to be or not to be

that's a question

"On the other hand, most of the regulation being pushed by abortion opponents seems pointless; it will burden the health care system while hardly affecting the incidence of abortion."

This has been my point for a long time. If you actually seriously oppose abortion as a problem, then you'd want to support laws that purport reduce the incidence of it rather than things that are paperwork and regulation speed bumps along the way. It suggests that there is a pretty low opinion of doctors et al who provide them and a rather lower opinion of people who demand them. Without at all looking at why they did so (in both cases) and a lot of focus on the how, in particular with late term abortions which are much rarer. Asking "why" tends to get you a lot closer to determining how to arrive at "why, not" more often, certainly more so than presuming that gruesome how is an impacting feature or that you already know what the answer to "why" is (as we do/did with terrorism, "they hate us for our freedom!").

I suppose it would make some sense to allow states to competitively regulate (or not) abortion procedures (although it makes no sense to try to control interstate activity to that end from the state level), in that it would be more obvious which approaches are utterly useless and which have some effect on the underlying demands, both for and against. But I'm not sure that people who are pushing against abortion are usually all that concerned about whether they are pursuing rational policies that reduce demand for abortions instead of symbolic gestures that make it clear they don't want (other) people to have them. So the entire states as laboratories or competitive market approach might look a little silly here. That's typically a feature rather than a bug of that approach though.

Plus this is one issue that I'm a little more persuaded that the 14th Amendment positive rights guarantee matters more so than the states rights approach (less so here than with gay marriage). I'm very sympathetic to the dilemma of these choices, and to the argument that creating new life is important and perhaps special, but I'm also sympathetic to a concept that caring for such life in a planned or appropriate way might be important to fostering "good" lives and that there are therefore strong negative outcomes and consequences to creating new life, for the people involved, that can be easily put off for future consideration. Most of these consequences and situations can also be avoided by taking steps to avoid such undesirable pregnancies and dilemmas in the first place, as it seems pretty clear most upper crust people try to do. If we had some laws that reflected and adapted this thought process, most everyone else would be in a position to try to avoid the problem as well. But, as was pointed out, most anti-abortion laws and advocates do not advance that thought process at all.