Sometimes the NYT won't let you read things, so here's the article:

This the second part of my extended response to Katha Pollitt’s questions for abortion opponents, inspired by the still-ongoing release of Planned Parenthood sting videos; you can find the first half of my response here. If you like you can consider this a strange sort of counterprogramming for the global economy’s current China-driven jitters, and fear not: Full-spectrum Trump coverage will no doubt resume shortly.

Onward:

5. Men. You want to force women to carry every pregnancy to term, but the fact that men can easily walk away does not seem to interest you much. What are the responsibilities of men to avoid getting women pregnant, to support them while they are pregnant, to provide for mother and child? And what measures would you promote to enforce those responsibilities?

This is a strange accusation to lodge, for two reasons. First, political conservatives, pro-life and otherwise, have long been eager to talk critically about “deadbeat dads,” and over time the normal right-of-center bias in favor of states rights has been mostly set aside on this issue, and we’ve seen a steady federalization of child support enforcement that was consolidated in the 1996 welfare reform. Whether this has made for optimal policy is an open question, one that’s inevitably tangled up with the wider debate about the welfare state — since men who evade child support payments are often poor or incarcerated, and women who receive child support are less likely to receive public assistance. But the claim that abortion opponents aren’t “interested” in the issue and need to come up with some sort of tougher child support agenda doesn’t seem right at all; if anything, the de facto liberal view today seems to be that conservatives have become too aggressive about making low-income fathers pay child support, and need to ease off and let the welfare state take care of things instead.

Then second, it’s a strange accusation because one of the more commonplace pro-life arguments is that the current abortion regime is itself a gift to men who want “to easily walk away,” itself a legal and cultural enabler of male irresponsibility, on a profound, society-altering scale. Here pro-lifers are fond of citing (as I’ve been known to do) the famous Janet Yellen and George Akerlof paper linking legal abortion and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates, which suggested — quite reasonably, I think — that Roe dramatically changed male incentives around sex and marriage, and significantly weakened the relational power of women when they do get pregnant: “By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother,” they wrote, “the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.” That argument obviously need not imply pro-life conclusions; indeed, Akerlof and Yellen are themselves pro-choice. But it lends the pro-life view of things a certain coherence on this front: We believe in male responsibility, and we think that your preferred policies, not ours, are the ones that made it far too easy for men to wash their hands of their most primal, powerful, essential responsibilities.

6. Equality. Contraception and legal abortion have played a crucial part in enabling women to advance in education, the workplace, self-development and public life. How do you see women continuing to progress if they cannot control when they bear children? Do you think equality of the sexes is desirable? If so, how would you make it compatible with ill-timed pregnancy and motherhood? If not, what do you think is the appropriate place of women?

I addressed this by implication in my prior response, but I simply don’t accept your premise here. Not the harp (as it were) on the case of Ireland, but if unrestricted abortion were as essential to female advancement as you assume, you would expect a society with such outlying abortion laws to be an outlier (in a bad way) in terms of female opportunity, equality, and advancement. And you just don’t see that trend in cross-national comparisons; Ireland’s score in The Economist’s female opportunity rankings, to take just one for instance, is basically identical to the neighboring, much-more-abortion-friendly U.K.

Or forget Ireland and just look at the vast and complicated United States. Your list of questions for pro-lifers, like your recent book, is premised on the idea that our side has won major victories over the past few decades, both by passing various sorts of restrictions and by driving the real case for abortion rights into a kind of cultural underground. Obviously I think you’ve somewhat overstated our success, but it’s definitely true that the pro-life movement has made some real gains, culturally and legally, relative to the status quo in 1975. So over that same period, by your abortion-is-essential-to-female-advancement logic, you would expect those pro-life victories to produce steady female disempowerment. But the evidence isn’t there: The abortion rate has gone down, abortion has become more culturally taboo, more restrictions have been passed … and women have leaped past men in educational attainment, doubled their share of managerial and professional jobs, quadrupled the share of households in which they’re the primary or sole breadwinner (which is not necessarily a good thing, of course, but we’re talking about indicators of female independence), and so on down a much longer list. If America is more pro-life than it used to be (again, an arguable point but a plausible one), the era in which it’s become more pro-life seems to have been pretty good for female advancement overall.

And not surprisingly, given this overall cultural combination, the pro-life movement has itself also evolved over time: Its gender politics have always been more complicated than your side’s interpretation of the debate would suggest, but what we’ve seen over the last forty years is that pro-life sentiment has held steady even as religious-conservative opposition to women in the workforce, in politics and so on has essentially collapsed. As Jon Shields pointed out a few years ago, today “the average moderately pro-life citizen is a stronger supporter of gender equality than even the typical strongly pro-choice citizen was in the early 1980s.” Maybe all these pro-life citizens are just hopelessly deluded, but they — we — simply don’t see the necessary connection between abortion and the equality of the sexes that your side takes for granted.

Now I know the implications of the data on female advancement are hotly disputed among feminists, and that I’m implicitly taking the side of Hanna Rosin in an ongoing intra-liberal dispute about the patriarchy’s resilience. But I think we could even concede, for the sake of argument, that a kind of patriarchy is resilient at the highest levels of American society — in elite-level boardrooms and law firms, at the highest levels of the entertainment industry, in the halls of power in Washington D.C., and so on — and it still wouldn’t necessarily help your argument, because 1) these are some of the most pro-choice sectors of American society, 2) the women in these sectors have the easiest access to abortion, inevitably, of any demographic group, and 3) the biggest challenge facing women in these arenas to be their desire to have and rear children, not their inability to abort them. That’s the heart of the whole “having it all” debate, after all: Not whether elite women need better access to abortion but whether elite workplaces need to become more family-friendly, more flexible in their hours and demands, less inclined to pass over women who seem to be on a “mommy track,” so that their glass ceilings might be more easily shattered. Which is an important, complex debate — here’s what I wrote about it when Ann-Marie Slaughter’s piece came out — but not one, in the end, in which the pro-life movement’s recent gains are particularly implicated.

There’s a lot more to say about this topic, but at the broadest level my view is sketched out here: I think increased female economic opportunity is a great good, but that like previous gains for human welfare it need not be permanently associated with the collateral damage of the sexual revolution, and I think your side of the abortion debate is a bit like the cohort of Social Darwinists who assumed that the economic gains of the industrial revolution were so precious (and they were, indeed, precious!) that they required the terrible factory conditions, massive child labor, perpetually polluted skies and other dark-satanic-mills barbarisms that came in along with the 19th century rise in human wealth. From that fatalism I respectfully dissent, and I look forward to a future in which my daughters’ self-determination doesn’t need to bought with a kind of society-wide blood sacrifice of the unborn.

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