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I don't think any of these things are an actual problem. Acknowledging your issue is unpopular doesn't make it more unpopular, as far as I can tell. So if there's no actual cost, why not try all the lines of defence you have available? Okay, they lost here, but they're in no different a situation than if they hadn't tried.
In my opinion, the actual smart strategic decision for pro-lifers in broadly pro-abortion jurisdictions would be to move abortion out of the field of legislation entirely and to concentrate on regulatory restriction pathways. E.g. establish in codes of conduct that doctors faced with situations directly impacting multiple patients (such as conjoined twins or pregnant mothers) need to act to promote the best health outcomes for both patients whenever possible. And then you use board review to take medical licences away from doctors that perform medically unnecessary abortions (while also ensuring you don't spook the normies by forcing women to carry pregnancies in genuinely life threatening situations). Encourage pro-lifers to get their kids to become doctors, make use of the large network of Catholic hospitals to promote pro-lifers into positions of prestige and power in the medical profession, etc.
Why wouldn't the regulatory approach face the same hurdles as the legislative approach?
Because for the little attention that legislation gets, regulation gets even less. A law is - or at least can be dumbed down to - a bright line rule. A regulatory approach is full of considerations and exceptions and maybes. It can be every bit as stifling (or even more so) than an actual prohibition, but the specific rules are cloudy and opaque and hard to organise against.
No one would have ever voted for a law that said "No new housing may be built". But we got systems that said "Sure, of course you can build new housing! Just as long as your Environmental Impact Statement is consistent with our Ecological Management Plan, and the floor area to height ratio falls within our guidelines, and you go through a local consultation process and respond to concerns from community members, and..."
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