Holding women responsible for their pregnancies.

     "If a woman chooses to have sexual intercourse with a man, is she responsible for the consequences? If a woman chooses to go into an unsafe location, is she responsible for the consequences?"

      Letter to the editor, Medford Oregon newspaper 

The abortion debate in America is only partially about abortion.  It is also about gender roles.

There is a principled view that the product of conception is a person, fully worthy of the respect and protections we give a person.  

We don't torture a person, nor take away a person's liberties without due process. We count them for census purposes, consider them citizens if they are born in the geographical boundaries of the country, and we don't allow them to be enslaved. Persons have rights.

Alabama said so, and did it with consistency and clarity. The person conceived by a rape or incest didn't do a crime, so should not suffer the death penalty via abortion. 

The abortion debate has a subtext, expressed brilliantly in the attached letter to the editor: women are the gatekeepers of sexual behavior.  

The letter doesn't absolve men, but it doesn't address them either. There is an assumption embedded here of a traditional view of gender roles, with men and women being fundamentally different and having different cultural roles. Men will be men. Men will get sex if they can because it is their nature. 

Therefore, women have a complementary nature and role. Women are the ones who say "no." 

They say it overtly by declining sex and they say it indirectly by avoiding situations where unwanted-in-hindsight sex might happen: unsafe locations, intoxication with alcohol, debilitating drugs. If a woman flirts with dangerous situations she is making her choice right then, and bears the responsibility.

Modern, educated women, like my college classmate Katha Pollitt, celebrate something hugely important to women of my generation, the achievement of full female personhood through the ability to control reproduction. Our generation saw the one-two tools of reliable contraception and abortion as a safety net in the event of the rare, but possible, mishap. She writes about the revolution in technology and law of the 1960s and 1970s, which empowered her and my contemporaries.

Click: The New Yorker

It changed the world for women, and therefore men. It changed the American economy, with women in the professions and workforce; it changed American demographics, with women delaying pregnancies; it reduced teen pregnancies; it reduced shotgun marriages. 

It made them persons, fully human.

The letter by McDermott reveals that the abortion debate is simultaneously--maybe primarily--about gender roles. It is a continuation of the observations this blog made yesterday, that Donald Trump located and energized cultural backlash against feminism and a woke ethic of gender equality. 

In the traditional view of men, Trump (and Bill Clinton before him) are just doing what men do, and what powerful men can get away with. If Monica Lewinsky were a "good girl" she wouldn't have flashed her panties and settled into giving him blow jobs, and same with Paula Jones before her. If Stormy Daniels had said no, she wouldn't have had reluctant sex with Trump, so he wouldn't have been in the position of paying for her silence.

Men are men. Women who put out are tramps.

Columnist Pollitt and letter-writing McDermott both envision empowered womanhood. Pollitt sees empowerment in the ability to achieve personal and professional personhood. Pollitt and her peers operate at the highest levels of American civic and economic life. McDermott sees women as empowered in their roles as the moral gatekeeper, with the power to be good, to be careful, to navigate a world in which men will be men, but women have the power to say no.

In the mores and laws written in the urban, secular, HR-compliant world of coastal elites, the cultural battle is well won. Of course Pollitt is right, of course men have a duty to act with respect, of course sexual harassment is wrong, of course the sexes should be treated equally, because they are in fact equal.

In the traditional, faith-centered, world, away from HR departments and The New Yorker readers, there is a different assumption. Social tradition and the Bible tell the story: strong men lead and desire sex, and good girls say no until safely and respectfully married.

Democrats in their bubble under-estimate how many people there are who understand the world the way McDermott does, but those women vote as well as write letters to the editor. A majority of white women voted for Trump and not Hillary, and a greater majority of married white women did, and an even higher majority of married white evangelical Christian women did. 

This was all immediately after revealing the Access Hollywood recording. Trump: "I did try and fuck her. She was married. She's now got the big phony tits and everything."

Trump voters were shocked by the crudeness, but not by the reality of his behavior. They heard this then voted for him. Men are men.