After Roe, there's no time to party

It's been a fabulous week for conservatives, Republicans and millions of ordinary Americans.

I cheered all of the Supreme Court's recent blockbusters -- for moral, political and personal reasons.

I'm 100% anti-abortion. I believe adults should be free to own and carry guns. I believe there should be more prayer in schools, not less.

And I don't want unelected federal bureaucrats writing laws about the environment or anything else that Congress should be writing.

But the Court's 5-4 decision last week to overrule Roe v. Wade and send the "regulating" of abortion back to the states, where it always belonged, was doubly pleasing to me.

This week when I spoke about abortion and adoption to a group of teenagers at a Young Americans Foundation event, I repeated something I've written and spoken about many times before.

First, I asked the young conservatives to imagine what the world would be like if the person sitting next to them had never been born.

Then I told them the story of Sarah Jean Maysfield, whose family could not afford to have a child and literally left her on the doorstep of a neighbor.

I told them how that neighbor took her in, legally adopted her and changed her name to Sarah Jean Faulks.

I told them about Nancy Robbins. On the day she was born her father walked out on her mother because he didn't want a child. Nancy was later adopted by the doctor who had married her mother.

And then there was John L. Flaugher. He was born to a young woman from Ohio who had been impregnated by a married man. After she gave birth to John alone in California, she gave him up for adoption.

So, OK, I asked the kids, what's the big deal with these unknown "unwanted" babies?

Well, Sarah Jane Faulks was Jane Wyman, an Academy Award-winning actress, the first wife of Ronald Reagan and my mother.

Nancy Robbins, who would be adopted by her mother's second husband, Dr. Loyal Davis, became Nancy Davis, the actress, second wife of Ronald Reagan and first lady of the United States.

And John L. Flaugher, the baby put up for adoption in California by his unwed mother, is actually the author of this column.

So, I asked the kids, imagine what life would have been like for the Reagan family -- or the world, for that matter -- if these three babies had been aborted instead of adopted?

During the half-century of abortion on demand that Roe made possible in 1973, an estimated 63 million future Americans were snuffed out.

Disproportionately black and brown lives, no one knows how much good they could have done for themselves, their families and the rest of us if they had been given a chance to live.

Again, I'm proudly anti-abortion. But I'm also really, really, really pro-adoption.

In post-Roe America, it's going to be incumbent on those of us who are anti-abortion to support adoption in every way possible.

We have to be there with our love, our time, our money and our political clout to help all single mothers keep and raise their "accidental" babies. Especially if they are our own daughters.

If the mothers decide they can't keep their children, we pro-lifers have to work overtime to make sure they will be adopted and don't end up being victims of our horrible foster care system.

Most important, we pro-lifers need to use our political powers in Red and Blue states to get rid of the overly strict and complicated adoption laws that often make it more difficult and expensive to adopt American babies than foreign ones.

Getting those state laws changed to make adoption easier and more common is the responsible, moral and practical reaction to the end of Roe.

It's not time to sit back and party because we won the constitutional fight over Roe.

For pro-lifers, the work to bring more babies into this world alive -- and love and care for them -- has just begun.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.