Despite initial appearances to the contrary, the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade has put conservatives into a difficult position. Unlike some anti-abortion activists who seem to believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth, people in touch with reality are aware that babies need to be cared for after they come into this world. But years of shredding the social safety net, railing against national health insurance and hollowing out the middle class has left us utterly unprepared to cope with the baby boom that will surely result from this myopic ideologically-driven decision.

With the quality of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of new lives now hanging in the balance, it has become imperative that we make a radical shift in our national priorities — a shift that will throw the inhuman agenda of right-wing hardliners into stark relief and perhaps open a way to a more humane and life-affirming society.

Let us begin with a reminder that abortion is not a mere alternative method of birth control but often a desperate measure after all other options have been exhausted. No woman truly wants to kill her unborn baby. Why would someone be driven to seek such a violent and emotionally wrenching procedure whether legal or not? First are the medical concerns as summarized by Dr. Dorothy Federman in a recent letter to the Enterprise (“Pregnancy carries risks,” June 25), which range from ectopic pregnancies to uterine rupture, and make “the pregnancy-related mortality rate … more than 10 times that of a safe, legal abortion.”

Widespread poverty also plays an outsized role. In a recent appeal for funds, the Salvation Army of Central New York wrote: “Local families are in economic distress … Many working parents hold down multiple jobs, yet don’t earn enough to feed their kids and afford other critical necessities. Some can’t pay for utilities. Others are worried about losing their homes. Millions of Americans are struggling to pay even their most basic expenses … The truth is, most people are just one missed paycheck away from hunger or homelessness. Just one emergency or unexpected event [like an unplanned pregnancy] can be devastating when money is already tight.”

More affluent families feel the pinch as well. On May 7, for example, The Valley News Sun in Elizabethtown carried a story headlined “Health report: Childcare can cost Essex parents almost a third of their income,” which says, in part, that “health officials say this extraordinary statistic puts childcare out of reach of many North Country residents.” Few if any employers will help. Many jobs are not salaried, but rather minimum-wage hourly work without benefits like health insurance or paid parental leave or even sick/personal time. Further, lack of adequate affordable housing can mean that if a home becomes too cramped as the result of an additional baby, finding more suitable space can be next to impossible.

This reminds us of the growing numbers of homeless people living in tents and under bridges, driven there by evictions, bankruptcy and climate-related disasters such as wildfires and floods. Hanging over it all is the enormous load of debt that many Americans carry and whose weight is frequently compounded by domestic violence, mental illness, PTSD and suicide among military veterans, the prison pipeline and drug/opioid addiction. All these factors — medical, economic, and social — mix and combine in innumerable configurations of infinite variety. One size does not fit all. For people struggling with such circumstances, adding even one baby to their situation may well prove catastrophic.

The SCOTUS ruling is oblivious or indifferent to all of this. Small wonder that a new Underground Railroad is emerging as desperate women with the means to do so find their way to states where abortion remains legal. “Pro-life” zealots are now seeking to eliminate this possibility, and to prohibit any exceptions to the new legal restrictions (“In abortion fight, conservatives push to end exceptions,” Enterprise, May 7).

But simply banning abortion only intensifies the underlying desperation that feeds it. The real solution to this problem is far more radical than anyone seems prepared to admit. This is made clear in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2014), where, echoing what I have written just above, he says “… we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day with dire consequences … The hearts of many people are gripped by fear and desperation, even in the so-called rich countries … Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.” We also have to say no, he continues, to “the new idolatry of money,” no to “a financial system which rules rather than serves,” no to “the inequality which spawns violence.”

In other words, if we say no to abortion, we also have to say no to our current death-oriented economic and social system and set about fundamentally restructuring it to care for the tsunami of new babies (many possibly unwanted) that will soon be upon us. In practical terms, this means strengthening health insurance, subsidizing free or low-cost daycare centers, coordinating a network of adoption agencies, narrowing the wealth gap and providing for paid parental leave and a living wage. This will have to be done at the federal level because the scale of the national emergency will be too massive for individual states (or our declining churches) to cope with.

Of course even mentioning such ideas will instantly draw predictable shouts of “far-left,” “socialist,” “liberal,” and similar knee-jerk attacks from the conservative Republican far right. No matter. Their heartless authoritarian ideology must inevitably collapse under the weight of the new reality that they themselves have created. Meanwhile, a time of unimaginable (though formerly avoidable) human misery awaits us. But perhaps it may become a portal to a gentler America that truly cherishes all life, not just in word but in deed.

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John Radigan lives in Saranac Lake.