Leadership Quote by Louise Slaughter

A clean bit of political jiu-jitsu: Slaughter flips the battlefield from moral absolutes to measurable outcomes. Instead of arguing about when life begins - a debate designed to never end - she yanks the conversation into the unglamorous mechanics of how pregnancies actually happen and how policy can reduce them. The line is built on conditional logic ("If... then...") that sounds almost civics-textbook neutral, which is precisely the point. It dares opponents to prove they care about the stated goal more than the cultural fight.

The subtext is accusation-by-syllogism. If you claim abortion is a tragedy, but you oppose contraception access, comprehensive sex ed, or the safety net that makes childbearing feasible, your position starts to look less like principled protection and more like punishment or control. Slaughter, a Democrat and longtime advocate for women's health, is also signaling coalition politics: you can be personally anti-abortion and still support policies that lower abortion rates without criminalizing women or doctors.

Context matters because this is the language of late-20th and early-21st century U.S. reproductive politics, where "pro-life" and "pro-choice" hardened into identities. Slaughter's intent is to pry them apart and expose a gap between branding and governance. The line doesn't ask for conversion; it demands coherence. If abortion is the harm, prevention is the practical remedy. If prevention is rejected, the motive is something else.