One of the most vigorous debates among pro-life millennials concerns the best way to reduce the high rates of abortion that currently exist in the United States.

Pro-life progressives have criticized the lobbying and lawmaking strategy of conservatives, one which has focused since the early 1980s on incremental measures to gradually choke off access to abortion at the state level, and on judicial maneuvers aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade at the federal level. Progressives point out that abortion rates were at their highest (29.3 abortions per 1,000 women) during the first year of the Reagan presidency (Reagan himself had signed legislation authorizing legal abortion as Governor of California, although he later regretted it), and declined significantly during the Clinton years in the 1990s.

Conservatives claim that the progressive attempt to fuse opposition to abortion with discussions about welfare dilutes moral energies which ought to be focused solely on protecting the right to life. They argue that the decline in abortion rates proves the success of their lawmaking strategy, since they claim that falling abortion rates are due to restrictive laws passed in many states since the early 1990s, and not due to Clinton-era social welfare policies.

Both sides can also point to examples and counter-examples in other countries to back up their positions. Pro-life progressives who focus on reducing abortions by increasing welfare support can point to Brazil, where over a million abortions occur every year despite the procedure being illegal. Pro-life conservatives often point disparagingly to “socialist” European welfare states. Great Britain, for example, has comparable abortion rates to the US despite having policies which actually incentivize childbirth for young women and girls from economically deprived backgrounds.

But do we really need to choose between protecting life in law and protecting it through robust social welfare measures? As Catholics, our answer to most questions that ask us to choose either this or that tends to be a “both/and” approach. Why should it be any different when it comes to abortion?

The right-wing focus on protecting life through the power of law is radically incomplete on its own. It is not enough to safeguard the right to life without caring about actual life. In right-wing approaches, the political community’s role in promoting human life is often conceived of as something purely negative, as a mere abstinence from killing. This cheapens human life by reducing the right to life to the same level as my “right” to make sexist or homophobic jokes, or to drive around Alabama with a billboard saying “I hate NASCAR.” It’s a purely negative right – something that isn’t subject to interference by others, but hardly something that a healthy community should actively foster and promote.

Life, however, is worth more than an offensive joke. It is not a purely negative value and a community doesn’t cherish life merely by not exterminating it. It is something that must be actively promoted, not only through legal measures, but through real, practical support on all levels, from fostering proper maternal healthcare, to instituting paid maternity leave, to investing in education so that those children who are born can fulfill their God-given potential. It takes a community to raise a child, and that means some sacrifice is required from all of the community’s members, even if it is only paying a few more cents in taxes to ensure that welfare programs that help mothers and babies are adequately funded. The Finnish government’s practice of giving each new mother a “baby box” containing clothes and toys for newborns is a beautiful example of what it means for a community to value life tangibly, concretely, and not in word only. It has also, incidentally, helped Finland achieve one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world.

Similarly, the heavy focus on welfare as a means of reducing abortion rates by pro-life progressives is incomplete when it detaches itself from any concern to protect the right to life in law.  Such an approach is at risk of missing a wider point about what it really means for a community to value human life as a community, and not just as a disconnected group of individuals. As the famous American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once said, law “is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.” A community in which the unborn lack even the most rudimentary legal protections is saying something very different about the value of unborn life than a community which grants the unborn those protections.  In itself, an approach that focuses on a gradual reduction in the rate of abortions is not wrong. But we must be careful to remember that human beings can’t be reduced to meaningless statistics on a bar chart and adequately accounted for by overall rates, and that building a culture that genuinely welcomes human life is very different from building a culture in which fewer abortions occur simply because some of the economic disincentives to childbirth have been removed.

Ultimately, it’s not a case of “either/or” – either we give material assistance to women and children or we protect the right to life of the unborn – but of “both/and.” If a community values life, that valuation will naturally express itself both in law, which is the fruit of the community’s reasoning together about right and wrong, and through the actual practices of the community, in its treatment of mothers and young children. For Catholics, who follow the example of Jesus, the goal of being “pro-life” must surely not be to rest content at protecting a right to life, or even at protecting life’s mere existence, but to work so that each life can be lived as a “life in abundance” (John 10:10).

Aaron Taylor, a PhD student in ethics at Boston College, holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Heythrop College, University of London.