A one-sided argument

I think the false dilemma in Ono Ekeh's "More Than One Pro-Life Way" article in the National Catholic Reporter was obvious enough:

The conservative approach to reducing the number of abortions is a “supply-side” approach. The idea here is to criminalize abortion providers, thus resulting in a reduction in the number of abortions...
Pro-life moderates and liberals embrace the “demand-side” approach. This approach seeks to reduce the number of abortions by addressing the social issues that compel too many women to contemplate what would normally be unthinkable.

It isn't an "either/or" matter. In fact, it can't be. The same moral imperative that requires abortion to be illegal also requires abortion to be unthinkable. If you think one without the other suffices, you don't really understand what abortion is. Which is one reason why all pro-choice Catholics are foolish at best.

On giving this more thought, though, I realized that this "supply-side vs. demand-side" contrast is worse than a false dilemma. The fact of the matter is, there is no such thing as a "supply side" in contrast to a "demand side." It's all the same side.

Laws prohibiting abortion help make abortion unthinkable, just as laws allowing abortion make abortion not only thinkable, but unremarkable. Ono Ekeh writes:

If social conditions were changed so that women were empowered, and if we effectively addressed issues such as health care, child care, family leave, wage inequity, domestic violence and other women’s issues, we could reasonably expect a significant reduction in the number of abortions in the United States.

What he doesn't write is that prohibiting abortion would also produce a change in social conditions from which we could reasonably expect a significant reduction in the number of abortions. Changing the law is not attacking the abortion problem in a different way than addressing women's issues, it's attacking it in the same way, by reducing the "demand" for abortion.

So I'm disappointed to see Steven Riddle write:

Before legislation will work, the society must be so fundamentally changed as to make the legislation essentially useless anyway. There need to be options for young women who find themselves in this "Sophie's Choice" in which the apparent choice is between "my continued existence on a subsistence level" and "the existence below subsistence I would have with this child." I know it is not the reality, but fear is rarely rational.

For one thing, using Ono Ekeh's data, "inadequate finances" is the reason behind only 21 percent of U.S. abortions. Yes, "only." If we had effectively addressed issues such as health care, child care, family leave, wage inequity, domestic violence and other women’s issues in 1973, there would only have been 32 million abortions in the U.S. since then.

There seems to be an implication that "abortion legislation will work" is equivalent to "no one will have an abortion," but that's absurd. For some reason, abortion law is thought about in ways that would be unthinkable for laws proscribing any other activity. Someone breaking a law is evidence that we shouldn't bother having the law?

More to my point, though, Steven doesn't account for the fact that prohibiting abortion is a means of fundamentally changing society. Let me go further, and propose that society will not be fundamentally changed such that abortion is unthinkable until and unless it is prohibited by law. And that is one reason Ono Ekeh's "pro-life, pro-Kerry" stance is bunk.

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