UPDATE: Jane has responded; I replied again in her comments.
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Goodness! Jane Galt has replied to me, at length and with some heat. Let me say at first that I was more snarky than was perhaps appropriate, and that it seems to have led to some misunderstanding. I'd like to set out--hopefully with greater clarity than before--how, in fact, I actually agree with her about a number of specific claims, but why I nevertheless thought her original post deeply off-base (and why I chose to respond in the tone I did).

So, here are some things that I believe we agree about:

I entirely agree with her that legalizing abortion has a very, very large effect on both conceptions and abortions.

I am certainly not suggesting "the government coming in and deciding to re-educate us out of our values"--I, too, believe this to be "more than a little creepy." It's a lot creepy!

I have no firm views about the efficacy of government sex ed programs; her view about threshold effects sounds pretty reasonable. I'm willing to be convinced either way on this. I'm certainly not in the "there oughtta be a law!" camp, at any rate.

Now, that last bit may seem very odd. Ms. Galt says, in her reply:

The question I was asking was not "is there some policy that will reduce abortions?" to which the answer is obviously, yes. The question was "will some Federally mandated sex education programme reduce abortions", to which the answer, as far as I can tell, is "not much".

Now, if I'm not taking much issue with this, then what on earth was my post about? And why was I so mean?

Ms. Galt saw her post as being mainly about sex-ed, but that wasn't what bothered me. Her piece was a response to Saletan's, after all, which I didn't think was really "about" sex-ed at all; it was about focusing the pro-choice movement on contraception more generally. One of the three suggestions he had was "educate teenagers about sex, birth control and abstinence", yes, but I don't think it's fair to say he thinks it's a magic bullet. And yes, his outlook seems pretty statist, focused as it is on legislation. But throwing out the one paragraph of policy prescription still leaves the main claim: that if we're concerned about abortions, we ought to focus on contraception.

And insofar as Ms. Galt's post was a response to Saletan's, I took it to be an attempt to discredit this central thesis, and insisting that, no, the only thing that's going to shift the rate of contraception usage, and hence the abortion rate, is using state sanctions against abortion. Is this an unfair gloss on her post? Was I wrong to read her that way? Maybe; I didn't think so at the time, but each reader will have to judge. Still, consider the last few paragraphs of her post:

Mr Saletan seems to be ignoring a very basic question, implied by his own statement that half of all terminated pregnancies occur in women who weren't using any protection: why are so many people engaging in behaviour that they have been repeatedly told will lead to an unwanted pregnancy? Especially when there are cheap and effective prophylactics at the nearest drugstore? Answer: because it's not very costly to do so.

Abortions are relatively cheap, and relatively painless (or at least, they sound that way if you haven't had one--I don't actually know if they're painful or not), and America's youth, like youth everywhere, are not very good at correctly estimating the future disutility of current actions. This is why smoking continues to be popular. And the back seat of a car is a terrible place to by trying to do an expected value calculation in your head.

Not that I'm advocating making abortion illegal; I'm not. As I've said before, I'm reluctantly pro-choice. But "safe, legal and rare" is like "good, fast, and cheap" -- you have to pick two, because it's not possible to have all three at one time. At least not until we get that perfect birth control that doesn't have to be remembered, doesn't have to be prescribed, doesn't have to be applied, and never lets its user down. And by then we won't have to worry about getting pregnant anyway, because the Trump will have sounded and we'll all be on our way to meet Jesus at the pearly gates.

So, to be clear, Ms. Galt's post annoyed me not because I disagreed with the claim about education, but because I disagreed quite strongly with the implicit claim that, having disposed of the education question, Saletan's *general* argument about targeting contraception falls apart. I was annoyed, not by what she put in, but by what she left out: all the other causal mechanisms that influence the relative costs and benefits of protected versus unprotected sex (which she rightly enough acknowledges in her replies to me).

Ms. Galt and I both seem to agree that, overall, there are two interrelated choice functions in place, both of which are sensitive to costs and benefits: the choice to have protected v. unprotected v. no sex, and the choice to terminate v. keep an unintended pregnancy. Moreover, we can't look at these two separately: the relative cost of abortion will feed into the relative costs of protected and unprotected sex. And of course the number of people who are faced with the second choice, and so the number of abortions overall, is determined by the choices made at the first stage.

But the cost of abortion is hardly the only factor that constitutes the cost of protected v. unprotected v. no sex. And what I really objected to was the implication that protected sex is already basically as cheap as it can be, so the only way to shift costs is by manipulating the costs of unsafe sex through sanctions on abortion. Again, whether or not this is a fair reaction to her piece is up to the reader. I can only note that she seemed to dismiss such concerns pretty flatly with her claim that "there are cheap and effective prophylactics at the nearest drugstore." Even in her followup, she seems to stick with this: she has an extended paragraph about how Trinessa is only $25/month, condoms are often free, and Planned Parenthood allows for doctors' visits at "trivial" cost.

I don't think these claims serve to undermine my argument. $300 a year is not trivial, not for everyone, and again, we should not ignore the non-monetary costs of time and effort. A coblogger has reminded me that one of the main difficulties of being poor is not simply total expenditures but rather managing cash flow; 25$ a month may be less problematic than $25 on a particular day. Unexpected costs can lead to tough end-of-the-month decisions, and credit markets are hardly frictionless (what's the rate on payday loans again?). Now, I'm very privileged, and cannot pretend to have experienced these difficulties myself. One possible response is that this is because they don't exist. But I think it is very easy for people in my position, or, yes, Ms. Galt's, to underestimate how much easier our educational background, our social networks, and our experience dealing with medical professionals as assertive consumers rather than as charity cases--characteristics that we still retain even if we're unemployed or underemployed and feel ourselves to be quite disadvantaged--makes all of these things.

And, of course, money and effort don't exhaust the "costs" of safe sex; social stigma is very real. This matters both directly, as worries about shame and reputation influence decision-making, and indirectly, as social norms about who is responsible for birth control (and whether birth control is something that, obviously, one should use, or is instead a signal of moral failure) factor into the monetary and non-monetary costs (do parents pay, or must a teenager pay secretly? Will her boyfriend chip in? Will she have to drive an hour away to fill her prescription so that no one knows she's on the pill? Etc.) Obviously these vary enormously across individuals and communities; for many people, they may indeed be trivial. But for many, they are not, and I believe that they could be lower than they are now--but not necessarily through government action, let alone reeducation!

I didn't intend the cross-national data to be anything but suggestive, but I do feel the data ought to make us realize that these costs, especially the social ones, are not set in stone or written into the deep structure of the universe. Cultures can and do change, although I would certainly hope that state coercion would be absolutely the last tool people reach for (sadly, it rarely is). Which, again, is why I was so very annoyed by Ms. Galt's first post: she critiques Saletan's statist prescriptions only to implicitly go along with his presumption that the only thing on the table is State Policy. She seems to have backed away from this in her replies, which is great, but I stand by my reading of the original post.

Ms. Galt is right that I "never really attempt[ed] to refute [her] core thesis": what I attempted to do was highlight, through sarcasm, why her "core thesis" was simply the wrong one to write about. Her post came across, to me, as an attempt to shut down rather than open up the discussion Saletan was trying to start, that is, the investigation of possible ways to encourage contraceptive use. Sex ed not so helpful? Well, okay. But are there other ways to encourage use, to lower costs? Recall that one of the only specific policies I mentioned was the state's control over hormonal birth control through medical gate-keeping. Deregulating that seems like one nice place to start, no? As for the rest, specially regarding social norms, I never pretended either that (1) I have any of the answers or that (2) even if I did, I expect the answers to be easy to implement. Social change is hard, and it's even harder if you believe, as I do, that it ought not be imposed through state coercion. But that doesn't mean it's not a worthy goal.