On the morning of was Friday, June 24, I was taping a podcast about Father Brown with John Miller of National Review. I was saying something about Detective Valentin when suddenly John cut in. “I have to cut you off, Mike,” he said, “because I always want you to remember we were recording a podcast together when you found out Roe v. Wade was struck down.”
I still get chills thinking about it. Never in my life have I been more proud to be an American than I was on that day. For many of us, it will be a kind of reverse 9/11. It’s a day—a moment—that will be seared in our memories forever.
Still, as I’ve written here before, I’m not terribly optimistic about the long-term prospects of the unborn. In New York City, more black children are aborted than born alive. The same is true in Putin’s Russia: their abortion rate is higher than their birth rate. Besides, most Americans are opposed to overturning Roe. It’s possible to overvalue an unpopular decision by an unpopular court appointed by a president who lost the popular vote… twice.
Honestly, I don’t mean to be a downer. I agree with T. S. Eliot: there are no lost causes, because there are no gained causes. That’s all the more reason to celebrate every victory, however small—and there are no small victories in the cause of life. If the Dobbs decision saves a single child’s life, that would be reason enough to drown the world in Te Deums.
I’ll say this, too: seeing how pro-choicers responded to the repeal of Roe was incredibly telling. The popular liberal pundit Joyce Vance, who tweeted, “Women will die as a result of this decision. So don’t tell me you’re pro-life.” That seems to be the general consensus.
Others more insightfully speculated how the decision would impact Americans’ views on sex. For example, Insider published an article called “Swearing off men and avoiding intimacy: Gen Z reconsiders sex in the wake of a post-Roe world.” And its Twitter post contained a really interesting graphic, with quotes from some of their sources. I don’t post it here, because some of them are a little graphic. But here’s a sample of what these teenagers are saying:
“I refuse to have sex without a condom.”
“I feel less sexually empowered than ever.”
“I kind kinda don’t want to do it at all or get my tubes tied.”
“Just means I gotta get a vasectomy.”
So, women will die as a result of Dobbs v. Jackson… unless they use birth control. Or, you know, don’t have sex.
As a Catholic, I don’t believe in birth control. But if you’re mourning the repeal of Roe, odds are you’re okay with condoms and the Pill. When used together, there’s essentially a zero percent chance of becoming pregnant. And these Gen-Xers seem to know that.
So, why are most progressives so adamant that the only alternative to partial-birth abortion is women being slaughtered en masse by their local back-alley sawbones?
Maybe you’d blame the entitlement complex of the modern American. And maybe you’re right. But this attitude isn’t quite new. From the very beginning, the pro-choice movement has insisted that the huge majority of women having unprotected sex is a given. It can’t be avoided. They have no choice.
For instance, the novelist Ursula K. LeGuin procured an abortion in the year 1950. Fifty-four years later, in a 2004 address to Oregon NARAL, she wonders what her life might have been like had she kept the child. Le Guin says, that,
The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses, or children, or lives, or whatever you choose to call them: my children the three I bore, the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met and married, because he would have been a Fulbright student going to France on the Queen Mary in 1953. I would have been an “unwed mother,” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents, not marriageable, contributing nothing to her community but another mouth to feed, another useless woman.
We want to ask, “What if you’d simply not had sex with your boyfriend—the one who apparently left you after you got pregnant?” But, again, that’s not an option. Not having unprotected sex isn’t an option.
I don’t mean to trivialize the fear that women (quite naturally) feel when they experience an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy. Honestly, I don’t. Having seen how difficult pregnancy and motherhood are for my wife, and for our friends—all of whom are married, and to men who can support their families on a single income—I really can’t fathom what it would be like for a woman to go through all of it alone.
But here’s my point. For women, the choice isn’t between (A) legal abortion, (B) death by illegal abortion, or (C) life as a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. They can choose chastity, contraception, or adoption, too.
Also, there’s virtually no remaining stigma around “unwed mothers.” Companies are falling over themselves to prove how feminist they are by providing free childcare, maternity leave, etc. In fact, governments are doing the same. Employers who discriminate against mothers can find themselves at the wrong end of a lawsuit. The “maternal wall bias” is crumbling.
That’s why pro-choice laws aren’t really about women per se. Really, they’re about enshrining the central dogma of the Sexual Revolution: the sanctity of casual sex. The inalienable right of every adult to have sex whenever they want, with whomever they want, at no cost to themselves whatsoever.
Hence at the beginning of her speech, Ms. Le Guin said,
My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs. Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all [had sex with] her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke.
That’s horrible, of course. But what makes it horrible?
To Christians, it’s the fathers’ refusal to accept responsibility for their children. But clearly progressives don’t care very much about that. They’re okay with parents not wanting to support their children. Hell, they’re okay with mothers killing their children.
Rather, what seems to bother Le Guin is the lack of parity. Men can be more carefree in their relationships, and they know it. That’s what abortion does. It helps women to compete more equally in the sexual marketplace.
Here’s the rub, though. Even with abortion, women will never—never—be able to compete with men in this field.
Simply put, sex comes with a far higher cost to women, both physically and emotionally. And it’s not just pregnancy. Women also form a deeper emotional attachment to their sexual partners than men do. Hence the phenomena like ghosting and its cousin “mosting”. According to journalist Tracey Moore,
Mosting is ghosting, but where before you ghost, you completely love bomb the person with praise, compliments and faux perfect soulmate-type stuff. It’s so over the top. The ghosting is much more confusing and painful, because this wasn’t just a “meh” date that you could take or leave. This person really made you feel like you had a rare connection in a sea of duds.
Now, obviously it’s women are getting “mosted” by men, not the other way around. It’s just not a tactic that would work on us guys. Rather, if a woman did try this on a man—if she showered him with praise and affection, and all he got was a one-night stand—he’d count his lucky stars. It doesn’t affect us the same way. It just doesn’t.
By the way, we haven’t even gone into the massive psychological trauma that abortion can cause women. It even has a name: post-abortion stress syndrome (PASS), a close cousin of PTSD.
So, those who wish to enshrine the sanctity of casual sex in law must acknowledge that pregnancy makes women vulnerable. But does abortion give power back to women? No. It only gives them a dangerous illusion of power—dangerous to their babies, to their partners, and to themselves.
Deep down, most pro-choice leaders know all of this. That’s why California governor Gavin Newsom responded by the repeal of Roe by signing legislation that would (he said) “protect women” from abortion bans. As a matter of fact, the word “protect” appears fifteen times in his press release.
Free, empowered women don’t look to male politicians to “protect” them. But, again, abortion isn’t about empowering women. It really is about protecting them, in a warped sort of way. It’s about protecting them from their own natural vulnerability, from their own relative weakness—from the consequences of their choices, and from the choices of men.
In that sense, the pro-choice regime is really a kind of strange, inverted patriarchy. In days past, men like Gov. Newsom would protect women by abstaining from having sex with them until marriage—in other words, until a man as socially and legally obligated to support his partner if and when she became pregnant. Then, it would be his duty to defend and provide for his wife and children by any means necessary.
The abortion regime means that men are no longer inconvenienced by things like social and legal obligations. We can “protect” women simply by standing back and letting doctors kill their children. We get sex without any of the providing, defending, etc. It’s a perverse paternalism, where the male “serves” his mate by killing their offspring and then wandering off in search of a new mate.
This is what the Sexual Revolution is really about. This is what it’s always been about. It’s about men giving themselves permission to use women.
By the way, giving women permission to “use” men doesn’t make it any better. It’s like saying that a father has a right to beat his children… but it’s okay, because children also have a right to beat their fathers.
If that’s equality, I want nothing to do with it. And neither should you. After all, what has this “equality” gotten us? Weak men, miserable women, and dead babies.