I’m almost amazed at the ease with which Samuel Alito has been able to coast through his confirmation hearings. It certainly wasn’t much fun for him to face the hostile questioning of Senate Democrats, but compared to the scrutiny endured by Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas, Alito has gotten off pretty easy. With a confirmation vote just days away, there are a number of left-wing special interest groups that are wringing their hands because there’s not much that can be done to stop the rightward drift of the Supreme Court.

One of the groups that’s most upset by Alito’s confirmation is the pro-choice movement. It must be a nightmare for them to consider the prospect of a Supreme Court consisting of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito. The big fear, of course, is that Roe v. Wade has become an endangered species with the arrical of Alito and Roberts. In light of this situation, I found it interesting to read William Saletan’s op-ed in the New York Times earlier this week. Saletan is the author of a book called Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. In his recent op-ed, he writes:

The problem with using restrictions to reduce the number of abortions isn’t that the restrictions are judgmental. It’s that they’re crude. They leap too easily from judgment to legislation and criminalization. They drag police officers, prosecutors and politicians into personal tragedies. Most people don’t want such intrusion. But you lose them up front by refusing to concede that there’s anything wrong with abortion. You have to offer them anti-abortion results (fewer abortions) without anti-abortion laws.

The pro-choice path to those results is simple. Help every woman when she doesn’t want an abortion: before she’s pregnant. That means abstinence for those who can practice it, and contraception for everybody else. Nearly half of the unintended pregnancies in this country result in abortions, and at least half of our unintended pregnancies are attributable to women who didn’t use contraception. The pregnancy rate among these women astronomically exceeds the pregnancy rate among women who use contraception. The No. 1 threat to the unborn isn’t the unchurched. It’s the unprotected.

His point is this — the easiest way to ensure that access to abortion survives is to make a genuine effort to reduce the number of abortions performed in this country. It’s a very simple solution that comes from a simple premise — abortion is bad thing. Pro-lifers understand that and have built their movement on it. The pro-choice movement hasn’t spent much time saying it, if they believe it. They’ll be the first to defend abortion as an often necessary evil, but the emphasis is almost always on “necessary” rather than “evil”.

I think if a Democratic candidate would stand up and say that abortion is terrible practice that is both tragic and horrible and that the best thing abortion rights supporters can do is to actively work towards reducing the number of abortions performed through better sex education, promoting abstinence, and providing access and funding for contraceptive options, then I think we’d see the abortion debate dry up and blow away. Most pro-lifers would probably be fine keeping Roe on the books if the number of abortions performed in America dropped to a less 500,000 per year from the current number over over a million a year.

The problem is that abortion has become a money-making industry for the providers. There may have been a time when abortion providers truly were agnostic about the procedure and simply offered it as a service to patients. However, as the number of abortions performed annually has nearly tripled since 1972, more and more abortion providers are seeing the economic benefit of offering the procedure. The profit motive exists.

I’d certainly like to see those on both sides of this issue find some common ground and work on creative ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies and lessen the demand for abortions in this country. I’d also like to hear pro-choice candidates speak openly about how terrible the procedure is. I think it’s a great strategy for a Democrat who is interested in making some headway in re-capturing so many of the moderates who have fled the party in recent years.