Day 7

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Abortion Arguments Series: Day 7 of 10

"Banning abortion doesn't stop it. Just like Prohibition, it'll still happen"

One of the most common arguments against abortion restrictions sounds reasonable on the surface:

"Bans don't stop abortion. They just move it. Women drive across state lines or order pills online. Look at Prohibition. You can't stop something people want, so outlawing it is pointless."

I'll concede what's true: no law eliminates 100% of the behavior it prohibits. When states pass restrictions, thousands of women travel, and others order pills by mail.

So if the claim is simply that a statute cannot prevent EVERY single abortion, that's correct.

The trouble starts when you examine what that logic actually proves (and the contradictions hiding beneath it).

First, "laws don't stop everyone" is an argument against every law ever written.

We have laws against theft and drunk driving and murder and child abuse, yet all of those still happen nearly every day.

Nobody looks at domestic violence stats and concludes the law should be repealed because "people do it anyway." The purpose of a law was never a 100% success rate. Its purpose is to draw a line, declare what a society will not tolerate, reduce the harm where it can, and provide consequences when someone crosses that line.

If "people will do it anyway" were a valid reason to legalize something, it would be a valid reason to legalize almost everything.

Second, the Prohibition comparison falls apart the moment you ask one question: Who is being protected from harm?

Prohibition banned the sale of a substance. Drinking carries real downstream risks, but drinking itself is a private act. Harm to others is a risk, not the definition of the act. That's why our legal system criminalizes the external harms (like drunk driving) while regulating the substance itself.

And for what it's worth, Prohibition did reduce drinking, by roughly a third at its low point, according to the standard economic study of it. It was repealed because society decided policing a private vice wasn't worth the cost. That is not the calculation when someone else's life is at stake.

Abortion is fundamentally different. It isn't a private vice or a consumption habit with downstream risks. In every abortion, there is an innocent, defenseless second person who does not survive, and the entire purpose of the procedure is to end that life.

"Yeah, but this just makes it more dangerous"

Can we admit that the underground abortion of today isn't a coat hanger? It's a pill in an envelope, mailed by a licensed doctor in another state. Whatever else you think of that, it isn't the 1960s, and pretending it is misleads the very women it claims to protect.

Plus the logic doesn't hold anywhere else. Nobody says, "Burglars will break in regardless, so let's decriminalize it so they stop cutting themselves on broken windows." The reason is obvious: the harm isn't to the person committing the act. It's to someone else.

Third, consider what a law is supposed to do.

Laws don't have to be perfect to be effective. Making an action harder, more expensive, and farther away means it happens less often. In the first year after post-Dobbs restrictions, roughly 20,000 to 32,000 babies were born who otherwise would have been aborted. Some women traveled. Some ordered pills. But tens of thousands didn't. That number is not zero. Those are real human beings alive today because a legal boundary existed.

Beyond numbers, the law is a teacher. Sixty years ago, throwing beer cans out the window, driving drunk, and skipping the seatbelt were culturally normal. The statutes changed, and over a generation the culture followed, at least as much as it led. What a society permits, it eventually normalizes; what it prohibits, it eventually stigmatizes.

Finally, notice the contradiction inside the other side's own slogans.

The same movement that insists "bans don't stop abortion" turns right around and calls those very same laws "forced birth."

Think about what that phrase claims. It claims the law forced a woman to carry a pregnancy she otherwise would have ended. That is an explicit confession that the ban prevented an abortion.

You can argue "bans don't work," or you can argue "forced birth." You cannot argue both. If bans don't stop abortion, nobody was forced to give birth. If women are having babies because of the law, the ban worked, and this debate is over. Either way, the other side's own vocabulary admits what they publicly deny.

Finally, when someone shrugs and says "you can't stop it anyway," notice what they didn't say.

They didn't say abortion was right.

"You can't stop it anyway" isn't a claim that something is fine. It's a concession that it might be wrong, followed by a shrug. And a shrug, when an innocent human life is on the line, isn't a principled position. It's looking the other way."