Making abortions illegal does not stop abortions. Statistics show outlawing abortion barely reduces the number of abortions; it just makes them more dangerous to the woman and the fetus. The abortion debate is more about lifestyle and views about woman and sexuality than about babies. Here are some questions to test the actual motivations of abortion opponents:

• Do you support access to contraception?
• Do you hold men equally accountable for unwanted pregnancies?
• Do you support public education about birth control, pregnancy and disease?
• Do you encourage medical research to prevent the 30% of all impregnated eggs that self-abort?
• Do you support medical care for pregnant women, which prevents birth defects and miscarriages?
• Do you do anything to help women who choose to go through with an unplanned pregnancy?
• Do you also try to do anything for newborns who are dying of disease and starvation?

Someone who is “pro-life” who can’t answer yes to some of these questions, is not pro-life. At best, they are anti-abortion, and at worst, they are anti-woman or anti-sex. Neither women nor sex the deserve scorn.

Improving access to affordable birth control and public education about contraception will prevent more abortions than outlawing abortions, but abortion foes fight these alternatives. Why? Because it is more about legislating sexual morality than it is about babies.

Much of the conservative movement is “morally” opposed to premarital sex and casual sex. I think it is immoral to judge or discriminate against people for their sexuality. We disagree, but here is something conservatives just need to realize:

You can’t stop people from having sex.

Shaming, discrimination, harassment, and attacks do not, and will not, stop it. In societies where people are killed for pre-marital sex, homosexual sex, and adultery; people still do it. People will die to love the person they want to love. People will risk discrimination, punishment, and death to express their sexuality.

Therefore, if you want to stop abortions, stop attacking sex and reproductive rights, and start working to fight unwanted pregnancy. Doing so has the added benefit of reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Society at large, particularly conservatives, and especially conservative men, seem to blame women for sex, “sin”, unwanted pregnancies, and rape. It takes two people to create an unwanted baby, and despite the sick and horrible things some conservatives say, a man forcing himself on a woman is never “her fault”. We don’t say that murder is okay, because the victim was “asking for it”, but almost every time a woman is raped, there is always some jerk wondering if she “deserved it”.

Statistically, men pressure women for sex dramatically more than women pressure men for sex. Statistically, men pressure women to have unprotected sex much more than women pressure men to have unprotected sex. Compare the numbers of women who rape men to men that rape women. Rapes by women are so rare they are not statically significant.

The gender that is most responsible for unwanted pregnancies is men. Still, we shame women and put the responsibility for dealing with the unwanted pregnancy almost exclusively upon women.

If pro-lifers really wanted to “protect innocent babies”, they would ante up and make sure that those innocent babies have proper healthcare during the pregnancy and for the first years of life. An all-male group of Republicans, almost all “pro-life” tried to eliminate prenatal and maternal care from healthcare coverage. This is hurting innocent babies by taking away the care they need to thrive, and completely contradicting their alleged motivations in the abortion debate.

No one likes abortion. Pro-choice people see it is the lesser of two evils, and generally do not see an early term fetus as a “baby” or a “person”. The two sides aren’t going to ever agree on that issue, but if abortion opponents would stop being sanctimonious about sexuality, we could dramatically reduce the need for and number of abortions.