Two years ago, Texas shocked the world.
The Heartbeat Act went into effect in September 2021, prohibiting abortions after the detection of a child’s heartbeat, typically around six weeks of pregnancy. For the first time since Roe v. Wade, a state could protect preborn children in the first trimester.
It was a worthy precursor to the cultural earthquake that followed nine months later, when Dobbs forever changed the abortion landscape of the United States.
People said it couldn’t be done, that a law modeled on a novel legal idea was a fool’s errand. Yet both our organizations — Human Coalition and the Texas Pregnancy Care Network — supported it. How could we not? Courts for decades had prevented states from exercising their sovereign duty to protect children in the womb; we owed it to every single one of these vulnerable children to do the right thing.
Yes, the work of serving women and supporting them as they rescue their children from abortion has been, and always will be, the foundation of the pro-life movement. Our staff see women at possibly the most vulnerable moments of their lives, cases where women feel that aborting their child is their only option.
But the fact remains that laws and policies such as the Heartbeat Act are also necessary to prevent as many abortions as possible, so we also support these lifesaving measures.
In the months that followed the implementation of the act, abortions in Texas fell, and more than 1,000 lives were saved
