or having been overwhelmed by media bias. These factors make a difference, but we have to dig deeper.

The main reason for these results is that most Americans have embraced an unspoken creed: “Abortion for thee, because your behavior isn’t my business. And abortion for me, if push comes to shove, because I deserve to control my own future.” Pro-life Americans will only be treading water until we are courageous enough to acknowledge and address these deeper roots of our political problems.

The pro-life movement’s efforts to effect change through policy must grapple with the increasingly obvious fact that neither major political party appears prepared to act on behalf of unborn children in any meaningful way.

At the same time, the movement must be willing to approach this underlying cultural challenge more seriously, redirecting some of its efforts into the enormous project of changing hearts and minds in a country that has accepted abortion as a necessary evil.