Picking Better Targets & Tactics On Abortion

Posted by: Ion | April 16th, 2007 · 2:24 PM

Michelle Malkin has an interesting story today, about the dramatic fall in the number of doctors willing to perform abortions in Britain. It seems to demonstrate that indirectly attacking the limited labor supply for abortionists, rather than consumer demand, is an effective tactical reversal for opponents of abortion.

Whereas pro-life advocates are hopelessly outnumbered when set against British popular opinion and are severely out-gunned when set against the state and National Health Service, they have enormous advantages in both numbers and influence when set against abortion practitioners in the medical community. A market that is predicated on a small group of highly specialized suppliers, is extremely vulnerable to these sorts of pressures at the retail level:

Distaste at performing terminations combined with ethical and religious convictions has led to a big increase in “conscientious objectors” who request exemption from the task, the RCOG says. A key factor is what specialists call “the dinner party test”. Gynaecologists who specialise in fertility treatment creating babies for childless couples are almost universally revered - but no one boasts of being an abortionist.

As a result, after decades of campaigning, anti-abortion organisations may be on the point of achieving their objective by default. Repeated efforts to tighten the law have failed and public opinion remains firmly in support, but the growing number of doctors refusing to do the work means there may soon not be enough prepared to carry out terminations to meet demand.
(MichelleMalkin)

There’s a way to further exacerbate this trend. If every woman who is in the UK pro-Life movement pledged to patronize a private gynaecologist at least once, if they pledged to renounce performing abortions, this would facilitate a serious economic attraction for doctors to disengage from it.

A relational database that matched pledged women with pledging gynaecologists, would be rather easy to actualize as well. If you can somehow couple financial incentive with preexisting moral and social disincentives, you’ll have a crushing model which would get you very near to erasing the availability of the practice.

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