American women can now get the abortion pill by mail, after the FDA made permanent a pandemic-era provision that allows doctors to prescribe the miscarriage-inducing drug over the phone, without ever examining the pregnant mother in person.

I’m old enough to remember when Democrat Rep. Jim Clyburn said the pandemic was a “tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision,” and here we are using a mild seasonal virus to permanently justify making infanticide as easy as ordering takeout. I’m old enough to remember when pro-choice activists screamed that a Texas law limiting abortions to before the child is 6 weeks old was proof we’re living in The Handmaid’s Tale, but in reality it seems the only thing that’s changing is the way in which abortions will be procured. I’m not old enough to remember when Roe v. Wade was radical, and allowing abortions in the second trimester criminal; that seems like a different era, rather than just one generation ago. But one thing’s for sure: The fight for life is not over; we’ve merely changed the setting.

A few weeks ago, The American Conservative contributing editor Matthew Walther wrote of the Dobbs case that “the end of legalized abortion will be revolutionary. Hence (whispers the quiet voice of despair) the supreme unlikelihood that it will ever come to pass.” We’re seeing exactly what that means. While the pro-choice side says anything less than free, no-questions-asked abortion available whenever and wherever is a human rights violation, in this total war, they’re a lot closer to their goal than many pro-life Americans like to admit.

“But we have heartbeat bills.” But those only ban abortion after a heartbeat is detected, as though one doesn’t exist simply because an ultrasound can’t detect it.

“But Texas.” But that’s one state of 50.

“But Dobbs could overturn Roe v. Wade.” But the highest court means little if the culture wants what the law has proscribed.

In the early days of the movement, widespread access to abortion, and especially late-stage procedures, were on the fringes of society. The extremely wealthy could afford to experiment and the extremely poor took desperate measures, but the average, middle-class American had to be convinced of the need for such legal changes by arguments such as the old “when the mother’s life is at risk”—an extremely rare situation in which prudence, rather than a universal code, should guide a doctor’s judgment. Rape and incest were added to the list, to further sour the taste of resisting abortion.

We’re living in a very different culture today. To oppose infanticide is to be backwards, patriarchal, and insensitive to the needs of women. This is not a culture that shudders to hear that only 21 states prohibit partial-birth abortions. And until it is, it will not be a culture that bans, rather than proliferating, a chemical drug that induces the death of its unborn children.

We can, and should, continue to play whack-a-mole with the laws where we can, but we should do so always with our eye on the real issue. Until Americans can begin to see abortion for what it is—widespread killing of the most defenseless of all humans—we will not succeed by simply curtailing only the worst of many, horrible evils.