The Most Radical Argument against Abortion

It's time to make a case against the worldview that makes abortion seem necessary.

This update comes to you from Hillsdale, Michigan, where I’m spending a couple of weeks as Hillsdale College’s fall semester Pulliam Fellow, teaching a one-credit class on journalism and giving a talk at the end of my stay. They’ve asked me to talk about — surprise, surprise! — the future of the pro-life movement and abortion politics after Dobbs. I think the talk will be recorded, so I’ll share the link in my next newsletter so you can watch it after the fact if you’re interested.

My remarks will be along the lines of the talk I gave for students at the University of Notre Dame about ten days ago, sponsored by ND Right to Life, as well as the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture (a real group effort!). There was great turnout, and students asked some really thoughtful and challenging questions. I got the sense that pro-life students at ND are really grappling with what the end of Roe means for their advocacy and the pro-life cause, as we all should be.

My talk at ND focused a bit on my new book, but I also covered some ground that I don’t think pro-lifers have been considering much at all in recent months. The title was “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Our Politics and Disadvantages Women.” In the second chapter of Tearing Us Apart, Ryan and I write about how legal abortion has harmed American women, not only those who suffer after having chosen abortion but also those who have never had an abortion at all.

Part of what we were trying to get at is the way in which the widespread societal acceptance of abortion has contributed to a culture that takes the male body and the male mode of being human as the norm. In this worldview — strangely enough, a worldview set in motion by feminists — the female mode of embodiment is seen as somehow deficient, because it entails childbearing and childrearing. Inherent in the claim that abortion should be permissible is the idea that women need abortion, that there’s something dysfunctional about pregnancy and therefore about the female body, something that requires a solution, at least some of the time.

This thinking explains why, in the wake of Dobbs, my social media feed was full of my peers — privileged young women with every advantage in the world — lamenting how the Court’s decision meant that American women now have fewer rights than men and claiming that the justices had rendered women second-class citizens or less than human by taking away the right to abortion.

There are plenty of issues with this way of thinking, not least of which is the mistaken notion that there was ever a constitutional right to abortion. But underlying these sentiments is a very sincere fear that, in a world without abortion, women will be disadvantaged or unequally burdened by the fact of pregnancy. It’s this fear that pro-lifers have to learn how to respond to if we ever want to fully rebut the argument for abortion.

Pro-abortion feminists, like most of us, are aware of a couple basic facts: Sex often leads to pregnancy, and, when it does, women are the ones who get pregnant. (It’s true, of course, that some of our fellow citizens no longer assent to either of these facts, but we’ll set those folks aside for the time being.) We live in a culture that views uncommitted and “consequence free” sex as an essential aspect of human fulfillment. Within this context, the reality of pregnancy does indeed put women at a distinct disadvantage. Men, as a result of their basic biology, have the ability to simply walk away from sex in a way that women can’t. This is why both contraception and abortion are so deeply entangled in the Sexual Revolution; technology that allows women either to avoid pregnancy or to dispatch with an unborn child is indispensable if we believe that a person can’t be fully human or fully free and fulfilled without access to “no strings attached” sex.

So what does all of this mean for pro-lifers? It means that our job is bigger than simply making the argument against abortion, although doing so is essential. We also have to become comfortable making the case against the entire Sexual Revolution worldview, within which abortion will always seem necessary. And we have to make a related, positive case for a culture that values sex between committed (ideally married) men and women who commit first to each other and then to any children who come into the world as a result of their union.

What I’ve Been Writing

One of my recent columns at National Review was an interview with the founder of the Hallow app, which aims to help users learn how to pray. You can subscribe to the app for free, but there’s also a paid tier with more in-depth content. The app’s founder, Alex Jones (no relation to the Alex Jones of InfoWars fame), has had a really interesting personal journey, which led directly to the creation of Hallow. He’s a Notre Dame grad who fell away from his Catholic faith in high school and college. It was through his exploration of secular meditation that he found his way to the Catholic prayer tradition and then back into the practice of his faith. He had some great insights to share about the app, which I highly recommend.

I also have a column responding to some of my NR colleagues who argue that Congress has no constitutional role in limiting abortion. I’ll write about this topic in more depth here in the future, but my column takes the view that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause gives Congress grounds to protect unborn human beings. I’ll also recommend an article by my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on the same topic (and taking the same view).

Where I’ve Been

It’s been a midwestern sort of month, first in the great state of Indiana and now in Michigan. It’s a great time of year to travel so as to escape DC’s third round of Indian summer. My hope is that, by the time I’m home, it’ll actually be autumn, but that’s never really guaranteed until mid October.

One of the highlights of my trip to Notre Dame, in addition to giving my talk and seeing old friends, was a workshop I hosted for student writers on campus, many of whom write for the Irish Rover independent newspaper. Considering how much time I spent working on the Rover in undergrad (time spent not working on my class work…), it was great to see the paper in the hands of talented students who seem to care a lot about Notre Dame and its future. For any of my readers concerned about ND’s Catholic identity, the paper is well worth a subscription.

What I’ve Been Reading

As part of my journalism class, I’m having students read two indispensable pieces of writing, and I’m getting the chance to reread both along with them. The first is the essay “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell, essential reading for anyone who loves reading, writing, or politics. I somehow graduated from Notre Dame without ever having read it, and I’m now of the opinion that no one should be allowed to graduate high school, much less college, without studying it at least once.

The second essay is this 2016 piece by Andrew Sullivan, titled “I Used to Be a Human Being,” about his experience of addiction to digital technology and other forms of constant noise. I’m curious to see how my students will react to it. I know that when I first read it — after seeing it mentioned in Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism — it changed my thinking about all sorts of things, especially my relationship with the ever-present Apple rectangle.