The American Spectator

The pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute has put out a new report documenting a “seismic shift” during the past decade in the number of states with significant protections for unborn human life:

Over the last decade, the abortion policy landscape at the state level has shifted dramatically. Although a core of states in the Northeast and on the West Coast remained consistently supportive of abortion rights between 2000 and 2011, a substantial number of other states shifted from having only a moderate number of abortion restrictions to becoming overtly hostile. The implications of this shift are enormous. In 2000, the country was almost evenly divided, with nearly a third of American women of reproductive age living in states solidly hostile to abortion rights, slightly more than a third in states supportive of abortion rights and close to a third in middle-ground states. By 2011, however, more than half of women of reproductive age lived in hostile states. This growth came largely at the expense of the states in the middle, and the women who live in them; in 2011, only one in 10 American women of reproductive age lived in a middle-ground state.

Gains for the pro-life caused occurred mainly in the Sunbelt, midwest, and mountain west. Many of these states and regions are the fastest growing in the United States, while more pro-abortion regions (such as New England) are losing population.

Guttmacher uses the trend as a call-to-arms for abortion advocates, and with good reason. These developments show the effectiveness of a pro-life strategy working at the state level. While state-level action alone won’t be enough to defeat the evil brought about by Roe v. Wade, it is increasingly making that Supreme Court ruling irrelevant as attitudes about the value of unborn human life continue to shift.