On Tuesday, March 15, 2016, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a propaganda-filled hearing on what was incorrectly referred to as “late-term abortion” and “fetal pain,” which has not been proven by science. This hearing was part of a drive to put in place a national 20-week abortion ban and measures that encourage the harassment of abortion providers and patients seeking healthcare.

We must hold leaders who support this inhumane agenda accountable. In this same vein, we at Reproaction believe that we do ourselves no favors when we do not hold pro-choice allies accountable, too. During the hearing Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) fell into the pro-life trap of “fewer abortions” being a necessarily good thing: “If we are serious about reducing the number of abortions, we need to start with access to family planning,” he said.

Senator Durbin, there is absolutely nothing wrong with abortion, a procedure that 1 in 3 women obtain in this nation. ‘Pro-choice’ calls for fewer abortions feed into the fallacious logic that abortion is somehow fundamentally wrong. It is not. While access to contraception should be expanded on principle, there is no need to bring down the number of abortions. There is, instead, an imperative to make sure that every person is given the dignity to make their own decisions about their healthcare and that everyone who needs an abortion can get one.

We can cede no ground to anti-abortion extremists who will never rest until safe, legal abortion is entirely inaccessible to people in this country. The intention of hearings such as the one held last week is to plant false flags to distract from the fact that the extreme pro-life agenda does not fall into line with that of the mainstream. Anti-abortion extremists will continuously and disingenuously shift the goal posts until every pregnancy in this country is under complete state control. We cannot afford to let them, and we shouldn’t parrot their dream of fewer abortions when there should be exactly as many abortions as people who need them.