In the left’s furor over a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court that would, if finalized, overturn Roe v. Wade and send abortion law back to states’ jurisdiction, it’s impossible not to notice how many men really, really don’t want to let abortion go.
I have sympathy for a naïve woman who’s been fed the lie that she’s trapped and abortion is the only way out. She’s wrong, of course, and still responsible for her act. But she’s often the victim of pressure and exploitation — if not from people around her, then certainly from the abortion industrial complex that profits from murdering children and carelessly scarring would-be mothers.
But I harbor no such sympathy for men who melt into panic at the idea that they could no longer pressure their girlfriends, wives, or daughters into killing their babies. There is no more blatant act of cowardice, nothing that flies so directly in the face of the most basic obligations of manhood, than a man who wants to have his way with a woman and then force her to shoulder all of the consequences.
This selfish attitude is part of why we as a society find rape so heinous. Only the cruelest of cowards would force his appetites on a woman, then slink away to leave her with the physical, emotional, and psychological burden of their actions. A man who impregnates a woman and then tries to force her to kill their child is, in some sense, doing the same thing — he’s leaving her with the physical consequences, the emotional trauma, and the psychological guilt of taking an innocent life, for his own convenience.
Abortion allows a man to shirk the basic responsibility of taking care of and providing for his child and the mother of his child. In some cases, a man may see it as his ticket out of being obligated to marry the woman with whom he’s conceived a life. It allows him to continue his behavior without fear of biological consequences.
That’s why it’s so infuriating — and telling — to see men rushing to keep women on the abortionist’s table and babies in the medical wastebasket.
CNN brought on an expert in such cowardly coercion to help lead its coverage after the court’s draft decision leaked. While Jeffrey Toobin earned infamy for playing with himself on camera, in 2009 he had a child with Casey Greenfield, his former colleague’s daughter. Toobin, who is married to a different woman, pressured Greenfield to abort the child and “reportedly even offer[ed] money to terminate the pregnancy.”
So of course Toobin was panicked at the idea that his ability to pressure his sexual partners into aborting his offspring might be eroded. “This is a constitutional earthquake if it stands,” he fretted, “and American life, not just American law, will be very different if this is the law of the land.”
But even men who, as far as we know, don’t have such intimate experience with such matters have been just as adamant about keeping state legislators from limiting or banning abortion.
ABC News’ senior national correspondent Terry Moran had an unhinged meltdown directed at a tactful and collected Mallory Carroll of the Susan B. Anthony List on Tuesday.
“Do you believe, if abortion is murder, women should be punished as criminals?” he asked just before his freakout.
When Carroll explained that abortion is “an exploitation of women” and “a way for men to cover up crimes of rape and infidelity and other sexual behavior,” Moran interrupted her with a nonsensical rant noting “Charlie Manson’s dad beat him” before accusing her of “infantilizing” women who are pressured into abortions.
Carroll highlighted that abortionists are the ones taking the child’s life, subjecting the mother to guilt and trauma, and profiting from it, but Moran continued his minutes-long breakdown by condescendingly claiming “The poor women can’t make up their own minds like adults, and should be coddled, but that’s, I guess that’s your position.” The whole exchange is worth watching — it’s even more awful and cringe-inducing than it sounds.
It’s really something to watch Moran browbeat a woman with disingenuous assumptions and patronizing interruptions, all supposedly in the name of women’s “rights.” He can’t stand an intelligent woman challenging his paradigm that women should shut up and kill their babies so men like him won’t be inconvenienced.
Instead, he willfully distorts her argument, snaps at her, talks down to her, and then has the audacity to present himself as being on the side of women. It’s a dead giveaway of his panic about men losing power to exploit women — if not exploiting them on a personal level, then at least exploiting their fears about the abortion debate for political gain.
Toobin and Moran aren’t the only ones making cowardly fools of themselves this week, either.
California Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell went into full conspiracy mode to preserve men’s ability to pressure women into abortions. “The Republicans won’t stop with banning abortion. They want to ban interracial marriage. Do you want to save that?” he asked on Twitter, ignoring the fact that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas is in just such a marriage, and potentially violating ethics laws with the tweet.
President Joe Biden, who claims to be a devout Catholic, is also fighting hard to keep women subjugated by the horrors of abortion, even pledging to use his administration to fight a potential Supreme Court reversal of Roe (though even he couldn’t help a verbal slip admitting that abortion takes the life of a child).
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the potential court decisions “abominable” in a joint statement with fellow Democrat and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, adding that it would “inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years — not just on women but on all Americans.”
The list of examples — from Bill Gates to Barstool’s Dave Portnoy — goes on. Why are all these men so obsessed with having women kill their babies and subjecting those women to a lifetime of trauma and guilt? We hardly have to wonder why Toobin wants to ensconce abortion. But why so many others, if not for similar reasons?
Responsibility for others is an intrinsic part of masculinity as God designed it. Forcing a woman to abort a child not only takes one life and ruins another, it rebels against the very essence of what a man is supposed to be.
It’s one of the most cowardly, evil, petulant, selfish, abusive, smarmy things a man could do — and defending a man’s license to do such a thing isn’t much better.
