Of all the sad and pitiable political creatures in the modern United States, few are as strikingly pathetic as Abortion Man, the adult male who has made abortion rights a central part of his own odd identity. If you can spare any pity, pity him right about now.
You know Abortion Man: He styles himself a "feminist," he is vociferously committed to what he very delicately calls "the right to choose," he uses the phrase "clump of cells" and "blob of tissue" at least once every nine minutes, he is more in favor of abortion rights than many hardline NARAL staffers, and he is utterly convinced that his support for abortion—for the killing of unborn, innocent human beings—marks him as a more sensitive, thoughtful, and feeling individual.
He is also weirdly convinced that men in general should have absolutely no thoughts, feelings or comments about abortion whatsoever (except, presumably, the kind of obsequious deference to abortion rights that he himself so fully embodies).
Abortion Man is having a bad week right about now; the news of Roe v. Wade's potential looming destruction has hit him hard. There are few things that make Abortion Man as angry as the thought of it being potentially illegal to kill an unborn human being.
For Abortion Man, the prerogative of preborn infanticide is an indispensable part of a civilized society. He fears that its abrogation will usher in a lawless anarchic hellscape in which we do not kill nearly a million innocent human beings every single year.
You can grasp, sort of, the existential distress that Abortion Man is feeling right now. If abortion perverts and destroys a mother's natural instinct toward growing, birthing and loving her child, it likewise annihilates the impulses of protectiveness and care to which men are naturally ordered.
We know by instinctual feeling that the best men are those who defend and protect those weaker than them; nobody, not even the most hardcore fourth-wave feminist, wants to live in a society where men as a rule embrace violence against helpless innocents.
But of course that is the society we are making with abortion; it is the society of the Abortion Man.
So the anger and misery that Abortion Man is feeling right now is understandable. He has based most of his personality around a set of horror-show ideals that are, at present, under grave threat. If the tide truly does turn against abortion, he'll no longer be an enlightened, considerate, woman-supporting he/him activist. He'll just be a dude who wants to kill babies.
He doesn't want to face that. As the gnomic scientist Engywook said in The Neverending Story, "Confronted with their true selves, most men run away screaming."
The job for pro-lifers in a post-Wade world, then, will not simply be to work at dismantling abortion at the state level; it will also be to work at changing the hearts and minds of some of the most loathsome citizens among us, chief among them Abortion Man. Roe's destruction is welcome news. And yet there is still so much work to be done.
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