Grabbing the Abortion Dilemma by the Horns
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, a common argument was to describe pro-life Republicans as "the dog that caught the car". There's some indication that this is true, as Republican political candidates are slowly walking away from strict abortion bans.
I was obviously aware of the prohibitionist stance on the pro-life side but truthfully I never took it seriously. Because Roe had been a question answered on constitutional grounds, it meant no one could do anything about it short of a constitutional amendment that had no chance of passing. Which meant that advocates could jawbone all they want about wanting to ban abortions without ever having to be made to call their bluff. The nightmare that Dobbs awakened a sleeping army of angry women chomping at the bit to vote for Democrats appears to be coming true. Blake Masters, GOP Senate candidate in Arizona, used to support a national ban on abortion. But recently, he accused his opponent of mischaracterizing his position, and claims that he's only opposed to "very late-term and partial-birth abortion". His campaign website was modified to reflect this new position. Bailey, meet Motte.
I noticed a similar reaction when stories like the 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio popped up. If you said you wanted to ban all abortions no questions asked, you necessarily had to support legally forcing that 10-year-old girl to carry to term. That also necessarily means prosecuting anyone who hinders that prohibition (doctors, pharmacists, anyone who facilitates inter-state travel, etc.) through the typical avenues, which means people with guns and badges threatening to put people in cages.
There's an easy way to square this circle. If you genuinely believe that abortion is as immoral as murder (without exception) and that the law should reflect that, then you have to support forcing 10-year-old rape victims into carrying their pregnancy to term. This is plainly justified even by conceding that forcing a child to carry her rapist's baby is atrocious, because the pro-life rejoinder is that you can’t remedy an atrocity by committing an even bigger one.
For me, even though I used to work as an attorney in abortion rights advocacy, my thinking on the morality of this issue has always been fuzzy. I do not know when a fetus becomes a person entitled to the right to live, and I think the pro-choice crowd does everyone a huge disservice by flippantly claiming it's all just a bunch of cells up until the millisecond it's finally exposed to air during delivery. Seeing it as a gradient with difficult and complex policy trade-offs does seem to be the most reasonable. My ideal is a world where abortion is far less prevalent because birth control is far more prevalent. Short of that, I still support an expansive abortion rights regime simply because restrictions tend to encourage hazardous black market alternatives (see the drug war).
Now that Roe is gone, we get to see how many pro-life advocates are willing to demonstrate their stated sincerity and grab the dilemma bull by the horns, pregnant 10-year-old rape victims be damned. I disagree strongly with that conclusion, but I at least genuinely respect its consistency.
RE: "My ideal is a world where abortion is far less prevalent because birth control is far more prevalent."
A big part of the pro-life movement (or anti-abortion if you prefer) is that sex needs to be re-centered on reproduction and re-contextualized to be the basis of creating a family. I would like to use Japan as an alternative to the way we talk about these things in America. I'll be quick.
So in Japan, the subject of abortion is basically settled along the lines of when the people think babies are developed enough to be delivered, or at which point it should be considered an atrocity to abort them, and that limit is 20 weeks. Japan goes further than that and requires pregnant mothers to register babies at city hall after a certain period of pregnancy (14 weeks, I think) in order to receive benefits under Japan's national health insurance program. For mothers who cannot pay the fees for delivery under the health insurance program, which are typically about $4600 USD, there are government grants that pay about 2/3 of that. There is also a strong culture there of expecting men to "take responsibility" for pregnancy and to both marry and support the mother and child as a nuclear family. I'm not Japanese, but I think America was generally a lot more like them before the US government started directly incentivizing single-mother families through welfare during the LBJ administration.
Where does birth control and abortion enter in? Major obstacles for minors receiving these items are that they must offer their insurance card, which guarantees that their parents will know what they are up to. This means that major life choices among minors will be tempered against the older generation's values and experience. I base a lot of these conclusions and positions from sex-ed manga, but they generally cite their sources among Japanese government surveys and research of relevant populations. Two things that stood out to me here are that 1: the Japanese government actually tracks how would-be mothers feel after having elective abortions and that 2: they really pay attention to how much money it takes to raise a child and to have one delivered. I guess a country with a baby crisis would do that, but the US also has a baby crisis that is being temporarily put off by our massive waves of immigration. We should be acting more like Japan and fixing national disputes democratically. We must stop straw-manning our opponents and really look at how people feel and what their experiences are.
Another big part of this is how do individuals feel before and after having sex, whether romantically attached or otherwise. These are real questions that need to be asked and understood before we necessarily just declare that sex is a universally good thing for everyone whenever they want it. No one ever actually proved that inconsequential sex is good for society. I do not see a universal path forward on this front because the conservative position will always be something along the lines of "sex is for reproduction but more importantly it should be within the context of a traditionally monogamous marriage." The opposite position seems to be "if it feels good, do it." Both sides produce unwanted or unexpected pregnancies, but I think the correct approach here is defining humanity first and then deciding based on when life begins how to proceed in understanding all the related issues.
In short, I don't think birth control treatments are the panacea to reducing abortions. If what really matters to you is sex unmoored from responsibility for pregnancy, I can understand why you might hope for such an easy solution, but I don't think this is good policy or good for society, because there's way more going on here.