Life before law: Catholicism and North Dakota’s pro-life ruling

A near-total ban on abortion has taken effect in North Dakota after the state’s Supreme Court reinstated a law previously blocked by a lower court. In a finely balanced decision delivered on 28 November, three of the five justices found the statute unconstitutional, but the state requires a supermajority of four to strike down legislation. As a result, the ruling of Judge Bruce Romanick, who halted the law in 2024, has been overturned and the ban now stands.

The law, passed in 2023, makes it a felony to perform an abortion and carries penalties of up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000 (£7,600). It permits abortion only to save the life of the mother, or to avert a serious health risk. Exemptions for rape or incest are permitted solely within the first six weeks of pregnancy.

The justices concluded that the state constitution contains no right to abortion, and that the statute “provides adequate and fair warning to those attempting to comply.” ⁠Chief Justice Jon Jensen and ⁠Justice Jerod Tufte held that challengers had relied on “hypothetical future conduct” rather than evidence of unequal enforcement. “This statute provides minimum guidelines to avoid arbitrary and discriminatory application,” they wrote.

The state’s Drew Wrigley welcomed the decision, calling it a clear affirmation of legislative intent. “The Supreme Court has upheld this important pro-life legislation, enacted by the people’s Legislature,” he said. “The Attorney General’s office has the solemn responsibility of defending the laws of North Dakota, and today those laws have been upheld.”

The ruling marks the latest chapter in North Dakota long struggle over abortion regulation. Following the 2022 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, states were free to enforce sweeping restrictions. North Dakota’s earlier, stricter ban had been blocked in the courts, prompting legislators to craft the 2023 law. State Senator Janne Myrdal described the cultural instinct behind the legislation, saying that “North Dakota has always been pro-life and believed in valuing the mums and children both.”

North Dakota’s decision to reinstate its near-total abortion ban is not a matter of shifting political alliances, or the mathematics of court voting. It is the foundational question of whether life has inherent dignity from conception, and whether a nation formed by Enlightenment ideas of liberty can still accept a moral truth that comes before politics.

The Catholic Church cannot step back from declaring what doctrine has already settled: the right to life is not granted by constitutions, judges, or legislatures, but by God at the instant a new human being exists.

A collision of philosophies is now unavoidable. Some hold liberty as America’s core principle, while Catholics hold that freedom does not define when life begins, God does. Post‑Dobbs legal period politics has forced each state to answer whether human dignity can survive an age of radical individualism.

American Catholics have long lived inside a political system shaped by Protestant and Enlightenment assumptions. There is no Catholic political party, no unified Catholic electoral vision, and the two major political traditions prize autonomy more than anthropology, or metaphysics. When abortion becomes a state question, Catholics must navigate a system not built on Catholic anthropology.

The Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once described society as a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” North Dakota’s insistence on protecting the unborn emerges from precisely this instinct: moral order predates law, and the unborn child belongs within the moral community.

Solicitor General Phil Axt told the court, “It’s been clear since our territorial days that in order to justify killing another human being, there must be a threat of death or serious bodily injury.” Jensen and Tufte held that while the statute “does not present a clear answer to every imaginable situation,” no law ever can. What matters is that it provides “minimum guidelines to avoid arbitrary and discriminatory” rulings, an argument mirroring the traditional Catholic position that moral principles do not lose force because difficult cases exist.

America’s cultural environment, insisting that liberty is the final word in all civic questions, frequently moulds public perception of abortion as a personal entitlement, not a moral fault. Many Catholics struggle because the surrounding culture encourages life issues to become matters of personal preference, not matters of doctrine. The political Right, splintered by populist forces including MAGA movement, lacks a consistent moral voice, and cannot always defend life coherently even when its constituency intuitively objects to abortion.

America’s abortion litigation is, at its core, a battle about metaphysics, and truth itself. The Catholic position insists that Catholics must defend life not as one factional position among others, but as the moral condition for any society to remain just.

(Photo by BRYAN DOZIER/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)