Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon discusses exactly what kind of monster "pro-life" columnist Ross Douthat really is.  At the end of the day you get the strong impression that, like a lot of other "pro-life" assholes, his opposition to abortion and contraception are 100% about the annoying shortage of white babies available for adoption.  She begins with this snipped of Douthat's latest pro-forced-pregnancy screed OpEd in the New York Times (emphasis mine)

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Source: New York Times

You'll notice in the last line that while his piece is nominally about how awful abortion is, his emphasis here isn't about abortion at all.  By definition the decline of pregnancies "relinquished" for adoption at birth weren't terminated!

Amanda correctly hands Douthat the toilet paper he needs to wipe his mouth

Well, obviously, having your life plans to have a baby thwarted is a humiliation no Caucasian should ever have to suffer. Clearly, there is only one solution, which is to return to an era where being a sexually active, unmarried woman was de facto criminalized so that your labor could be forcibly extracted from you to benefit people who do a much better job than you of keeping up appearances.

There’s a lot of human rights violations that Douthat glossed over in his chillingly inhumane euphemistic phrasing “this gap used to be bridged by adoption”.  By “bridged by adoption”, what he means is young white women (and some young black women, though there was less demand for their babies, and subsequently less forcing them into maternity homes) who turned up pregnant were forced to give birth to babies and forced into maternity homes where they were restrained and often subject to torturous behavior so they couldn’t resist when their babies were snatched from them against their wills.  He’s right that Roe v. Wade had a lot to do with turning this around, and it’s not just because women had an option to abort instead.  It’s also because once it was enshrined in law that even pregnant women have rights, it became harder to justify the existence of maternity homes and coercing women to give up babies.

This is why the concern for women’s mental health is such obvious bullshit.  Anti-choicers who blather about “post-abortion syndrome” have exactly no problem with reinstating a situation where women are put through the very real and often lifelong trauma of having a baby taken from you against your will.

Source: Pandagon

Got that right!  Having been a sex-ed peer counselor as a teenager I know and am still friends with a number of people, mostly but not all women, who were involved in teen pregnancies that ended in two of the three cases that Douthat deplores and the one he extolls.  One or two women of the many who had abortions in their teens say they think about what might have been, though most don't.  The one or two women who kept their babies (which was extremely rare in those days) are pretty darn happy they did.

The ones who were forced by society in general and their parents in particular to "relinquish" the babies they give birth to?  30 and 40 years later most are still trying to find the children Douthat would have gleefully torn from their arms at birth and sold through and adoption agency to "nice white couples" like... himself and his wife.

Did I mention Douthat's a monster?  Did you notice I didn't say "I think he's a monster?"  He's just a monster.  An inhuman, unfeeling, heartless, sick, woman-hating, avaricious, predatory, and (despite his protestations of nominal Christianity) godless monster.

Because unless you're just evil then if you're going to work as tirelessly against contraception as Douthat and his coven do, and if you're genuinely interested in alternatives to pregnancy termination, then the biggest possible cause for celebration on the planet would be the increase in "unwed" mother's ability to keep and raise their own infants to adulthood.  And the way to do that, of course, is to alter society so that women in need can have the support they need early on, and the opportunities for education, for work, and for decent, equal wages for equal time worked, such that they... and often their equally "unwed" partners... can provide for their own children.  The big difference since the 1970s?  We've made changes to society.  And if major shitheads like Ross Douthat would stop working to actually thwart the process we could do even more.

To Douthat, though, and to far too many others of his festering ilk, a young woman selfishly raising her own children (surprisingly often in conjunction with her equally young partner, by the way) rather than "relinquishing" them to people like himself is a far larger tragedy than abortion.

Fuck him.  Him and the horse he rode up on.

And just to be clear, I'm not knocking adoption per se.  To name just one instance where I think adoption can work out well: a good person and a good friend I hardly see anymore adopted two genuinely wonderful children from a mom who really, seriously couldn't support them.  (Being a good person my friend keeps the birth mother as involved as she can safely allow.)

But here's the thing about that: the adoptions took place because the mother needed it, and her children needed it, not because the adopting family "needed" them or otherwise wanted to.

Douthat's case isn't about what children, or even "unwed" mothers need.  At all!  Notice how meticulously he parses the statistics of race in his lamentation.  There are, as we probably all know, entirely too many children who need... sometimes badly need adoption -- far more than the ostensible "demand" for adoptees.  The only problem... and for Douthat the only problem!... is that there aren't enough available white adoptees... born of "prime breeding stock" young, healthy, suburban teenageers from whom they can be forcibly taken away.  And sold.  Into the families of white-skinned but black-hearted fuckers like Douthat's.

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Oh yeah.  One more thing.  One possible area where Douthat and I might possibly intersect -- though I think saying "common ground" would be way too strong a term.  While Douthat's obviously 100% fine with families that force their younger members to throw their babies away into to the adoption industry's maw, in the past he's expressed concern that sometimes families, or partners, will pressure young women to have abortions they'd rather not have.  Since, unlike Douthat, I'm strongly pro-choice I agree that a pregnant woman's choice should be honored, deferred to, and, especially, supported. A woman who doesn't want to either terminate her pregnancy or surrender her baby shouldn't have to!

Sheesh!  It shouldn't be hard to get that across to someone with even a tiny little brain.  And Douthat doesn't have a tiny brain.  Quite the opposite in fact.  That something as simple as honoring choice should easily percolate but doesn't is further evidence of exactly what kind of monster he really is.

Update: See also Jill Filipovic's take.  Read the whole thing (the first paragraph's great.)  I especially liked this though: "It’s also absolutely true that birth control has decreased the pool of potentially adoptable babies. I suppose in Douthat’s world, that’s a bad thing too, since any control over your reproduction is suspect. But for most of us, being able to prevent pregnancies we don’t want is a net gain."

So this evening I caught maybe the last 15 seconds of a public-radio story having something to do with a 14-year-old girl and her newborn daughter both in child-protective custody and… someone with a male name — the baby’s father? Her father? — on the lam. So that’s, like, literally all I know about it.

Except for one more thing. The last line mentioned that couples were coming forward with offers to adopt the baby, as if it was a good thing.

And it might have been. The 14-year-old mother might be in trouble herself. She and her infant might be in custody because the infant had been in jeopardy. That’s one of the consequences of knowing only a fragment of what could be a far more complex story.

But knowing no more than I did, it struck me as odd that couples were stepping forward to adopt the infant but not his or her mother.

And, again, maybe if I’d heard the story that would have made perfect sense. The mother could be in trouble with the law in her own right, she may have been an unsuitable mother as well as an unsuitable age, her health might be compromised… who knows.

So I won’t comment on that particular case…

But I wonder…

There are so many other very young girls who become pregnant, and so often (assuming she’s been prohibited from terminating the pregnancy or chooses to remain pregnant of her own free will) the assumed best thing is for her to give her baby up to one of those couples who are always so quick to volunteer. And maybe that often is the best bet… maybe it’s just a coincidence that those who long-ago surrendered their children of teen pregnancy are uniformly more wistful, more regretful than those who terminated their pregnancies instead. Maybe so.

And I don’t know, maybe the 14-year-old in the story, the one with all the couples lining up to “take” her baby should it be offered to them… or if not her then other girls like her…

Golly, maybe it would be nice if a few couples stepped forward and offered to adopt them both! Because goodness knows if someone, even a child, goes to all the trouble, the risk, the labor of having a child of her own, then would it be too much to ask to give her a home to raise her child in? I’d imagine quite a few have needed it.

And, I don’t know, I guess I’m also imagining that couples who look forward to adopting an infant child might not find it so tough to adopting an infant grandchild, and her young mother, instead.

I wonder if anyone’s offered in this case? My partner and I already have our hands full, and I can’t say without waking her to ask whether she’d consider adopting both rather than splitting parent and child. But after those few seconds of airtime I have to admit I’d think seriously about it, and I think other couples might as well.

I just wonder if its come up before and if so how it’s worked.