Abortion is sexist. This is so obvious that it is a little embarrassing to say out loud. The possibility of abortion has allowed for a great “reaching in” of almost every form of prototypical male coercion, precisely at the moment in which a woman is most obviously powerful in her difference as mother—obliging, requiring, and enforcing the transformation of all men within her vicinity into servants.
For there are two ways of making a free man give up his space: enslave him or introduce a mother into it. In this distinction is all of political philosophy, but let us stick with the obvious: Human custom dictates that the presence of pregnancy and motherhood shall motivate and coerce the male frame into opening doors, moving chairs, giving up space, giving more money, excusing mistakes, dispensing with laws, suppressing comments, driving absurd distances to procure cheeseburgers, and otherwise working—however poorly and begrudgingly—to reshape his existence into one of service and self-gift rather than accumulation and self-interest. Men who don’t do this suck, and suck obviously. They are cowards. Abortion offers them a means of escape from the power of women; a means of retaining their sovereign world; a means of avoiding that good witch Obligation, whose charm turns every stronghold of power to acts of service.
Of course, the fact of abortion has its own magic, though it is a black magic: it turns every pregnancy into a choice; into an object of an isolated individual’s pursuit of self-interest. This commodification of the fruit of the womb erodes those extravagant norms of gift and service that seem to leap up from the male conscience to the aid of the pregnant: “You chose to keep the baby, so why should I give up my seat for you? I might give up my seat for someone without legs—but if I found out he chose to cut them off? Get real, preggers.”
Few people are so stupid. The goodness and holiness of pregnancy is a bulwark. We try to race abortion to its logical conclusion, but always end up stumbling before the finish line, charmed into referring to fetuses as “babies,” saying “congratulations,” accidentally smiling at women who, after all, may only be containing a brief and unchosen “situation” scheduled for termination—and this same blessed inconsistency is apparent in the continued fact of male subservience towards pregnant women.
It is true that there are wicked men for whom no sign of weakness presents itself as a call upon their strength. It is true that the fairer sex contains some sellouts; girl bosses who assert their independence by parroting the propaganda of their actual bosses, rejecting the power of pregnancy to please the powers of the world. For these, male solicitude feels malicious, an insinuation that pregnancy is not the neutral choice of a rational actor, worthy of the same indifference we grant to every other lifestyle choice, but a role and a good common to all. But these are rare birds, squawking against a culture of human goodness which, in the main, remains baffled by their noise. By and large, people’s actual reaction to the pregnant woman is joy and care, and it is only situationally (and with difficulty) that they apply the logic of abortion, painstakingly relating to the woman as an individual with rights rather than as a mother with a meaning.
In the real world, women bend male strength towards their needs, even as the child bends female strength towards its own. This is why men are so awkward around pregnant women; why they feel the need to assert themselves with some horrible cliché: “should you be doing that?” “You must be due any time now!” etc. Forgive them—they are coping with their own undoing. This transformation of strength into service is the secret of the family, a secret the Church would tell to the whole world, if they ever had the ears to hear it. Within the family, weakness is strength.
We might, in a fit of Greco-Roman feeling, emblazon the glories of the adult male form over and against the pathetic imperfection of the newborn. Still, it is the wail of the newborn that obliges and moves the adult male frame—to hold, to help, and to spoon-feed little balls of mashed potato. We may, in a spasm of traditionalism, speak sternly of the decisive, arbitrary power of the father as the Head of the Family. Still, there is no healthy family for whom that theoretical power is not actually bent towards pleasing the wife, raising the perennially comic question: who's really in charge around here? And this subordination of male strength into service is most accentuated when the strength of the woman is itself sapped and subordinated into serving the weakness of the infant in pregnancy, birth, and child-raising.
The scandal of the family is that the rear-end of the child has more de facto power to coerce the bodies of the strong than the supreme reason of the father. All philosophies of strength (be they Greek, Nietzschean, or merely liberal) can be explained by the effort to avoid the diaper. But that we are yet Christian is evident in this: the weight of social opprobrium still falls heaviest on those who would accumulate strength rather than serve weakness. Let adults serve each other instead of children, there you will find, called down like an avenging angel, the full force of the law—of positive statutes here and there, but more importantly, the constraining and coercing law of shame. For what scumbag hurts children? What bastard leaves them? What monster neglects to use what strength he has for their sake?
Abortion is defended as giving women the status of equality with men. One of the opinions dissenting from Roe v. Wade’s overturn put it this way: “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” Now this is really quite something; really, a bald-faced assent, courtesy of the dissent, to the Ancient notion of woman as a defective male. For if women are those creatures who need abortion to be equal to men, then female freedom is categorically distinct from male freedom, woman’s citizenship something different than man’s, and their dignity not quite our dignity.
The difference is this: women get their dignity as citizens contingent on the purchase of a “surgical operation,” while men get their own from God. The dissent characterizes the female sex as the sicker sex, naturally defective vis a vis the male, and so in need of augmentation—or subtraction, as the case may be—in order to claim by artifice what belongs to men by nature. But this is simply the definition of the slave: the one who must buy the freedom that the master has for free. The dissent characterizes women as unfinished and incomplete human beings who must achieve equality by offering and tribute. With a cool glance towards All of Human History, they complain that “without the ability to decide whether and when to have children, women could not—in the way men took for granted—determine how they would live their lives, and how they would contribute to the society around them.” Obviously, this means that without abortion women were slaves, that only with abortion can a woman determine her own life—and so woman is defined as being naturally dependent, sick, needy, and only lately saved by a technology developed, perfected, and largely provided by men.
But there is a manner in which the dissent is quite correct: the availability of abortion does tend to render women equal to men, not because it lifts the defective non-male into the heady heights of masculine citizenry, but by way of demotion. For, prior to the possibility of abortion, women are obviously unequal to men by way of superiority. Mothers are more important than us, and it is this recognition that motivates and even coerces the male into servitude.
It’s as if a girl who made her living assembling flip-flops were suddenly to be acclaimed Queen, with all the sufferings and joys of rule, and with the throng wild and willing to serve her every command. But somewhere between the apse and the altar, her employer catches her hand, and advises her to reject the honor as it would undoubtedly hamper her career. Indeed, he had evidence of the wage gap such a decision would produce between her and her male counterparts.
It’s a scam, whereby career and wage are presented as the only forms of power that matter, forcing women to compete in “the only game in town”—which they always happen to lose. It’s the sort of point one would expect from Foucault: power is not some monolithic entity that stems from either salary, office, or the relative size of one’s bicep. Social power and capacity are rich, interwoven webs, and one can earn money, and even a lot of money, and still never know what it is like to wield the power and privilege of a parent. The intentionally childless know this and weep. You can sacrifice every waking hour to become a CEO, to move such things as are moved by money, still, it’s the woman with the baby inside who moves such things as are moved by virtue, obligation, and love. Goons from the World Economic Forum point to the loss of wages mothers can expect vis-à-vis women who remain childless, as if women, by becoming mothers, do not oblige all wealth and all politics to flow towards them as so many servants. Mothers are unequally superior citizens: abortion works to equalize them.
Abortion degrades and reduces the power and freedom of women, not because pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing are some neato femme-powers to which women would otherwise have unequivocal access, but precisely because pregnancy is an indispensable weakness—and within Christian societies, weakness is strength, for it demands and obliges the strength of the strong to move on its behalf. Once Christianity is stubbed out like the West’s last cigarette, then weakness will be weakness, and life as a woman will be precisely what the Greek philosophers believed it to be—passive, apolitical, deficient, and worthy of being classified alongside the life of children and slaves. People are puzzled as to why Dobbs, our recent pro-life victory, was almost entirely arranged by the Catholic Church in America. It’s an honor we’ll accept and a puzzle which isn’t so very hard to solve: only the Church understands abortion as child-sacrifice, the ultimate act of sexism, which fundamentally and actually reverses the subordination of power prefigured in the human family, demanded by the Law and the Prophets, achieved by Jesus Christ, and spread throughout the world by his Church.