Over the past few weeks, we have seen gruesome pictures of abortions on Hayden Lawn and anti-abortion advocates screaming, “Abortion is murder!” outside the Memorial Union on the Tempe campus. The passage of House Bill 2564 leads me to believe that their message was heard down at the state capitol.

The bill invokes new restrictions on abortions; but like some anti-abortion arguments, this bill misses the point.

Republican, Democrat or Independent, we can all agree on one piece of information when it comes to this issue: The less teenage and unwanted pregnancies, the better. The severe political, and sometimes moral, divide mainly occurs over how we should go about this.

In a recent article, The Arizona Republic reported that this bill would “allow Arizona pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception on moral grounds.” Denying access to various forms of contraception will not help the rate of teenage and unwanted pregnancies go down. Quite frankly, this move will put us in reverse.

Bristol Palin has made it clear that abstinence-only education is not effective. To counter teenage hormones and unwanted pregnancies, sex education needs to start earlier and contraceptives need to be more accessible. Allowing pharmacists, who do not normally offer their morals to customers, to refuse the sale of contraceptives for moral reasons seems nonsensical.

Another provision to this bill prohibits anybody but a physician from performing an abortion. Oftentimes the procedure is done by nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants. This would severely limit the number of successful procedures that could be performed. Because this makes abortions harder to come by, it is possible people could resort to illegal abortions.

There is a hypothesis, which supports this idea, that once abortion was legalized in the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, crime rates began to fall. Gentleman from Yale Law School and University of Chicago researched this theory, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. “Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime,” the report said. I fear that with this stipulation the crime rate would be affected because abortions would be less accessible.

One more provision of this bill leads some to believe that this bill is based in morals rather than practicality. Under the law, they must mandate informed consent and a 24-hour “reflection period” before any adult woman could undergo the procedure. The woman should have a right to dictate the abortion on her terms and if she chooses to have it.

Though I do not find abortions desirable — I am not sure anyone does — this bill does not help achieve the ultimate goal of lowering the number of teen and unwanted pregnancies.

Instead, this bill ventures into the realm of dictating morals. Governing from a moral standpoint is impossible to do when we live in such a large state and have as diverse a population as Arizona does.

When it comes to emotional-driven and heated issues such as abortion, we must create and enforce policies in a tempered and well-thought out manner, which is something this bill does not do.

Reach Andrew at andrew.hedlund@asu.edu.