On Friday, paying subscribers can look forward to an interview with University of Massachusetts historian Sam Redman about his new book, The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience (NYU, May 2022).

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Image courtesy of Miami U. Libraries - Digital Collections/Wikimedia Commons

Today’s New York Times featured a startling honest article by Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, a literary journal “that offers an orthodox Catholic perspective on the problems of modern life.” I say “startling honest” not because I think that those who are anti-abortion are necessarily dishonest, although some are. But most abortion opponents seem disingenuous to me because they are unwilling to grapple with the real-life implications of what it means to either categorically deny women abortions or make abortion so challenging to access that many women are effectively denied an abortion.

Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett thinks that dropping your baby off in a bin at the fire station is an excellent solution to forced pregnancy. On the PBS NewsHour last week, anchor Amna Nawaz asked the Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge in six different ways how her state would cope with an influx of live births among the poor. Nawaz also noted that adoption and foster systems in Arkansas are overwhelmed, and it offers one of the lowest levels of social support in the nation. Rutledge’s only answer? “Love. We are just going to surround them with love.”

It’s crazier than Jewish space lasers out there. At least there aren’t any actual Jewish space lasers! But absent access to abortion and the limitations some states now claim they wish to place on a range of birth control methods, we are looking at a sharp uptick in babies. Those babies will be born to American women who will be least economically able to care for them. And this will happen in states with structural barriers to helping these women raise—or even feed and house—their children.

But in “Overturning Roe Will Disrupt a Lot More Than Abortion. I Can Live With That,” Walther admits that there will be many bad outcomes to the expected SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe. After a weird digression in which he links the commitment of some corporations to help their employees travel for reproductive healthcare (suggesting that abortion is, among other things, an extension of the evils of capitalism), he points out that being alive is not about being happy. Instead, it is about being alive, which is the primary value of restrictionist laws.

I am going to quote Walther at length because you must understand what he means:

Research over the years has suggested that an America without abortion would mean more single mothers and more births to teenage mothers, increased strain on Medicaid and other welfare programs, higher crime rates, a less dynamic and flexible work force, an uptick in carbon emissions, lower student test scores and goodness knows what else. If you sincerely believe, as I do, that every abortion means the deliberate killing of an innocent human being, is there some hypothetical threshold for negative growth, carbon dioxide levels or work force participation rates beyond which the protection of that life would be too burdensome?
For me, the answer is no. This is why, even though I find it unlikely that (for example) there is any meaningful causal relationship between access to abortion and academic performance, I believe that those who oppose abortion should not discount the possibility that its proscription will have consequences that some of us would otherwise regret. To insist, as opponents of abortion often have, that the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt cannot be right about the correlation between Roe and the reduced incidence of crime two decades later strikes me as a tacit concession that if they were right, our position on abortion might have to be altered.
For the same reason, opponents of abortion should commit ourselves to the most generous and humane provisions for mothers and children (paid family leave, generous child benefits, direct income subsidies for stay-at-home mothers, single-payer health care) without being Pollyannaish. No matter what we do, in a post-Roe world many children who would not otherwise have been born will live lives of utter misery, and many of our fellow Americans will be indifferent to their plight. If we wish to dispel the noxious argument that only happy lives are worth saving, we will have to be honest about the limits of social policy and private charity in regulating the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.

In other words, Walther is arguing that those who are against abortion should make social provisions for unplanned and unwanted children—but that, in fact, they probably won’t. I would say that this is also an inherently misogynist argument, but that’s only partially true: many of these children living “lives of utter misery” will be boys.

In the same vein, if you are wondering what kind of monster would ask a child to carry a pregnancy conceived in rape or incest to term, they aren’t all monsters. For example. Kathy Barnette, a Republican primary candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, is running as a child born of rape. Barnette’s mother was 12 when she was born, something she discovered late in life, and in this campaign ad, she tells that story.

Again, Barnette does not sugarcoat this experience: she talks about trauma, pain, and grief and an apparently loving family who ensured her well-being.

None of this is an argument for taking away another woman’s right to choose. But as we move forward, digging beyond the hot takes, the political gaslighting, and the sloganeering to understand what true believers mean when they insist that they cannot condone abortion under any circumstances is wrong.

Because if we don’t understand that, we don’t know what the struggle for women’s freedom will require of us.

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Short takes:

Will overturning Roe force Democrats to scrutinize online privacy? Perhaps. Much is being made of the potential for self-medicated abortions facilitated by online providers. Still, as Senator Ron Wyden points out, everything online is potential evidence for prosecuting procedures that states will soon ban in many states. As Abby Vesoulis of Time magazine explains, “using these internet resources in states that criminalize aspects of abortion could expose people to prosecution. Court-ordered search warrants yielding a pregnant woman’s Google search results for Mifepristone, her Amazon purchases of pregnancy tests, or her cell phone app tracking her menstruation could be used in court to justify a homicide conviction in Louisiana if its abortion-homicide bill is enacted. Private Venmo or PayPal payments obtained by a warrant and thought by prosecutors to be intended to help a friend afford an abortion could be used as evidence in a state that criminalizes aiding an abortion.” (May 10, 2022)
In which the GOP turns out to have limits after all. As video after video of sexual “hijinks” featuring Madison Cawthorne spread across the internet, it is pretty clear that this ratfuck is coming from fellow Republicans who are not content with simply endorsing Cawthorne’s primary opponent. “The 26-year-old congressman has, in his few years in politics, sparked public outrage with his support for former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, inflammatory speeches, repeated driving and gun infractions, and even a nude video. But his falling-out with top Republicans in North Carolina and Washington also arose from more humdrum blunders such as neglecting constituent services and insulting party elders, according to GOP officials and operatives in the state,” writes Isaac Arnsdorf at The Washington Post. “Now, those Republican enemies are openly lining up to take him down.” (May 9, 2022)
I admit that I thought she was already dead. At 94, Midge Decter, one of the original neoconservatives, has passed. She and Diana Trilling are perhaps two of the most underexamined and underrecognized members of the generation that moved from liberal anti-communism to conservatism in the 1970s. A robust aversion to feminism was a big part of that story. But Decter’s life also reflects a time when the literary world had larger politically hybrid spaces. “Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines,” Douglas Martin writes in his New York Times obituary, “as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.” (May 9, 2022)

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