I’m not sure the analogy with warfare is entirely accurate or reasonable here in the “war” against abortion. In other words, the fight against the practice is engaged on two fronts really, the moral and the legal.
The question really is, for each person to decide and this prioritize, what is, or should be, the main goal. The decrease in the number of abortions or winning the moral argument against abortion.
Laws (or regulations) are not designed nor intended to win any arguments. They are by definition an extension of the people’s will as a society on said society, intended to enforce a particular moral decision. So in the case of abortion, for example, there is no way anyone can reasonably assert any law, no matter how strict, will end all abortions. The only way that goal will be achieved is when the moral argument is won in the hearts and minds of every person.
However again, laws don’t win arguments they enforce collective decisions made already. So to expect some perfect law to be written and magically end all abortions is expecting something unreasonable. It’s setting a goal that is unreasonable in that circumstance.
It’s not unreasonable to have as a goal, an end to all abortion. But this goal must be worked for and ultimately achieved by education of people either through scientific education or philosophic education or religious. The goal of ending all abortions cannot be achieved by legislation alone.
This doesn’t mean though that one shouldn’t work towards legislative means to limit abortions as much as possible. Indeed, by doing this in concert with the educative process described above, one actually aids the eventual goal of ending all abortion not hinders it. Why? Because those who we seek to educate as above can see we are serious about the issue, and take the issue we describe in education seriously enough to want to stop as many as possible now.
Otherwise the cause of education (again as described above) is hindered because those who oppose such educative efforts can be and are scandalized by our seeming unwillingness to put any effort into the issue legislatively. They can point to such inaction and say, “You make all these arguments against abortion but you don’t seek to end it at all, why should I take you seriously?” And they would be right to make such an objection.
Actions speak louder than words alone, as we all know, so to add realistic weight to such arguments as above, one must fight to end as many abortions as possible now. Otherwise the moral urgency of the situstion is lost in an echo chamber of sterile thought and argumentation.
The other extreme is equally lacking, which would seek by the force of the State alone, the end of all abortion. Devoid of arguments based on reason, there would always be abortions just abortions done illegally. One could say there would be far fewer, but then the purist insistence on only laws that outlaw all abortions severely suffers from the same relativism that such proponents accuse the current pro life movement.
One baby dead is too many, under either strategy, from a strictly purist approach. There is no way to guarantee that the practice would be completely eliminated by instituting strict laws against it now, laws devoid of a complementary strategy of education. A strategy of education that itself relies upon legal action now, in order to be taken seriously. Legal action that has a reasonable chance of succeeding in the current environment.
There’s nothing wrong with an incremental approach, per se.
The problem is when your incrementalism includes the codification of permission in the statutes to murder individual persons. All of them, as long as your illogical, unreasonable, arbitrary requirements are met.
There is a simple two part test of all legislation:
1. Does it recognize the God-given, unalienable nature of the individual right to live?
And
2. Does it provide the equal protection for every innocent person that the Constitution absolutely requires?
If it fails on either hand, it is immoral and unconstitutional, and in fact is reinforcing the practice of abortion on demand.
There is another horrible problem piled in on top of what I said above, which is that most all of the incrementalists who are pushing this immoral, failed strategy are also judicial supremacists.
And so, no matter what you do, the judges are simply going to continue what they have now done for decades, which is strike down your ill-founded regulatory schemes as an impediment to the woman’s “right” to access to the means to murder their offspring.
Leaving you with absolutely nothing but to continue to deceive “pro-lifers” with empty promises of accomplishing something, somehow, somewhere over the rainbow. When it is politically expedient, of course. Which is never is.
I think what everyone misses is that an abortion is a purposeful act. It’s different from taking a pill to cause an abortion IF you are pregnant. A doctor knows a baby is in the womb and destroys it.
If we can just outlaw that, we will have done a world of good. Pregnancy is a natural result of sex. Everyone knows how to greatly lower the risk of pregnancy. There are more ways to prevent pregnancy than there are ways to prevent HIV.