Left-Twitter is all up in arms today at Ross Douthat for daring to respond to an argument that abortion is good for men. Abortion enthusiast Jill Filipovic argued that case:
There are millions of men whose lives would have been much worse without abortion. Men who wouldn’t have found their big loves, wouldn’t have their kids, wouldn’t have been as successful, wouldn’t have taken big risks. Many of them don’t think about it. Some don’t even know it. How many men are sitting in elected office, running companies, caring for their much-loved kids, going on big adventures, working their way up, making their art, writing their books, appearing on your television screen because they didn’t become fathers before they were ready? I would bet, though, that most of them don’t think about the abortion their partner had as saving their lives, too; I would bet they don’t think about it much at all. And many of them are the beneficiaries of abortions they still don’t know about. I’m not saying that men need to talk about someone else’s abortion. I am saying: This is your fight, too. Get in it.
Douthat responded by observing the negative trends in the lives of men since Roe v. Wade:
Worth noting that in the 50 yrs since Roe, men have become less likely to find a spouse, less likely father kids or live with the kids they father, and less likely to participate in the workforce. Harder to measure “big risks” but rates of new business formation and even moving from state to state have also declined.
As with most Twitter arguments, there is a lot of context and caveats and data that neither side is presenting here; the format doesn’t lend itself to that. But what has people so angry is that Douthat is speaking truthfully to something progressives despise: culture. And more particularly, the corrosive effect of mass legal abortion on the culture of male responsibility.
The massacre of children in the interests of freeing men from the consequences of their relations with women is not as uniformly beneficial to men as Filipovic claims. The theory of how abortion benefits men is, at bottom, crass and misogynistic: Abortion makes it easier for men to treat women as disposable sex objects and children as solely women’s problem, and thus “frees” men from “becom[ing] fathers before they were ready,” sometimes even by the mother disposing of the child without the father ever knowing. Whenever that argument is aired, it should be met with moral derision for what it says about how men should treat women and children. But people are mad at Douthat not just for noticing that, but for telling people that it’s also a lie. The path of disposable sexual partners is, in the long run, unfulfilling. It is not what men are made for, and it contributes to a world full of frustrated, lonely, alienated, middle-aged men who are prone to addiction and vulnerable to the siren song of political extremism.