If you’re serious about reducing abortion, the most important issue is not which abortions to ban. The most important issue is how will you support women to have the babies they want.

CNN contributor David Frum has penned an exceptionally well-argued and accessible article that makes clear two of the leading reasons women seek abortions: poverty and “maternal distress.”  (These are not the only reasons, but I’ll take what I can get). He describes maternal distress as the experience of being a woman in a culture in which women are dominated in their homes or in their communities, whose sexuality is policed by male members of the family–or hey, the Government– and who are denied proper access to birth control and health care.

While Frum is referring to non-Dutch immigrants living in the Netherlands, his description applies to a broad swathe of American Christian culture,  i.e. the States in which  “morally” motivated anti-choice anti-women’s reproductive health legislation has been floated and passed in 2012. He also does a good job of dressing down pro-lifers who present us with “exquisitely extreme moral dilemmas.”

His article is brief, and worth a read and a share:

If a woman has her credit card stolen, her maximum liability under federal law is $50. Yet on [Mourdock's] theory, if she is raped, she must endure not only the trauma of assault, but also accept economic costs of potentially many thousands of dollars. Must that burden also fall on her alone? When we used to draft men into the Army, we gave them veterans’ benefits afterward. If the state now intends to conscript women into involuntary childbearing, surely those women deserve at least an equally generous deal?”