The abortion debate: lower rates or more-just laws?

In this post, at America ("Schneck hits a nerve on abortion"), Vincent Miller writes, commenting on Prof. Steve Schneck's arguments at a recent Democrats for Life event:

Schneck casts much needed light on how abortion functions as a political
issue.  Over the years, I’ve spoken with many committed and knowledgeable
Prolife activists, who can recount and critique the various strategy and policy
positions the movement has made.  They know the issues and the political
tradeoffs.  (It’s encouraging to see similar reflection in some of the comments
on the CatholicVote site referenced above.) But for so much of our politics,
it’s simply a moral posture.  “Prolife” Republicans have been in power
repeatedly since 1980 and have spent virtually no political capital on policies
that address abortion in significant numbers.  It’s a posture that need have no
relationship to outcomes.

Schneck forces us to think about outcomes. . . .

Schneck’s argument is dangerous to those who want to use abortion as a moral
shibboleth.  If abortion is a real policy issue about women and children, the
calculus becomes much more difficult.  Moving from checking the right box (in
time for one’s candidacy) to arguing about outcomes can only be a win for the
Prolife movement.

Two quick points:  First, and with all due respect, Prof. Schneck's argument that "their proposals for Medicaid will have a grave impact on the abortion rate" rests on some highly questionable assumptions about the "proposals", about their effect on Medicaid, and about the connection between Medicaid cuts and abortion rates.  Others have fleshed this out (and not only in what Miller calls the "right wing Catholic blogosphere"), and so I won't get into the weeds on this matter here.

The more important point, as I see it, is this:  Yes, "outcomes" (i.e., fewer abortions) matter, but this is also a matter of basic justice.  It is deeply wrong and gravely unjust that our laws exclude from protection against lethal private violence a particular group of vulnerable and voiceless human beings.  This injustice is not lessened, it seems to me, by policies that have the no-doubt-welcome effect of reducing the human cost of those unjust laws.  To say, as Prof. Schneck did, that abortion is a "powerful abortifacient" is, I think, to obscure the (to me) very important point that it is our unjust abortion regime, which not only tolerates but constitutionally protects certain decisions made by actual real-life decisionmakers (not abstractions like "poverty") to cause the deaths of innocent persons.

Miller writes, "[m]oving from checking the right box (in time for one’s candidacy) to arguing about outcomes can only be a win for the Prolife movement," and I suppose, if the choice is actually between merely "checking the right box" and improving outcomes, that's right.  But, that isn't, in fact, the choice.  The claims are repeated often, but they don't get any less false with repetition, that pro-life politicians (who, at present, tend to be in the Republican Party) haven't actually delivered any improvements in the legal regime and that these improvements are merely symbolic, and do nothing to help with outcomes.  Again, both of these claims are false.  If one really cares about outcomes, one cannot shelve the hard work of fixing the regime.

UPDATE:  Michael Fragoso expands and improves on my points, at Public Discourse, here.