Fans of history will remember the following crucial turning points in world-changing conflicts:

• When George Washington defeated the Hessians at Trenton in 1776, and the Patriots declared victory, then went home to their farms.
• When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, so the Union decided the war was finally over.
• When the British ferried home their battered, beaten troops from Dunkirk in 1940, and promptly laid down their arms.

Wait, that isn’t what you learned in school? Seriously? Perhaps you learned instead that the authors of these achievements realized their wars were far from over. Maybe (if your teacher was really good) you learned that these partial victories made life even harder, for a while, because they outraged the enemy and stiffened their resistance. If so, then you’d know about later, bitter events like the Patriots’ winter at Valley Forge, the brutal Battle of Gettysburg, and the bloodsoaked Normandy landing.

The Patriots weren’t fighting for control over northern New Jersey, but full independence for all 13 American colonies. The Union wasn’t fighting to declare slavery null and void in the states it hadn’t yet conquered, but to prevent Southern independence — and after this Declaration, to obliterate slavery nationwide. And the British weren’t fighting Hitler just to get their Expeditionary Force back home alive — but to stop the German conquest of Europe.

The Dobbs Decision Was Dunkirk, Not D-Day

Likewise, we in the pro-life movement after 1973 were in no way fighting merely to expunge a few intellectually disgraceful Supreme Court decisions, as if to vindicate the honor of the U.S. legal system. This last point might not be obvious to some conservative legal types, who for decades have seemed more outraged at Roe v. Wade’s faulty logic and dishonest scholarship … rather than the deaths of some one million pre-born Americans every single year.

We need as defenders of the innocent to remember how bad the impact of those decisions was: It was as complete and appalling a catastrophe as the fall of France in 1940. Suddenly abortion was de facto legal for all nine months of pregnancy for any reason in each of the 50 states. The pre-born were as besieged and abandoned as Churchill’s United Kingdom was in 1940. Overturning Roe was an historic achievement, but only in the same way that Dunkirk was. As Winston Churchill reminded the desperately relieved British public who welcomed home their soldiers: “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

Overturning Roe was of course the right thing to do. But we must be clear-eyed and honest about what it accomplished: It slowed down and frustrated our powerful, relentless enemies, and pulled us back from the brink of surrender. That’s a lot, but that is all.

Next We Face the Blitz

And what came next was ugly: The Blitz, the Battle of Britain, the grinding submarine war that saw thousands of Britons drown in the icy North Atlantic. The enemy didn’t take its failure at Normandy as a signal to negotiate in good faith, or as some demoralizing defeat that sapped its strength. Instead they were emboldened to new and fanatical efforts, like sharks who taste blood in the water but can’t quite reach their victims.

And that’s how the pro-choice movement reacted to the fall of its phony Supreme Court decisions. We saw massive spending and dazzlingly dishonest ad campaigns bamboozle the voters of Ohio to amend their state constitution, enshrining abortion through birth. We witnessed politicians whom we had trusted suddenly lose their nerve. How else to describe Donald Trump dubbing as “extreme” the logical and nationally popular “heartbeat” bill Ron De Santis signed in Florida? Yes, that’s right, I said “popular,” because nationwide there’s strong support for choosing that seemingly logical starting point for protecting human life.

We Shall Not Flag or Fail. We Shall Go on to the End

Why doesn’t Donald Trump know this? Probably because he’s listening to advisors. The last time he did that, he appointed people like General Milley, Anthony Fauci, Christopher Wray, Bill Barr and Nikki Haley — who backstabbed not just Trump but all his voters and our country.

We know that Winston Churchill’s colleagues, almost the whole of his cabinet, pressured him to negotiate with a seemingly unbeatable Adolf Hitler. It was the “rational,” “prudent,” “sensible” thing to do. Committing the nation instead to years of “blood and sweat, toil and tears” was indeed extreme. It was also the only hope.

There are two powerful movies that depict the bleak world Churchill faced: Darkest Hour and Dunkirk. Watching them would remind pro-life Americans where we stand on the war-time timeline. The Nazis are still at the gates. The Luftwaffe’s still flying. And we still will never surrender.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, author, activist and human rights worker.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.