After seeing the new study demonstrating the gross ineffectiveness of "pro-life" policies in actually reducing abortion rates that Kate discussed last week, Professor B suggests that "pro-lifers" be renamed the "pro dead women" camp. While impolitic, the label is sadly accurate. Essentially, the only thing that criminalizing abortion accomplishes is to ensure that some number of women will be maimed or killed. There are few policies that can be said to have failed -- even if you accept "pro-life" premises -- more clearly and across as wide a variety of institutional contexts as criminalizing abortion. This is also representative of the highly selective anti-statism of a lot of American conservatives. "Pro-lifers" who advocate forced pregnancy policies that -- unless you really do support abortion bans to injure women rather than to protect fetal life -- are inevitable failures will apply much greater skepticism to universal healthcare policies that have worked in most countries where they've been tried. The most obvious example, of course, is Republicans who don't trust the government to administer a (consistently low-overhead) pension system strongly advocating spending a couple trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives to implement an exceptionally implausible scheme to create a stable democracy ex nihilo in Iraq. To a lot of conservatives, cost-benefit analysis seems to go out the window if there's a chance to regulate female sexuality or bomb foreigners. --Scott Lemieux
