Many of Donald Trump’s defenders say that it’s him. The proof, they say, is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which was issued one year ago this week. Trump nominated three of the six justices who voted to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, and three of the five who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He was indispensable to the pro-life movement’s greatest legal triumph, and in the months since Dobbs, state after state has enacted or enforced sharp limitations or near-total bans on abortion. So it has to be Trump, right?

But if we change the metric from abortion law to actual, legal abortions, the picture is considerably different, and begins to challenge our assumptions about what it means to build a true pro-life culture in the United States. If the most important metric in determining a president’s pro-life credentials is the prevalence of abortions performed in the United States during his term, then the title of the most pro-life president in modern American history belongs, remarkably, to Barack Obama. It’s not close. And, Trump’s judicial nominations notwithstanding, a very long pro-life trend reversed itself during his presidency.

A tiny bit of history: According to the Guttmacher Institute, the American abortion rate (the number of abortions per 1,000 women) and abortion ratio (the number of abortions per 100 pregnancies) rose sharply in the years after the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973. These figures essentially plateaued and then dipped slightly under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and then began a long decline under each president since then … until Donald Trump. No president saw sharper decreases in the abortion rate and ratio from the first to the last year of his presidency than Barack Obama. In 2016, at the end of a presidency dominated by pro-choice policies and judicial nominations, there were a total of 874,080 abortions — 338,270 fewer than there were in 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush presidency. That’s a remarkable decline of 28 percent. The rate and ratio of abortions at the end of Obama’s second term was actually lower than it was in 1973, the year Roe was decided.

Yet that long trajectory toward lower abortion rates and ratios changed during Donald Trump’s single term. In spite of allegedly being the most pro-life president in American history, he presided over the first overall increase in the abortion rate and ratio during a presidency since Jimmy Carter. As a result, there were 56,080 more abortions in the final year of Trump’s presidency than there were in the final year of Obama’s.

And no, this was not a Covid-induced blip: The abortion rate dipped slightly in 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency, before rising in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Has the effect of Dobbs canceled out that increase? The short is answer is yes, slightly. The longer answer is, again, more complicated. According to data from #WeCount, a project from the Society of Family Planning, it appears that there were roughly 24,000 fewer abortions in the United States in the first nine months after the Dobbs decision than there were in the previous nine months.

That decrease is substantially less than some of the leading pre-Dobbs estimates, one of which predicted that the abortion rate would be “at least 13 percent lower without Roe v. Wade.” Such an estimate would have expected to see a decrease of about 100,000 abortions in nine months. Even more troubling, the same #WeCount study found that national monthly abortion rates had rebounded to pre-Dobbs levels by early winter of 2023.

This is but one study, of course, and it will take time to discern the enduring impact of Roe’s reversal. But it suggests that the abortion increases that began under Trump might be more sticky than I hoped, that what could have been a mere blip might be a trend.

To cite these numbers is to raise the logical next question: Why? Why did decades of abortion declines reverse themselves in the Trump years? Why is the decrease in abortion after Dobbs so much less than even the most informed observers anticipated?It’s a tough question, and one that’s resistant to monocausal answers. But let me return to hope, specifically the sense of hope in America’s young adults, the very people who date, marry and start families. That’s also the cohort, unsurprisingly, that’s most likely to seek abortions.

The decision to bring a child into the world is one of mankind’s most hopeful acts, part of a seamless garment of hope and love that begins with a mother and a father and the raising of kids into whom they pour their hearts — with the goal that those kids’ lives are better, more full and, yes, even more hopeful than their own.

Tear the threads of that garment at any point, and hope starts to fail. Is a relationship loving and strong or unstable and ephemeral? Do you approach your own future hopefully or are you struggling with feelings of anger, anxiety and depression? Are you in a state of financial difficulty or crisis? Destroy people’s hope, and you can destroy their expectations of life, not to mention their desire to bring new life into the world.

And make no mistake: America is facing a hope crisis. I’ve written about the extraordinary wave of depression and anxiety in teens and adults before, but every month seems to bring new (and worse) numbers. In one analysis, around 44 percent of American eighth, 10th and 12th graders report feeling that “my life is not useful.” Another 48.9 percent say “I do not enjoy life” and 49.5 percent say “I can’t do anything right.”

This is a younger cohort than those typically seeking abortions, of course, but the numbers offer a terrifying glimpse into the hopelessness with which they approach life.

Another concrete sign that hope is plummeting is the American marriage rate. After years of decline it stabilized in the Obama years, before plunging during Trump’s term. I could go on and on with the grim external markers of a lack of hope.

More murder during the Trump years. More drug overdose deaths. More animosity between red and blue. No one should pin all these statistics on Trump. The Covid pandemic would have been catastrophic under any person’s leadership. These last few years have been trying worldwide, not just in the United States. Moreover, Trump is both a product and a producer of our cynical age.

I support the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Dobbs. The Constitution is silent on the right to an abortion, and the question properly belongs to the political process. Moreover, Roe worked a great injustice in my view: It prohibited American democracy from fully considering or acknowledging the humanity of the unborn child. It was right and necessary for the court to correct such a substantial error in constitutional law.

But even before Roe was overturned, I was under no illusions about the challenge facing the pro-life movement. That challenge is now proving worse even than I feared, and it’s worse in part because of the very compromises made to secure the Dobbs victory. The pro-life movement was Donald Trump’s mighty political vehicle. Without its support, his cruelty, malice and corruption would be a footnote to history.

Instead, his towering presence has warped almost a full decade of American life, turned Americans against Americans and transformed the culture of the Republican Party, the political home of pro-life America. It remains to be seen how long his malign influence will last. But much of America has experienced Trump’s presence on the public stage as a form of assault, and that assault is ultimately antithetical to the cause of life.

The pro-life movement is not exclusively religious. Indeed, a pro-life liberal atheist named Nat Hentoff was extraordinarily influential in the development of my own pro-life philosophy. But the movement is heavily religious, and many of its members will be familiar with one of the most famous verses in the Bible, from the book of Jeremiah: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”

Hope and future. Those two words are profoundly connected. And when it comes to the decision to have a child, it is hope that provides that future. A pro-life movement that has long affixed its eyes on power must now remember hope.

Otherwise, it may remember this period of American history as the time when it won the law and lost the nation, when the means of its legal triumph also sowed the seeds of its cultural defeat. If there is one thing that we know, it is that the culture in which we live decisively influences whether men and women possess the hope sufficient to have a child.