New book provides roadmap to pro-life movement’s future

Denver, Colo., Aug 27, 2022 / 06:00 am

What do you get when you put a pro-life scholar and a pro-life journalist together to write a book? A guide to the future of the pro-life movement and the truth about abortion. 

Ryan T. Anderson, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), and Alexandra DeSanctis, a National Review staff writer and EPPC fellow, recently co-wrote “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing” (Regnery Publishing, 2022). Published just days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the book promises to explain pro-life arguments with facts and logic while revealing the brutality of abortion and how it has wounded society. 

In an interview with EWTN Pro-Life Weekly on Aug. 18, the authors said that they foresaw the possibility of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the near future. That’s when they decided to “provide a pro-life roadmap to the future of the pro-life movement,” explained DeSanctis. 

“We wrote a book hoping that it would be accessible, useful even, to people who don’t agree with us,” she said. “We wanted to make a case, of course, first of all, that the unborn child is harmed by abortion, is killed by abortion, but [also] to kind of show pro-lifers a broader case, that abortion has actually harmed everything it’s touched.”

The two began writing the book in December, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case ultimately overturned Roe, leaving abortion up to the states.

The book dives into several aspects of society harmed by abortion, Anderson said, including the unborn child, women, racial minorities, people with disabilities in the womb, the field of medicine, the legal system, the political system, and culture, from big business to the news media. 

The authors also defined three theses upon which the right to life stands and provide rebuttals to pro-choice arguments. The theses are: the biological, the moral, and the political. 

DeSanctis explained that the biological thesis defends the fact that the unborn child is indeed a human being and not a clump of cells, part of the mother, or a parasite.

The moral case, she said, poses the question of what it means to be a human being — and why human beings have moral worth. 

Finally, the political thesis rebukes the claim that it is “not the role of government to impose on other people your beliefs” or that “the government shouldn’t get in the way between women and their doctors,” she said. 

“What kind of government, what kind of society do we live in if the most innocent human beings aren’t protected by our laws?” DeSanctis asked. 

The book also discusses marriage and the family, along with the need to rebuild a pro-family culture.

“Abortion is the ultimate backstop for so-called consequence-free sex” or sex without commitment, Anderson explained. “What we argue in the book is that it can’t just be that we prohibit abortion.”

“Abortion is a consequence of the sexual revolution. Abortion is also a catalyst of the sexual revolution in fueling consequence-free sex, commitment-free sex,” he said. “And that means we need to promote a marriage culture. We need to get men and women to commit to each other so then they can commit to take care of that child.” 

DeSanctis stressed that the overturning of Roe “is not the end of the fight over abortion.”

Instead, she said, “It’s the beginning of a new and important phase.”

Watch the full interview below.