Cutting off the supply of abortions won’t alter demand

But that doesn’t mean Republicans aren’t trying their best to cut off both. At The Prospect, friend of the blog Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has a piece about how, despite concerted efforts to cut off the supply of abortions, demand remains unchanged. Thomson-Deveaux gets to the heart of the matter, which is that anti-choice advocates have a completely different worldview from many of the people seeking abortions, one that makes it much harder for them to influence demand, even if that were possible. As a result, it’s easier for them to just cut off supply:

The primary logic behind these laws was that women did not grasp the devastating ramifications of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. Of course, the laws influenced women in other ways, mainly by making abortion more costly. But the strategy was psychological as well as financial. “For folks who are really against abortion, it’s incomprehensible that a woman would be willfully killing her baby,” says Tracy Weitz, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California-San Francisco. “There’s got to be another reason. They’re either being coerced by providers, or they don’t really understand what they’re pregnant with. The idea is that if women heard the heartbeat or saw that it had fingers or toes, that it looked like a baby, they would change their mind.”

It’s a really smart piece, and I highly recommend it.

Chloe Angyal came out of the womb opinionated.