"The Priority of Reducing Abortions"

In this post, Amy says:  "As a group I think we have the capacity to bring a significant contribution to the positive articulation of how CST might inform an approach to political life."  I wholeheartedly agree.

Amy then mentions "the priority of reducing abortions."  My question, to no one in particular, is this:  Is the sole goal of the pro-life movement to reduce the numbers of abortion? I think not.  In a response to this post at Vox Nova, A Little Shy says:

I want to make a narrow, limited point, and not a partisan or even particularly political one; everyone else can have a happy time discussing how to vote and how a given politician’s record ought to be evaluated.

But it needs to be clearly stated that the abortion issue, for Catholics, is not only about the number of abortions.

Obviously, that number is of critical importance and needs to be weighted very heavily. But the fact of the matter is that even if there were zero abortions, a law allowing abortion would remain an unjust law, a threat to the rule of law itself, a teacher of evil and distorter of conscience, a cause of scandal that can lead to spiritual death and a profound assault on the common good.

Regardless of whose political dogma it may be, it is also the clear teaching of the Holy Catholic Church, articulated both in the Catechism and at length in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which goes so far as to call conscientious objection to such laws a grave obligation.

It is about the numbers. But it is also about the law.

MOJ friend and alum, Prof. John Breen, puts it this way in "John Paul II, The Structures of Sin, and the Limits of the Law," 52 St. Louis U. L. J. 317, 345 n.182:  "[A] society composed of perfectly just individuals would still suffer from injustice if any one of its laws repudiated the principles of justice.  Indeed, this would be true even if the unjust law in question did not affect the conduct of those whom it governed. ... a state hat enacted a statute that permitted whites to enslave non-whites would be unjust even if no one attempted to practice slavery.  That is, even if the law was in effect a dead- letter -- the role rhetorical remnant of a racist past long forgotten 0 it would still impair the full realization of justice in the society by continuing to teach the superiority of some individuals over others.  Indeed, for the state to continue to exercise its teaching capacity in this manner -- the official state endorsement of injustice -- would harm the common good, even if the message was ignored by everyone."