Ross Douthat proves once again why the NY Times was foolish to hire him, because he can’t help but write op-eds that read more like afterschool specials about the evils of fornication mixed with crappy prayer cards than actual greatest-newspaper-in-the-country editorials. He includes a poem about a fetal heartbeat, people.* That’s not NY Times level editorializing. I’d imagine the editors at two bit Midwestern newspapers that dedicate 50% of their content to high school sports would balk at running a poem about fetal heartbeats in the letters to the editor section.
As Douthat is plugged directly into (though he pretends not to be) the anti-contraception, anti-sex, virulently anti-woman activist anti-choice community, his column is a regurgitation of the same talking points that Jill “Chicago hospitals deliver babies and then stab them in the head with scissors, I swear, I totally saw it, why would I lie just because I’m a wild-eyed ideologue nutbar?” Stanek is pushing: that the sadness and doubt felt by some of the young women indicates they should have been forced by law to have babies they didn’t want, that contraception is evil because people didn’t even consider fucking before it was invented, and that MTV is biased because they present facts and allow women to speak for themselves. He does not, sadly, engage in the conspiracy theory about how MTV was paid off by the shadowy condom industry with under the table payments to promote sex to people who would otherwise be perfectly happy playing pinochle, which was my favorite response to the “No Easy Decision” program, but he needed room for the fetal heartbeat sentimentality, and his particularly misogynist addition to the right wing talking points hastily thrown together when they realized silencing these women wasn’t an option.
But before I get to that, I want to point you to today’s column at RH Reality Check, where I respond to the anti-choicers Douthat is taking his talking points from, like the lazy fuck he is. I’m particularly annoyed at how anti-choicers, including Douthat, latch on to two of the women in the program’s feelings of sadness at having to choose abortion when they love babies. It’s mostly because antis are trying to deprive these women of their basic rights as citizens while pretending to be concerned, but their faux concern is exposed by the fact that they lie and misrepresent what was said. Markai’s distress was obviously due to the fact that her very recent childbirth made her quick to attach herself to the idea of another baby. How do I know this? Because that’s what she said. Antis are latching onto her getting angry with her boyfriend momentarily because he calls the embryo a “thing”, but what they neglect to report is that she says then that the “thing” could develop into a baby. But she doesn’t say that it’s already a baby; a distinction that is critical, particularly since they accuse Markai of being mentally ill when there is no indication from her behavior that she is suffering from any kind of trauma.
Anyway, read the rest of the column to get my take on the notion of wistfulness about the road not taken, and why using that as a weapon against legal abortion doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.
What I like is that while the talking points Douthat works off of highlight the importance of feigning concern for women to avoid accusations of misogyny just because you’re, you know, lying about what women say and trying to silence them, he can’t even bring himself to feign concern for more than a paragraph before he lapses into straight up demanding that women be reduced to breeding machines whose mental health is of no more consequence than the mental health of your xBox. We cannot afford to treat women as human beings when the supply of white infants on the market is so dangerously low!