Two Facts

[Trigger warning for discussion of adoption.]

1. The New York Times is still paying Ross Douthat to peddle conservative dogma in the guise of milquetoast garbage columns.

2. Douthat's primary audience is comprised of rocks, lamps, and other inanimate objects, because his garbage arguments don't pass even the most cursory scrutiny by sentient beings.

Example One:

[I]t was a victory for realism, at least, when MTV decided to supplement its hit reality shows "16 and Pregnant" and "Teen Mom" with last week's special, "No Easy Decision," which followed Markai Durham, a teen mother who got pregnant a second time and chose abortion.

MTV being MTV, the special's attitude was resolutely pro-choice.

Now, I actually watched "No Easy Decision," and to assert that it was "resolutely pro-choice" is mendacious to the point of hilarity. Here are just some of the "resolutely pro-choice" moments to which viewers were witness: Durham sobbing while speaking to someone at the abortion clinic on the phone; Durham yelling at her boyfriend for referring to the embryo as a "thing" because it could become a baby like the one they already have; Durham talking about needing counseling following the abortion; another woman who had an abortion saying she had no regrets or guilt, then later bursting into tears while talking about her sister's son, born around the time of her abortion.

Granted, I'm just a cold-hearted steampunk abortion robot with a vast empty echo of tin where my soul should be, but I would argue that for anything to be described as "resolutely pro-choice," it has to show at least one of the millions of women for whom abortion was not a sorrowful choice, so it doesn't play into the resolutely anti-choice narrative that all women who have abortions are haunted by their decision. This is not the case.

Example Two:

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.

Leave it to a privileged conservative dude to talk about "tragedy" being bridged by adoption, carelessly eliding, willfully or ignorantly, the frequent tragedy of being a birth mother.

He complains that people on MTV's special "swaddle abortion in euphemism," but he, like so many other good "pro-lifers," renders birth mothers invisible, casually speaking about "lives that might have been welcomed into families [but were] cut short in utero instead," as if those hypothetical lives are born in vacuums, as if euphemizing a medical procedure is somehow more distasteful than tacitly reducing actual women to incubators for privileged families who want babies, preferably white ones.

It's feminists, pro-choicers, who are supposed to be the cold-hearted sociopaths who don't respect human life, but Douthat's column is, at its essence, little more than the bitter complaint of a market-revering conservative that legal abortion interferes with what ought to be a splendid business arrangement: There are women who can have babies they don't want, and women who want babies they can't have.

And like all good conservatives, who seek to deny opportunities to unprivileged people so that privileged people can get what they want (like soldiers to fight their wars, and maids to clean their toilets), Douthat imagines that if it weren't for Roe, and the opportunity it provides, everyone could be happy.

Where "everyone" equals People Like Him.