With Rick Perry announcing that he will not seek a fourth term as the governor of Texas, talk has immediately turned to whether he will consider another run for president. Tradition has it that it's almost inevitable:

Once a sufficient number of people have convinced an egomaniac that he would be a very good president, it's hard for that egomaniac to let go of that dream.

Perry's re-introduction on the national stage arrives just as Texas has become a symbol for extreme anti-abortion legislation. So, is there any way that a Perry candidacy could escape becoming a referendum on reproductive rights?

I think not. Both pro-life and pro-choice advocates would welcome it (even as the leaders in each party would probably cringe). Each would be convinced that the debate would end in their favor, each with polling data to support that conclusion.

But data are one thing, Rick Perry is another. If Perry does seek the nomination, he's the exactly wrong spokesman for the pro-life movement, representative of a traditional philosophy that has, again and again, failed to find purchase when tested at the national level. After all, women made the 2012 election about abortion even if the candidates shied away from it: one of the most striking polls of the cycle told us that women in swing states named abortion rights as their No 1 priority in deciding who to vote for. Does anyone think Rick Perry would fare well with them?

Not that the country is ardently pro-choice. I think we are all justifiably uncomfortable with even discussing abortion. I believe that we understand the profound heartache that accompanies making that choice, and that we all believe that we personally would only make (or support) terminating a pregnancy under in direst of situations. But most of us recognize that we can't know what another person's life is like; a clear majority of Americans, 52%, tell pollsters they believe abortion should be "legal only under certain circumstances".

For some reason, pro-life advocates always take this number to mean a tendency to support their extreme position. I see it as just the opposite: Americans are loath to dictate actions to their countrymen, especially when it comes to sex; our tradition of personal liberty is too strong, our discomfort with the icky specifics of reproduction too innate.

The creep factor in Perry's willingness to get right down to the nitty-gritty of abortion, to blithely endorse invasive ultrasounds and speak about "unborn babies", just amplifies the larger problem with Perry as the leading advocate for pro-life legislation: he's just another white guy mansplaining to ladies about their private parts, with a southern drawl at that. Marco Rubio's rumored intention to lead a bill instituting a federal ban on abortion has brought to the fore just the awkwardness of such scenes, in the words of one female staffer for a very conservative member of Congress:

Even if you agree with the issue, and you personally are pro-life, whenever these bills come up you basically live in fear your boss will say something stupid and offensive.

Perhaps the worst thing for the pro-life position has been their success at instituting what they seem to believe are half-measures at the state level: those calls for mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds and lectures from doctors that seem to mark open season for male ignorance. These incremental measures towards fully banning abortion only telegraph condescension at best, and witlessness at worst, about women and their bodies.

The ultrasound, in particular, is a needless and insulting barrier to women who seek abortions. Today, most women who choose (pdf) to terminate their pregnancies, 61%, already have at least one child; 34% have two or more. These women are fully aware of what's going on in their bodies; they are not coming to the doctor's office without having experienced the joy of childbirth or the tender bond that it instills. They know what they are giving up when they make their decision, and they are doing it anyway.

In fact, these are perhaps the women whom pro-life advocates could most easily convince to bear a child – maybe, by assuring the children and their mother will have the financial and emotional support they need – but they aren't going to do it by talking down to them.

Indeed, today's women have – like it or not – the sexual experience and awareness about contraception that undermines another favorite (and Perry-endorsed) weapon in the pro-life arsenal: limiting access to family planning and making what abortions are available expensive and hard to get. Americans in general and certainly most women understand that contraception prevents abortions, and that women who are desperate for them will find a way to get them even if it's unsafe. This is why voters stubbornly insist (by 57% to 40%) they do not favor defunding Planned Parenthood or other family planning clinics – even as the percentage of Americans identifying as pro-life ticks upward.

The entrenchment of "informed consent" laws and legislation restricting access into the larger pro-life ethos echoes the problem presented by Perry as its spokesman: anti-abortion advocacy has become inextricable from social conservatism as a whole. It is a box to check off in the platform, right next to support for "traditional marriage", prayer in schools, and "abstinence-only" sex education. Abortion is railed against in the same speech that denounces the "war on Christmas", the "global warming hoax", "class warfare" and Obamacare. You can yoke these policy positions together via a loosey-goosey interpretation of "scripture" (the Bible actually has very little to say about any of them), but today sees a generation of young conservatives who don't necessarily see them as related.

Polling among young Republicans finds support for policies that are pro-marriage equality and in favor of combating climate change, even as they are some of the fiercest opponents of abortion. I don't see these young people as hypocrites or even as somehow contradicting themselves.

The most powerful argument I've heard against abortion – and I'm as fierce an advocate for choice as anyone – is one that connects women's rights, civil liberties, and "spreading the wealth" with the choice to have a child in difficult circumstances. Granted, I've heard exactly one person even come close to articulating it in public – a young woman at the CPAC conference who allowed that she didn't care if her colleagues in the pro-life movement were also pro-gay marriage: "It's all human rights to me."

Now, I can imagine the power of such a platform being adopted widely. But it's not going to be accomplished by Rick Perry.

Show me a candidate who puts universal pre-K childcare, expanded parental leave, and broad support for adoption – including by same-sex couples – next to a pro-choice policy, and I might listen. Tell me you'll provide services that ensure women who seek abortions will get access to the earliest and safest procedures possible, and you and I can work together to make the already vanishingly rare event of late-term abortions (at 1.5% of all terminations) a distant memory.

And let me call myself pro-life, because the fact that I'm pro-choice doesn't mean I'm not.