Encourage women not to expose themselves to the risk of being impregnated by an unreliable man. And encourage men not to be unreliable.
Encourage women not to expose themselves to the risk of being impregnated by an unreliable man. And encourage men not to be unreliable.
T he feminist message of the past 50 years is that women are independent and don’t need men. In many ways, that’s been proven right. Women outperform men in school, are more likely to graduate from college, and are much more likely to initiate divorce.
Nevertheless, there remains a stubborn context in which women are not independent: pregnancy. Women can’t get pregnant without men. And after conception, the condition makes them dependent. But on what should they depend? Or better yet, on whom?
If you are pro-choice, you think pregnant women ought to be able to depend on abortion. If you are pro-life, you think pregnant women ought to be able to depend on the men who impregnate them.
Men’s supporting role in pregnancy is woefully underestimated. I watched my sister and her husband navigate this recently. For nine months, my brother-in-law attended appointments and birth classes with her, comforted her through every stress and symptom. During labor, he became her personal coach. And that was only the start of it. Returning from hospital in a highly vulnerable state, my sister seemed to need her husband almost as much as their infant son needed her.
The thought of going through that alone must be terrifying. And when an unborn child’s father is absent or unsupportive of a pregnancy, the motivation for abortion can be overwhelming. Continuing a pregnancy under such circumstances demands heroic courage. Even heroes need help, though, which is why the support of extended families, communities, and crisis-pregnancy centers in such cases are so invaluable.
The obvious difficulty for the pro-life movement is that most women have no interest in being heroines. Given the choice between heroism and barbarism — pregnancy without paternal/familial support, or abortion — most women choose the latter. Evidently, many voters do the same.
According to Pew’s latest figures, 61 percent of Americans think abortion ought to be legal in most/all cases. It is difficult to say the extent to which we saw it affecting congressional and gubernatorial races. But in CNN’s exit poll, 31 percent of voters named inflation as their top issue, with abortion not far behind at 27 percent.
When Dobbs was overturned, Michigan reverted to a 1931 law prohibiting abortion from conception with no exceptions except to save the life of the mother. This law was blocked by a judge, and then rendered moot by the vote on a ballot amendment, Proposition 3. This enshrined a right to abortion on demand, up until birth, in the state constitution. In Kansas earlier this year, voters opted to reject a constitutional amendment declaring no right to abortion in the state.
Because so few women want to be heroines, the pro-life movement ought to spend more time on prevention of the heroism/barbarism dilemma. That means encouraging women not to expose themselves to the risk of being impregnated by an unreliable man — and encouraging men not to be unreliable. Here, it’s worth noting that contraception is no substitute for character. As Louise Perry writes in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution:
It’s odd, in retrospect, that the introduction of a new form of contraception led to an increase rather than a decrease in the number of births out of wedlock, and yet that’s exactly what happened. This was because the Pill ended the taboo on pre-marital sex, while not actually providing complete protection from pregnancy. It still doesn’t, even though it remains the most popular method of contraception in the UK and the US: with perfect use, the combined contraceptive pill is 99 percent effective, but with typical use it is 91 percent effective, meaning that around nine in 100 women taking it will get pregnant in a year. Across a population, that is a huge number of unwanted babies.
The decriminalization of abortion across the Western world, which arrived shortly after the introduction of the Pill, provided a ‘back-up’ option in these cases of contraceptive failure. In the contemporary United States, about half of women who have abortions report that they were using contraception when they became pregnant, and about a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion. [Emphasis added.]
Perry also shared an observation from her friend Mason Hartman, who “compares the modern state to a kind of ‘back-up husband.’ If called upon, it will feed you, house you, and protect you from violence, but it won’t do so especially well. And the state will offer no warmth or companionship alongside these necessities.” The state can also step in as a “back-up” in the case of an unintended pregnancy. Only rather than help share the burden of pregnancy, the state permits (or subsidizes) the alleviation of the burden through the lethal violence of abortion.
CNN exit polling from this year’s midterms showed that more than two-thirds of unmarried women prefer Democrats to Republicans. There can be no doubt that, for this demographic, abortion policy is a significant concern. After all, it is mostly unmarried women who have abortions.
On Twitter, Joel Berry of the Babylon Bee remarked that “unmarried women in America are lost, miserable, addicted to SSRIs [a kind of antidepressant] and alcohol, wracked with guilt from abortion, and wandering from partner to partner.” He may not have noticed — perhaps because many men still vote Republican — but unmarried men aren’t doing so well either. As Jordan Peterson has discussed, men need to feel needed, and yet so many are written off by our culture that they spiral into perpetual adolescence.
This is not sustainable. Not only are men and women miserable, but the fertility rate is now well below replacement level, and experts are warning about the strains associated with an aging population. Chuck Schumer suggested recently that one way to fix this is through mass migration. The real way is to encourage more people to get married and have children.
Society’s sexual dysfunction will only be exacerbated by poor political choices such as increasingly permissive abortion laws. Until we succeed in redirecting the unavoidable dependency of pregnant women from abortion toward their children’s fathers, and from the state toward families, this trend will only worsen.