FOR women living in large swathes of the American South, it is increasingly difficult to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Onerous new rules and regulations are forcing abortion clinics to shut down in states across the region. A Texas law passed last year has already forced nearly half of the state’s 40 clinics to close. Only eight would still be in service had not the Supreme Court intervened on October 14th to block temporarily parts of the law. Remaining clinics are reporting longer waiting lists, with women travelling greater distances (and sometimes across state lines) to get the procedure. Similar rules threaten clinics in Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia and Wisconsin. Lawmakers claim these regulations make abortions safer, as they often require doctors who perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges. But few believe these changes achieve anything other than make it harder to get an abortion, which also happens to be a particularly safe surgical procedure in America. Less than 1% of women experience a complication, but this risk goes up the longer a woman waits to have an abortion, so laws that create more barriers could actually make the procedure less safe. The threatened clinics also offer other medical services, including cancer screenings and health counselling, so shutting them down is not terribly helpful, medically speaking.

Besides targeting abortion-providers, other new rules seem clearly designed to shame women who seek the procedure. In Alabama, for example, a law passed earlier this year imposes a court trial on minors who seek an abortion without their parents’ consent. The state can now appoint a lawyer to the foetus and bring in witnesses to attack the woman’s character. Not to be outdone, lawmakers in Tennessee hope to amend the state constitution so that it no longer “secures or protects” a right to abortion. Voters will get to decide the matter next week.

So far, so unsurprising. Efforts to limit access to abortion have gained steam since 2010. Conservative lawmakers who were elected to shrink government and cut away red tape are instead expanding the government’s role in reproductive affairs and regulating abortion providers out of existence. Some of these politicians sincerely and passionately believe that abortion is murder, and that it is their duty to prevent this tragedy. For others, blocking a woman’s right to an abortion remains an effective way to prove party loyalty and rally the base, which is useful in an election year when only the most partisan voters seem to make it to the polls.

Yet given the opposition of conservative lawmakers to ending unwanted pregnancies, one might assume they would throw more support behind pregnant women who end up delivering their children. This is where things get awkward. Unlike in most developed countries, where comprehensive maternity care is free or cheap, in America having a child is uniquely expensive. Charges for delivery have spiralled in recent decades, reaching a jaw-dropping $30,000 for a vaginal delivery and $50,000 for a C-section, as Elisabeth Rosenthal reported in the New York Times (in her excellent series on the costs of medicine in America). Poor and uninsured women often struggle to get or pay for proper prenatal care, which partly explains why America also has one of the highest mortality rates for both mothers and infants in the developed world.

The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, has made expanding insurance coverage for maternity benefits a priority. It achieves this by requiring all insurance policies to include maternity care in their packages (something many of them failed to do), and by forcing insurers to cover women who are already pregnant (ie, a “pre-existing condition”). Though these changes don’t restrain the rising costs of maternity care, they at least ensure that pregnant women are not left paying for these services completely out of pocket. Yet many of the lawmakers who penalise women for seeking to end their pregnancies have been quick to lambast a health-care policy designed to help them pay for their delivery bills. The fact that all insurance policies now include maternity benefits—regardless of who is being insured—is something Republicans have eagerly skewered as an example of ballooning insurance costs and government overreach. Many Republican-led states also refused to expand access to Medicaid, ensuring that poor women who don’t quite make enough to buy insurance will be saddled with maternity bills they will struggle to afford.

Working women who become pregnant in America are also left negotiating some of the least generous family-leave policies in the world. Unlike every other developed country, America does not require employers to offer paid leave to new parents—unless they happen to live in California, New Jersey or Rhode Island. Many workers have access to unpaid leave, courtesy of the 21-year-old Family and Medical Leave Act, but four in ten workers don’t qualify for this, either because their employer is too small or they haven’t worked for the same company for long enough. Many people can’t afford to take unpaid leave anyway. Last year Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Representative Rose DeLauro of Connecticut proposed providing up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave by raising the payroll tax. But not a single conservative lawmaker supports this bill. Its prospects look dim.

For a country where politicians are rather eager to promote family values, America has few policies that make it easy to have children. On top of high health-care costs and limited employer benefits, the country has little in the way of affordable child-care. It is unsurprising, then, that three-quarters of women who choose to have an abortion say it is because they cannot afford to have a child. Some will argue that they can always put their child up for adoption. Others will add that marriage can be a fine antidote to poverty (45% of all women who seek abortion are unmarried). These are fair points. But perhaps instead of closing down abortion clinics, lawmakers might consider more ways to give these women better choices.