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."

Jodi Jacobson of RHRealityCheck.org says

In a long night of bad news for the pro-choice community and for basically every other sector of the larger progressive movement, there was at least one important victory.

[Colorado] Amendment 62, the so-called “personhood” amendment, went down to defeat by a large margin—72 percent voting against to 28 percent voting as of this writing. 

This is the second time it has been defeated.

Source: RHRealityCheck.org.

Academic political scientists evidently talk passionately about how election swings tend to be determined by economic conditions rather than conventional liberal/conservative disputes. Of course being academics only other academics ever hear about them because all their (almost exclusively government-funded) work is sequestered behind extortionate commercial journal paywalls. But never the less they evidently say this with some considerable unity and not very much dissent.

If I wanted to believe them (I dunno, not being an academic of course I can’t afford to review the relevant articles) I’d say a 72% defeat of a “pro-life” bill in the midst of a nominally conservative sweep might be one way to independently verify the assertion.

Small consolation considering just how badly economic conditions suck. (And even less consolation that it’s now almost certainly going to suck even worse two years from now when these asshats will get their turn again.) And no consolation at all considering the new majority’s vicious determination to repeal the Sermon on the Mount, which has served as the blueprint for progressive social policy for most of the last hundred years. But still something to think about.

After dismissing the to main arguments for prosecuting abortion providers but not the women who hire them as sexist claptrap Scott Lemieux of the Center for American Progress’s TAPPED wades into the third in a way that resonates with my own memories of the days before abortion became legal (emphasis mine)

So this leaves us with the pragmatic justifications — essentially, “we would like to punish women, but we can’t because it’s impolitic.” Aside from undermining the case for anti-abortion laws, the problem with this pragmatism is that we need to go further. How effective are laws banning abortion in conditions where most people think women shouldn’t be subject to any punishment for obtaining an abortion? The answer is, “not very.” As Sunday’s episode of Mad Men usefully reminded us, plenty of safe, elective abortions were preformed in hospitals even when it was illegal for doctors to perform them. The effect of criminalizing abortion is not to stop women from obtaining abortions so much as to force those without the right social connections into the black market. So bans on abortion aren’t very good ways of lowering abortion rates, although they do make abortion much less safe for less affluent women. How this can be a good thing is, to put it mildly, unclear.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. I’m old enough to have been a newsboy going room to room in a local hospital back in the days before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. And, yeah, it’s funny how often “good girls” from nicer neighborhoods could be found in the ob/gyn wing recovering from their “appendectomies.”

The appendectomy rate for girls of less fortunate means was considerably closer to their demographic averages. As were their rates of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies.

This is why, of course, the affluent can remain sanguine about restrictions on abortion in their states and regions: such restrictions have never applied to them. They may choose not to take advantage of the… quiet options available to them. And some may not. But they all know it will always be there for them.

Harriet J of Fugitivus works in a municipal court building somewhere. Part of her job involves handling paperwork for parental-notification waivers for minors.

Turns out 90% of such cases don’t involve evading the notice of stereotypical wrathful, dictatorial, possibly Biblically Patriarchal fathers or mothers. Instead 90% of such cases involve what she calls “DMIAs” or biological “Dad’s Missing in Action.”

Thanks to combinations of extreme caution, extreme ass covering, and well-justified concern that a too-broad ruling at the municipal level could get turned into adverse case law on appeal… and/or adverse legislative “clarification,” it turns out that as long as he’s not outright dead it can be pretty difficult to get waivers for absent biological fathers who have been sent consent forms but have never getting around to signing and returning them.

So here’s Harriet J’s semi-tongue-in-cheek* counterproposal for dealing with this.

Here is my suggestion on DMIA*: Since we’ve established, via parental notification and consent laws, that the state has a vested and apparently legally legitimate interest in mandatorily enforcing parent-child communication, let’s have this go the other way. Let’s pass a law that says a parent must communicate with their child once a month to maintain the right to parent. This communication must be legally documented, via a written statement that must be notarized. The notarization will require both a legal ID and a birth certificate. If a parent fails to document their monthly communication with their child, their parenting rights are automatically terminated. A parent can attempt to bypass the communication law by seeing a judge and explaining their circumstances, if a judge is available anywhere in the state to hear the plea. If the judge denies their bypass, they can appeal, but there are no lawyers in the state that is trained and/or will involve themselves in such a case, because of the publicity.

She said it here.

What’s not so funny about her proposal is that it accurately mimics the out of control hoops that minors and their remaining parents have to jump through to get notification waivers. Not to mention the small numbers of minors who’s parents really might go Old Testament on them if they found out their daughters were seeking to terminate an unannounced pregnancy.

* In a footnote of her own she clearly explains why, barbed humor not withstanding, she does not, in fact, believe there’s a legitimate government interest in legally enforcing child-parent communications. —fl