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Abortion advocates advocate for widespread education about and research on alternative contraceptive methods like the iud / coil, condoms, the pill and so on, which with regular and responsible use significantly lower the likelihood of someone needing an abortion.
And they don’t consider ‘there will be fewer abortions’ a reason for pushing IUD’s the way they did in the 90s. Fewer babies yes, but not the ‘rare’ part of abortion.
I think that for a typical liberal woman not looking to conceive, the preference order is:
So birth control is absolutely preventing abortions. It is also preventing some babies being born.
Of course, the pro-life crowd has largely not embraced birth control as a method to prevent abortions, which is telling. While I get that there are age-old Christian objections to abortions specifically, I think that a lot of the point of being pro-life is to want to punish women for a sinful lifestyle. "If you fuck around, you get punished by being a single mother."
You believe pro-life advocates see motherhood as a punishment?
I believe that the Christian right, which is the camp of most pro-lifers, see non-procreative sex as inherently sinful.
There are probably some people who really hate abortions but are fine with fucking around, and will get their daughter an IUD at age 12 so she is protected from pregnancy, while also being fine with her experimenting with her 14yo boyfriend.
But the modal pro-lifer would emphasize that abstinence until marriage is the only 100% effective birth control. (For perfect use. For hormone-laden teens who do not typically get married before 20, I think that the Pearl Index for abstinence would be rather abysmal.)
Take the official Catholic position (my emphasis):
So it is not that abortion is very bad and using a condom or getting a sterilization after your fourth kid is a little bad -- they are all similarly worthy of condemnation. At the end of the day, at least the pope cares little about unborn kids being killed and a whole lot about people having deliberately non-procreative sex.
I think from a Catholic theology point of view, abortion, sodomy, sex outside marriage, sex within marriage with contraceptives and masturbation are all mortal sins. If you commit any of them and are not cleansed by baptism or confession, you go to hell. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and all that.
In conclusion, I think that the CR does not see single motherhood as a punishment for fornicating women, but simply as a natural consequence of her act which should be her cross to bear. But the underlying idea seems to be that during the heydays of Christianity -- in the good old days -- the choices of a woman were (1) marriage, (2) chastity (e.g. becoming a nun) or (3) being a fornicator, which meant to be an outcast of polite society. (Sure, gays and lesbians could always fuck around without biological consequences, but at least for men there were severe legal consequences instead.) Birth control and abortion have changed that equilibrium in a way which leads to a lot more sexual immorality especially from women (as men were probably always going to whorehouses). If birth control is illegal, then a woman are much less likely to engage in PIV sex outside marriage and will have their hands full with their kids instead of dyeing their hair green and studying feminism, or something -- I do not claim that I would pass the CR ideological Turing test.
Clearly you wouldn’t pass a CR ideological Turing test- literally, having a kid is seen as a blessing. Do you hate children or something? Evangelicals and Catholics don’t either.
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Only in the uncharitable case; more charitably, the inevitability of motherhood as an inescapable consequence of sex forms exceptional leverage when arguing for the cultural aesthetic they want.
If they can (unnaturally) impose the former condition, the latter naturally follows- it's the same thing the abortionists are doing when they argue for their aesthetic.
"More sex, less baby death" is not a goal the anti-sex side or the pro-baby-death side can publicly profess, since the anti-sex side promises less baby death as a consequence of less sex[1], and the pro-baby-death side promises more baby death as a consequence of more sex[1].
[1] Well, I say 'sex' but it's more 'choice', as in, which faction gets to write the social rules about how women get to leverage sex as a meal ticket. The "celebrate my abortion" stance is consistent with this, as is the "life begins at conception" one (but requires a bunch of other social context to fully understand why, since this is more a piece of a larger system that adds up to leverage rather than bestows it by itself).
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Do they not?
The women who are getting IUDs obviously prefer them to abortions. Providers like Planned Parenthood seem happy to offer them. What more do you expect?
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