'We've done our part': End of Roe brings answer to prayer

TUPELO, Miss. (AP) — There is a prayer Tanya Britton has said in the hazy first moments of morning and in the stillness of the night. She’s said it on her knees before her church’s gold tabernacle and slumped in the embrace of her living room sofa. The words have morphed, sometimes touching her lips and others echoing only in her mind, but one way or another, they’ve repeated, decade after decade after decade.

“Whatever I do, let it be for the end of abortion,” 70-year-old Britton prays. “Let it be that one child be saved today. Let it be that Roe v. Wade be overturned.”

She hoisted signs outside of clinics, cajoled lawmakers at the statehouse and spread her anti-abortion gospel to anyone who’d listen, repeating her mantra so often she wondered if she’d live long enough to see it come true. Until Friday came and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled. And her prayer was finally answered.

“This was my mission,” she said through tears. “I'm one of millions of people in this country who have done a little bit. We've done our part. We've done what God called us to do.”

Around the country, many mourned the decision, seeing it as one that robs a basic human right, inordinately affects poor people, and could lead to needless deaths of desperate women.

But on a day that belonged to the victors, people like Britton, vested in a half-century movement, rejoiced.

Britton got started in this work around 1990, praying the rosary outside a clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, and before long, it consumed whatever time was left over from working full-time as a nurse and raising her son.

She became the president of Pro-Life Mississippi, traveling the state to push anti-abortion laws and trying to win converts to her side. And week after week, she returned to the streets outside clinics.

Sometimes...