If that's the extent of the pro-life movement's ambitions, then great, but again -- I fail to see how that changes much. Women will still have a license to abort, abortions will still be common (perhaps MORE common, since current pro-life laws like informed consent would be gone), and the law will still treat abortion as something less than murder.
If this is all the pro-life movement is trying to accomplish, then it would be far more effective if it became a purely cultural, not political, movement.
Actually, abortion was criminally illegal in most states but could be procured in states such as New York or across the border in Mexico if the woman had the money to travel there. The availability of “back alley” abortions usually done in secret by dentists and other medical professionals were risky both to the mother as well as the abortionist. To the mother because the abortionist could get away with unsanitary and unsafe processes as well as charge anything the desperate woman could pay. To the one doing the killing, there was the risk of arrest, fines and revocation of medical licences.
Pro-abortion advocates like to declare women died by the thousands from such but that number was fabricated out of thin air. It was the advent of antibiotics that reduced greatly the number of women who were harmed physically by illegal abortion. A great many of those back alley abortionists simply set up in the front once it became legal.
The abortion lobby has ensured most laws that would logically protect women are stopped and it is why we have abortion-on-demand throughout the whole nine months today in this country.
I don’t claim to speak for the Pro-Life community, but I think the most effective way to stop abortion in our country and throughout the world is a holistic approach that combines early education about the miracle of reproduction, the sanctity of human life, respect for women and girls, men and boys, personal responsibility, emotional, physical and financial support of women and girls in unplanned pregnancy, support for adoption and other ways that we can bring home the truth that abortion is morally wrong because it is anti-life.
I think about how in just a generation we have seen smoking become socially unacceptable. Killing an innocent human baby is a million times worse. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that abortion will one day become unthinkable. It is something we should all strive for and support.