George Pyle: Sorry, Holly. Republicans aren’t doing anything to reduce the number of abortions.

First, the appropriate props.

Holly Richardson has more of a right to lament the number of abortions in the nation and the world than just about anybody. Her family has adopted and/or provided a foster home to more children than were in my first-grade class. To say she went out of her way to adopt children nobody else would care for is not just a figure of speech. She went to eight countries.

She’s been to Bangladesh twice in recent months to try to offer some aid and comfort to refugees from the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. And, when she’s stuck in dull old Utah, she speaks up for the idea that women and girls should get an education and fully participate in politics and other aspects of public life.

But I fear my Salt Lake Tribune columnist colleague has a serious blind spot when it comes to her defense of her continued affiliation with the Republican Party. As she wrote in a column that appeared on The Tribune’s website last week, Richardson puts up with a party that is in active denial about the social and economic problems faced by many women, that often shows itself to be dysfunctional and unmanageable, primarily for one reason.

– Abortion is a nonnegotiable for many voters — Holly Richardson | The Salt Lake Tribune

No, they aren’t.

Republicans, especially Republicans in Utah, stand against anything that could be called a true pro-life agenda.

They’ve held their breath and turned red rather than implement the Affordable Care Act.

They’ve come close to repealing the death penalty, but can’t actually pull the trigger.

They do little to nothing to fix the horrific state of Wasatch Front air quality.

The only bill they can move that has anything to do with guns is to designate an official state firearm. Once it was the AR-15.

There were a pair of encouraging exceptions to this dreary pattern. In its last session, the Republican-dominated Utah Legislature took a couple of steps to reduce abortions the only way that it can reasonably be done, to take steps to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Lawmakers passed one bill that will allow women to obtain certain kinds of birth control from pharmacists, rather than only from physicians, and another that will make ongoing kinds of contraception, such as IUDs, a covered service of the state’s paltry Medicaid plan.

Generally, though, what Republican platforms offer as a way of opposing abortion is to make it illegal. Or to say they will, if only you keeping giving them your votes and your money.

The reality of this played out in a meta-media fuss last month when the venerable Atlantic magazine hired, and quickly fired, a writer it had sought out as a way of including more conservative views in its pages. Come to find out that the writer, Kevin D. Williamson, had posted a tweet four years ago saying that women who have abortions should be hanged.

Last week, Williamson insisted he never really meant that bit about hanging people. Instead, he argued, the U.S. should follow France, where abortions after 12 weeks carry penalties for those who perform them — not the women who have them — including loss of medical licenses and jail terms of up to 10 years.

Williamson honestly followed the anti-abortion logic where it leads, got stung for it and wandered back to a murky middle that tries to dodge the real issue.

Abortion is either the taking of a human life or it isn’t. If it is, then it should be severely punished. If it isn’t, or if we are not willing to actually exact such punishments, then it is none of the criminal justice system’s damfool business.

Things can of course be wrong, even tragic, without being criminal. Things like being poor, being sick or being pregnant when you don’t want to be, know you can’t properly raise a child and don’t want to go through the full term of gestation and delivery, especially if you face doing it alone.

Holly Richardson’s life has been dedicated to the humane response to unwanted children. She wants them. Not just in theory, but in fact. If there were a million more Holly Richardsons out there, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because we wouldn’t have this problem.

Until that happens, abortion must be safe, legal and rare. The way to make it rare is not to make it illegal but to make it ridiculous. Something that almost no women would seek because sex education, contraceptives, education, health care, housing — and everything else people need in order to know that the world really wants every woman not only to have a baby, but to raise it to be a happy and healthy child — are so universal and expected that the demand for abortion just withers away.

Republicans show no sign of favoring any of that. So it makes little sense that people who are repelled by the idea of abortion remain Republicans.

George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, is speaking for himself on this one. gpyle@sltrib.com