(DCNF)—The leader and co-founder of a group seeking to end abortions around the world reflected on the state of the pro-life movement after the death of one of its most steadfast advocates — who began his career on the other side of the issue.
Dr. Haywood Robinson — who had been an abortionist for 14 years before becoming a staunch campaigner for the practice’s abolition — died of heart failure the last weekend of July 2026 at the age of 74, 40 Days For Life (“40 Days”) announced in multiple social media posts Tuesday. Shawn Carney, the president, CEO, and co-founder of 40 Days, said Robinson, who had served as the organization’s director of medical affairs and education, “was one of those rare characters who forced people to sort of take a side” on the issue of abortion.
“One of Haywood’s legacies was that he forced the issue because he had done abortions,” Carney told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) in an interview.
Robinson always stressed that, while people blame politicians and the media for abortion, “for some reason, medicine got off the hook,” Carney said.
The doctor told the nonprofit political advocacy group CatholicVote in 2024 that, when he was performing abortions, he observed some hospitals conducted the procedure “no more than 50 yards” away from the labor and delivery suite.
“So you’re killing babies in one part, and right on the same floor, you’re delivering babies,” Robinson told the organization. “I recognize, retrospectively, that it almost makes you godlike — the power to kill on one hand, and the power of life on the other.”
Carney told the DCNF that the group had taken Robinson on a trip to London during which he debated a female abortionist and cited embryology and the Hippocratic oath to make the pro-life argument.
“And she looked at him and said that was written by white men thousands of years ago, and he kind of laughed,” he said.
Robinson, a black man, was particularly outspoken on how the practice of abortion disproportionally affected his community. He was one of the founding board members of the Life Education And Resource Network (L.E.A.R.N.), which describes itself as “the largest, African-American, evangelical pro-life ministry in the United States,” according to its website.
“Haywood was very good at ringing the bell of ‘Look, blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and nearly 40% of all abortions,’” the 40 Days president noted.
In 2019, 38.4% of black women accounted for 38.4% of U.S. abortions reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), compared to only 33.4% for white women, Vox reported, citing CDC data.
The former abortionist, however, “never played the race card” and “just pointed out the facts and said, ‘This is a huge problem.’”
The Movement Now?
Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Carney stressed that the anti-abortion movement is in a much better place than it had been in years past.
He said the Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization returning the abortion issue to the states paved the way for an “America where we absolutely don’t have to live in a world where abortion is every around every corner.” Carney contrasted the post-ruling status quo — under which Generation Z is coming of age — to the previous presidency of Barack Obama, who he said “made pro-choice radical and cool.”
“And I think a lot of my our generation, the millennials, sort of fell for that” he told the DCNF. “Our kids are not because the playing field has changed significantly. Obama’s presidency has aged horribly.”
Carney said that many staunch opponents of abortion “enthusiastically” voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, including some who were more skeptical of him in past cycles. Trump, in his first term, appointed half of the six justices who comprised the Court’s majority in Dobbs [Editor’s note: Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of President George W. Bush, voted in Dobbs to uphold the Mississippi law at the heart of the case, but did not vote to overturn the precedent of Roe v. Wade].
Many prominent pro-life leaders have in recent weeks called on the president, his administration, and the Republican-controlled Congress to take more action on the issue ahead of the 2026 midterms, in which Democrats are looking to regain legislative power.
Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins specifically called for Trump, along with his Food and Dug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to take action under current U.S. law to prevent the abortion pill mifepristone from being sold or disseminated through mail.
“The Trump FDA and EPA can act swiftly right now today to pull mifepristone from the shelves,” Hawkins said during her June 27 speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in Washington, D.C. Later in her speech, she stressed that pro-life voters who backed Republicans in 2024 “have to see a return on our investments.”
Carney, however, told the DCNF that, so far, he is happy with what Trump has done for the movement.
He pointed to the president’s decision to bring back and expand the Reagan-era Mexico City Policy, which prevents U.S. taxpayer-funded global health aid from going to foreign groups that fund abortions, as well as his banning of “medical research on aborted babies.”
The 40 Days president also confidently said the Democrats are “not going to take the House” in November’s midterms, predicting that they “being married” to the issue of transgenderism will sink them with swing voters.
Specifically, he cited James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in his home state of Texas who made headlines after a 2023 podcast interview resurfaced in which he willingly admitted his “love” of transgender children. He eventually, however, came out against the practice of child sex changes during another podcast interview in June, three months after winning his party’s nomination.
Talarico “is going to get absolutely obliterated,” Carney said.
The pro-life leader pushed back on some Republicans warning that the upcoming midterm elections will be a good for Democrats.
Midterm cycles almost always favor the party out of the White House.
“I think Republicans do this because they need to take a class from Nick Saban on how to win,” he told the DCNF, referring to the legendary University of Alabama and Louisiana State University football coach. “But they [Republicans] get victories and then they just go dire. The pro-lifers do it too.”
“And I’m just— I’m not on that bandwagon,” he continued. “I think that, look — there there are definitely things that the Trump administration can do more for the unborn, just like any other administration. That’s for sure. But the average pro-life American in their living room thinks that Donald Trump is the most pro-life president ever. And they’re correct.”
40 Days describes itself as “an internationally coordinated 40-day campaign that aims to end abortion locally through prayer and fasting, community outreach, and a peaceful all-day vigil in front of abortion businesses,” according to its website. Its campaigns have reached 63 countries since the organization’s 2007 founding.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
