Why do women want abortions to begin with? “If we can change hearts and minds related to that, even if abortion is legal, it's unthinkable.”, says Roland Warren, President and CEO of Care Net on the latest CareCast episode.

Welcome to the newest episode of CareCast, Care Net’s podcast on family, faith, and life with Roland Warren, Care Net’s President and CEO, and Vincent DiCaro, Care Net’s Chief Outreach Officer. Listen in on Roland and Vincent’s conversation as they address the abortion pill dilemma and how to navigate the supply and demand of abortion in a post-Roe America.

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What follows is a portion of the transcript from the CareCast recording with Roland Warren (RW) and Vincent DiCaro (VD). 

Vincent DiCaro (VD): Roe vs. Wade being overturned was an amazing pro-life legal victory, and we're delighted that it happened. But as we've talked about many times on this podcast, it has actually made things very complicated. The abortion landscape in America has become quite complicated since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, and we've really emphasized just how important Care Net’s work in particular has become in this post-Roe environment.

So, in situations in which abortion is harder to access, women and men who would have chosen abortion are still looking for help. That's still an unplanned pregnancy from their perspective, and they're still looking for it. "I need support with this decision that I need to make." And so, you have in some ways even more people in that situation, and frankly feeling even more desperate and scared and urgent than ever before, because abortion is less accessible to them.

And so, this has created a very complex environment for this work and just made it even more important than ever. And one of the main factors that has caused that complexity is the availability of the abortion pill. So, just for argument's sake, let's say that half the states in the country are pro-life and half the states in the country are pro-choice. It's amazing, and it's great that there are state laws that are protecting unborn life and say half the states, but if there's a pro-choice state right next door that can mail you the abortion pill into your pro-life state, the abortion still happens despite the fact that you live in a pro-life state with pro-life laws.

Unfortunately, the evidence is starting to mount that we're seeing quite a bit of that. Abortion pills are being mailed over state lines in order to allow people in pro-life states to still have abortions.

Roland Warren (RW): People are doing things like setting up mailboxes in pro-choice states if you will, and so if they're concerned about, if the pill provider is concerned, well if I mail these pills into the pro-life state, there could be some issues because it's illegal, well they'll mail them to the pro-choice state and then they'll do mail forwarding to move them into the pro-life state because at that point you don't know what's in there.

VD: So there's almost a black market of sorts that's developing around the abortion pill. So very disturbing and you and I both studied economics and really what this is about is it's about supply and demand, right? And so pro-life laws obviously affect the supply, primarily the supply of surgical abortions in a particular geographic location, right? But the demand for abortion is unlikely to change very much even when those pro-life laws are passed in that particular geographic location.

So the demand for abortion, again for argument's sake, let's say it goes unchanged. So where are those folks who still want abortions going to get their abortions from? So if they can't get a surgical abortion in a town that they live in, they can either drive over state lines or again start to tap into this growing black market of abortion pills.

And so it's just a sad tragedy, really, that when people want to do something that's not necessarily a good thing, they will find ways to do it, unfortunately. Which leads to Care Net's work. Care Net's work is about, how we address the demand side? How do we love and minister to people who feel as though they need to have an abortion to help them realize that they don't need to have an abortion? Roland, if you could talk just a little bit about, some of the reasons as to why women have abortions and therefore how do you kind of serve them and kind of address that demand side?

RW: It's unfortunate in our culture that we tend not to do that, really address the demand side. We see the same kind of issue with the illicit drug trade, the same kind of thing, the war on drugs, right? A lot of that focus was on, and the focus has been and remains on the supply side. How do we stop drugs from getting across our border? But less of that focus is on why folks want drugs to begin with, right? Because if you could get them across the border but nobody wants them, you know, it's like some toy that used to be really hot and you were, you know, we had trouble getting—Cabbage patch kids or something—getting it into the country and then demand dries up and it's like, oh, we can get it in easily. And people are like, well, so I don't want that. And so I think the way that we've always approached this is not just from a supply perspective but from a demand perspective.

And candidly, that's what you see in the biblical narrative, right? Sin abounds, right? But grace abounds all the more. In other words, there's a supply of opportunities to sin, but when you've been transformed by grace, your demand for sin decreases. In other words, you've become a new creation. You've become a new person. And therefore, even though sin and opportunities to sin abound, they're abundant—They're available to you. The supply chain is perfect, right? There's no friction in the supply chain. The demand has gone down. And you can see that, you know, certainly in anyone who becomes a Christian, how your life has changed.

You still have the same supply or access to lots of devices that were, you know, leading you down a certain path, but you no longer want those devices. Why? Because the demand has changed because you've been transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. A big part of Care Net’s work has been really working on the demand side of this.

Why do women want abortions to begin with? If we can change hearts and minds related to that, even if abortion is legal, it's unthinkable. It kind of brings me back to when I used to get questions early on about, years ago, rather, about Roe v. Wade being overturned and when is Roe v. Wade going to be overturned and is it going to be overturned and how quickly can we overturn it. Again, that's a great focus and we should have wanted that law off the books, but I always tell people, that Roe v. Wade is overturned every day. Every time a woman decides to bring her child into the world and reject abortion, she just overturned Roe v. Wade. It's the death of 1,000 cuts.

What does that mean? We've got a certain power because you can get to a woman, get to a man, and have a life-affirming conversation and they can change their minds. Even though the supply is there, abortion is totally available, the demand for it is not.

Roland and Vincent discuss more about why women want abortions in the first place, from missing support after birth to the role of the father and the role of the church related to support as well as how many lives Care Net has supported and how many gospel conversations have taken place. 

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