It’s been a confusing couple of weeks for the pro-life movement. On January 6, President Donald Trump reportedly told Republican lawmakers they’d need to “be a little flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer money from funding abortions. They weren’t—House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was “just not going to allow that to happen.” The next day, Trump’s press secretary said the president’s policy supporting Hyde hadn’t changed. A week later, the American Civil Liberties Union dropped a lawsuit against the government after the latter released about $65 million in unpaid Title X funds to Planned Parenthood. The funds had been withheld most of 2025 for “possible violations.” To be clear—this wasn’t the same money withdrawn from Planned Parenthood in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. That law blocked Medicaid money from any nonprofit abortion clinics, and went into effect in September. All told, it should deprive Planned Parenthood of about $700 million. But there’s a catch: The One Big Beautiful Bill only cut off Medicaid funding for a year. Unless more legislation is passed, the spigot of funding will turn back on for Planned Parenthood in September 2026. It’s a lot to keep track of. And if you ask someone involved in pro-life advocacy which one to worry about most, they’ll tell you something else entirely. Courtesy of the Guttmacher Institute “The abortion numbers are going up,” said Herbie Newell, president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services. More than a million pregnancies were aborted in 2024—up 20 percent from 2017, when abortions hit an all-time low of about 860,000. So far, overturning Roe hasn’t dropped abortion numbers nationwide. It’s possible that defunding Planned Parenthood won’t either. That’s because this problem isn’t unique to the American political landscape. Abortion numbers are rising in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe too. “Romans 3:23 says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We need laws restricting abortions, and we should always advocate for them. But they’re not going to change the hearts and the minds of people,” Newell said. “That’s why we need the church, because it’s the gospel that’s going to actually change the heart. It’s the gospel that makes it safer for babies in the womb.” Why Are There More Abortions Now? After around 30 straight years of decline, abortions in America began to rise in 2018. It’s hard to find a good political reason—it wasn’t a presidential election year. It was four years before the Dobbs decision. The biggest political pro-life news that year was either Trump speaking at the March for Life or the Supreme Court decision that California couldn’t require pregnancy centers to provide information about nearby abortion clinics. Neither was the rise in abortion rates caused by a rash of unwanted pregnancies. The number of pregnancies (and indeed, of people having sex) had been decreasing for years. “The number of abortions is going up because it’s easier than it ever has been for a woman to get access to the pills,” Newell said. He’s referring to mifepristone, which was invented in France in 1980 and approved by the FDA for use in America in 2000. (You may remember its earlier name, RU-486.) The drug, which blocks the body’s natural production of progesterone, is commonly combined with a second pill called misoprostol, which contracts the uterus. By 2018, the pills—often referred to as medication abortion—accounted for around 40 percent of all American abortions. Five years later, that number was up to 63 percent. The same trend can be observed in places like Scotland, Switzerland, Canada, England, and Wales. After decades of abortion decline, the adoption of telehealth and mifepristone in those countries was corresponding with a surge in abortion numbers. Number of terminated pregnancies in Germany from 1996 to 2023 / Courtesy of Statista For example, Germany has some of Europe’s strictest abortion laws—a pregnant woman must see a counselor, wait three days, and be less than 12 weeks pregnant to be eligible for an abortion. Abortion numbers there have been dropping fairly steadily since the early 2000s. But in 2022, they popped up again. That year, a third of abortions were induced by mifepristone—up from 3 percent when it was first approved for use in Germany around 2000. In New Zealand, abortions also began to rise in 2022, the same year that medication abortions became as popular as surgical abortions. In the three years since, medication abortions have become twice as popular as surgery, and the number of abortions in New Zealand is at its highest rate since 2008. And in Canada, abortions began drifting back up in 2021. By 2023, more than 40 percent of abortions were caused by medication. Telehealth consultations and prescriptions were also rising rapidly. “This is a wild change in the landscape,” one Canadian researcher told reporters. Newell puts it like this: “The advances we thought we made in 2022, with the overturning of Roe? We didn’t make any advances. The game changed.” Let’s nuance that: Dobbs did make some things better. But it also made other things worse. And while everyone was looking at Washington, the technological advances of mifepristone and telehealth were doing an end run. Better and Worse The Dobbs decision was the right one, and it did make some things better. “There are babies that are being born today in the state of Texas because abortion is not accessible here,” said Mary Whitehurst, chief executive officer of the Source, a network of pregnancy support clinics in Houston and Austin, Texas. She’s right. Studies show that states with strong pro-life laws are seeing thousands more births than expected. Mary Whitehurst / Courtesy of the Source “But I also believe there are any number of abortions happening that we have no idea about,” she said. Whitehurst can see hints of them in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists journal, which reports how many women from Texas are traveling to states such as New Mexico and Kansas for abortions. And she knows pills are coming in through the mail, because some of those women end up in her clinics for postabortive care. Sometimes those women are hiding their abortion from their regular doctor, she said. They’re also hiding from ER doctors. “Women are being told, ‘If you have adverse side effects, go to the ER and tell them you’re miscarrying,’” she said. “But if a medical professional doesn’t know a woman has taken this pill, they won’t be able to provide the best health care.” These are unintended consequences of a good law. Whitehurst has seen this before, when Texas passed the Heartbeat Bill in 2021. “When the Heartbeat bill passed, we didn’t anticipate that women who were too early in their pregnancy to detect a heartbeat might see that as a green light to get an abortion as soon as possible,” she said. “Before, if she came in at five weeks, we knew she had until 20 weeks to make a decision. It was easy to say, ‘You don’t have to rush this. Come back next week. Let’s do another ultrasound. We’ll see if the pregnancy is even viable. And then let’s talk about your options.’” The Source team serving at a community fair / Courtesy of Mary Whitehurst But after the bill was passed, “if we couldn’t detect a heartbeat, her next stop was the abortion clinic,” Whitehurst said. That fallout didn’t make the law bad, she said. If there was a heartbeat, “more women were able to have those deeper conversations,” she said. “They were willing to explore other ways to move forward, because they felt like they didn’t have a choice about having the baby. Back then, there wasn’t a push to get women out of state or send them abortion pills in the mail. All of that was triggered by Dobbs.” It was also triggered by COVID-19, which normalized telehealth and allowed the FDA to authorize sending mifepristone through the mail. From 2022 to 2024, the percentage of abortions prescribed virtually rose from 5 percent to 25 percent. Neither of those factors is going to change anytime soon. In October, the FDA authorized a second generic version of mifepristone. This will increase the supply and competition, dropping the cost of an abortion even further. Currently, the median price of a medication abortion offered in person is $600, the same as the average cost of a surgical abortion from Planned Parenthood in the first trimester. But if you’re ordering pills online from a virtual clinic? The median price is just $150, down from about $240 in 2021. Now What? Heartbeat International, which has a network of 3,600 pregnancy help affiliates, projects that the pills will account for virtually 100 percent of abortions by the year 2030. So it makes sense that mifepristone is the most important target for pro-life legislation. One avenue could be recalling doctors to the Hippocratic oath, Newell said. The original form includes this sentence: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.” However, most medical schools have significantly reworked the vow, which now includes sentences such as “I will respect the autonomy and dignity of my patient” instead. Other strategies could include these: Require an in-person diagnosis and prescription. At a Senate hearing last week, Republican lawmakers again called on the Trump administration to roll back virtual visits for abortion pills and ban the practice of delivering them by mail. Ask the FDA to withdraw its approval of mifepristone. In mid-September, Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy told Republican state attorneys general that the FDA was reviewing the safety of the drug. By the end of the month, however, the FDA had approved the generic form. Focus on state-level restrictions, similar to the work being done before Dobbs. Already, 18 states require an in-person doctor’s visit to obtain abortion pills. In Texas, private citizens are allowed to sue anyone involved in providing abortion pills to Texans. And Louisiana’s attorney general is attempting to extradite out-of-state doctors who were prescribing and mailing drugs to Louisiana residents, perhaps setting up a Supreme Court case. Fighting abortion medication with legal restrictions is “probably going to be a decades-long battle,” Care Net chief outreach officer Vincent DiCaro said. “In the meantime, there’s a lot of things we could be doing outside of the political realm.” Beyond Politics “If you define pro-life as a political framework, then there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we’re doing pretty poorly,” DiCaro said. “But if you reframe it around things that we would call ‘pro-abundant-life,’ then there’s a lot of really positive things happening.” One is the Abortion Pill Rescue Network, expanded dramatically by Heartbeat International in 2018. The top situation the helpline sees is a scared woman who recently took the first dose of mifepristone and wants to save her pregnancy. The next most common situations are a woman whose boyfriend made her take the abortion pill and a woman whose abortion facility is telling her she must take the second pill to finish the procedure. Since 2012, the Abortion Pill Rescue Network has successfully saved 7,000 lives. Another bright spot is First Baptist Orlando, a congregation that started a pregnancy center in their church in 1986. Over the years, they have connected holistically with hundreds of men, women, and children. Pregnancy center clients receive resources from First Baptist Orlando before a Sunday morning service. / Courtesy of Care Net “We want people to become disciples of Christ,” senior executive pastor Danny de Armas said. “The first step for us is to help them make a decision to keep this child. And then that becomes a connection point with that family to help them come to faith in Jesus Christ.” From there, he wants the family to be discipled, join the church community, and begin to serve. As clients of the pregnancy center become volunteers, “it just keeps looping over and over again,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing.” To date, 428 new families have joined First Orlando through the pregnancy center. Not every church needs to start a pregnancy center, DiCaro said, but pastors should spend more time thinking about how they might support women and men at risk for choosing abortion, both outside and inside the church. “We did two national surveys of women who had abortions and men who participated in abortions, and we found about 40 percent of women were regularly attending church when they had their first abortion,” he said. “And a little more than half of men in the survey were regularly attending church at the time of the first abortion that they were involved in.” Abortion in the Church Abortion’s prevalence in the church is both heartbreaking and confusing. A 2025 study found that about 20 percent of regular churchgoers had “paid for, encouraged, or chosen to have an abortion.” “Interestingly, there was no significant correlation between being born again, how often one attends church, or how frequently one reads the Bible and the likelihood of having had an abortion,” the study authors wrote. “Christians understand that it’s a human life and that abortion is probably wrong,” DiCaro said. “But that doesn’t change the conditions that are causing them to consider abortion in the first place. They might feel as though they don’t have the finances, they’re not set in their education, they’ll have to drop out of school, or they don’t have support from the father of the baby. All that stuff hits like a ton of bricks, whether you’re going to church or not.” Care Net president and CEO Roland Warren and Vincent DiCaro discussing the life issue on Care Net’s CareCast podcast / Courtesy of Care Net It doesn’t help that Christians are increasingly unclear about abortion. In 2025, less than half of churchgoers described themselves as pro-life (43 percent), down from 63 percent in 2023. They meant it—just 26 percent in 2025 said abortion is never acceptable, down from 35 percent in 2023. And only 51 percent said the Bible is clear and decisive about the morality of aborting an unborn child, down from 65 percent two years ago. “We have to move the pro-life argument away from politics and recapture the imago Dei argument in the pulpit,” Newell said. “The whole reason Christ Jesus came is because life is sacred. If our lives didn’t matter, Jesus never would have had to come. . . . The imago Dei, the sanctity of life, is not complementary to the gospel. It is part of the gospel advancement—God made life in his image, redeems life in his image, so that life in his image will flourish and make disciples.” Good theology is the thing sturdy enough to stand up against a cheap, readily available, private abortion experience, Whitehurst said. “Ultimately, abortion is a heart issue,” she said. “How we see God, and then how we see our situations and his hand in our lives, even with those unplanned things, plays a big role.” A First Baptist Orlando volunteer finds supplies for a young mother before a church service. / Courtesy of Care Net She remembers a new father weeping as he saw his child on an ultrasound for the first time. The ultrasound tech was able to lead both parents to the Lord that day. “They realized this was bigger than them—a life was there,” Whitehurst said. “It was a miraculous thing that they were experiencing.” That’s why she keeps going to work, in a state where abortion is outlawed and yet unplanned pregnancies haven’t stopped. It’s why DiCaro keeps laying out a vision of churches that want not just a living baby but whole-life discipleship for the entire family. It’s why Newell isn’t discouraged by the changing stance of politicians or parties. “Because ultimately I know who the Author of life is,” he said. “In this world, we’re always going to have trouble. But the Word says, ‘Take heart, because Christ Jesus has overcome the world.’ God also tells us to give this world a taste of what heaven will feel like, so that those that are perishing may taste it. And in the end, our God—the Creator, Author, and Sustainer of life—wins.”