The Supreme Court made the historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the infamous opinion which claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the right to abortion, one year ago today. In the twelve months since the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was handed down, however, there remain massive loopholes in conservative states’ new abortion rules, a reality which the mainstream pro-life movement has enabled and encouraged to the mortal detriment of innumerable preborn babies.

The majority of abortions in the United States even before the decision to overturn Roe had been executed via so-called medication abortions, in which a mother takes a series of two pills to respectively cause the death of her child and the induction of a premature delivery. New regulations meant to discourage surgical abortions have been the focus of conservative legislative efforts despite the rapidly growing prominence of the substances.

Abolitionists Rising, for instance, recently demonstrated in one video how a young woman can quickly and easily obtain abortion pills, including strawberry-flavored abortion pills, through the mail for a few hundred dollars. The video was produced in Oklahoma, which supposedly has one of the most stringent anti-abortion legal regimes in the entire nation. With the added realities of pro-abortion activists zealously working to help mothers secretly pay for the substances, the trend away from surgical abortions in sterile Planned Parenthood operating rooms toward self-managed abortions in college dorm rooms and upstairs bedrooms will only accelerate under the new status quo.

New regulations meant to discourage surgical abortions have been the focus of legislative efforts despite the rapidly growing prominence of abortion pills.

Conservative states, many of which have indeed regulated surgical abortion centers out of business, nevertheless forbid officials from prosecuting mothers for the murder of their preborn children, even if the mothers in question willfully chose to order the pills without assistance or coercion from any other party. Oklahoma expressly bans the “charging or conviction of a woman with any criminal offense in the death of her own unborn child,” while Tennessee makes explicit that “the pregnant woman upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted” cannot be subjected to “criminal conviction or penalty.”

These laws are deemed sufficient to protect preborn life in the same nation where women brazenly pop abortion pills on the steps of the Supreme Court or in the middle of televised news interviews.

Bradley Pierce, a constitutional attorney and the president of the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, said in an interview with The Sentinel that “murdering anyone should be illegal for everyone” and observed that there are zero states which have truly banned abortion.

“Current laws in pro-life states not only fail to curb the growing number of self-managed pill abortions, but by giving complete immunity to women who abort they actually create the conditions for this method of abortion to expand freely,” he remarked. “My home state of Texas is called ‘abortion-free’ by some. Yet the truth is that without a bill of equal protection, an estimated 19,000 children per year will be killed on Texas soil by self-managed abortions.”

Conservative states, many of which have indeed regulated surgical abortion centers out of business, nevertheless forbid officials from prosecuting mothers for the murder of their preborn children.

Moves to enact such equal protection bills in various state legislatures have been met with fierce opposition not from the pro-abortion movement, but from the most widely respected organizations in the pro-life movement, which rely on donations from conservative Christians.

Pierce and other activists sought earlier this year to advance a bill in Missouri that would have protected preborn children “with the same criminal and civil laws protecting the lives of born persons” by repealing statutes that permit willful prenatal homicide and assault, yet without exemptions for mothers who willfully attempt to murder their children. The only two parties to speak against the bill in a key committee hearing were lobbyists from Missouri Right to Life and Campaign Life Missouri. The committee, which is controlled by Republicans, then voted against advancing the bill to the floor of the Missouri Senate.

Opposition to meaningful equal protection under the law for preborn children extends to the highest levels of government. One Republican lawmaker, with the assistance of pro-life entities such as Live Action, introduced a resolution earlier this month in the House of Representatives claiming to guarantee equal protection everywhere “within the jurisdictional reach of the Constitution.” Though most of the language of the resolution is commendable, the entire professed intent of the resolution is undermined by a provision which states that the effort “shall not be construed to permit the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child.”

Equal protection bills in various state legislatures have been met with fierce opposition not from the pro-abortion movement, but from the most widely respected organizations in the pro-life movement.

Organizations such as the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, which clarified that no mother should ever be prosecuted in the case of a miscarriage, a medical triage situation necessary to save her life, or an abortion forced upon her with threats of violence, warned that the resolution would disallow the prosecution of any mother for the killing of her preborn child “no matter how knowing, willful, and malicious her intent or how heinous her conduct.”

“Just like guns don’t shoot people, people do, the same can be said here,” Pierce told The Sentinel. “Abortion pills don’t kill babies, people who take the pills do.”

Equal protection under the law for preborn children is a worthy and necessary objective, but the ideal becomes nothing more than a political platitude if a certain subset of the population has blanket immunity to violate such protections. Abortion will remain legal and commonplace in all fifty states even after the overturn of Roe, to the offense of God and the demise of countless preborn image-bearers, unless the laws against murder truly apply to everyone.