The New York Times‘ Room for Debate blog, where they compile a handful of short opinion pieces addressing controversial questions, is hosting this debate today: “Would support for abortion rights grow if more women talked publicly about their abortions?“

Georgette Forney, president of Anglicans for Life, thinks support would more likely falter, that the women she’s talked to who regret their abortions make compelling cases against abortion. And Daniel Allott (from Gary Bauer’s right-wing American Values organization) says that just as proximity to out gay people in their lives has shifted Americans’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage—turns out gay people “are not so different from the rest of us,” he says—so people’s exposure to fetuses through ultrasound technology has “allow[ed] the unborn to be revealed as the living and feeling human beings they are.”

I disagree with both of these people on a personal and political level (every time I’ve heard someone talk about their abortion experience, it’s only made me more sure that the procedure should be safe and legal). But I also can’t believe anyone would reasonably put forth the argument that you could shift people to be against legal abortion if people who have had negative abortion experiences speak up. If abortion were illegal, or even a lot less accessible—as Texas is trying to make it right now—do these people not realize there would then be new horror stories about illegal abortions? Those stories are also important to this debate.

Allott’s piece quotes statistics showing support for the pro-choice position is actually dropping (even as abortion rates stay decidedly the same), and I’ve heard many people wonder if that slide is happening partly because we don’t hear the horror stories of pre–Roe abortion anymore.

And some of Allott’s numbers come from the Guttmacher Institute, which also has statistics saying that more than 6 in 10 women who have abortions already have a child (so much for the patronizing “they just don’t understand that it’s a potential child” argument) and that the reasons women get abortions are mainly about money and work/family responsibilities:

Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.

If y’all want to stop abortions, just making them harder to get is absurdly inhumane—and doesn’t seem to work. If Texas Republicans (and anti-choicers in general) want to do something that even resembles compassionate action, they can work their asses off to fund good prenatal care for poor women, affordable daycare and pre-K for everyone; they can work on poverty in general and on changing up our country’s bizarre anti-family, anti-gender-equality workplace policies. Maybe then they’d see a drop in the abortion rate—and I bet they wouldn’t get jeered by crowds of people while they were at it.