Why Roe Will Fall And Obergefell Won't
The case for returning the abortion question to politics
There is no question, it seems to me, that abortion is an issue where the burden on women vastly outweighs the burden on men. Up to nine months of carrying and then caring for an infant has no male equivalent. The intervention inside a person’s body is also entirely one-sided. Women alone face this restriction on their control of their own physical personhood. If they do not have control over that, with respect to both men and government, what does having (habeas) a body (corpus) ultimately mean?
The question I’ve often pondered, however, is whether that makes abortion a “women’s issue,” as it has been framed by the pro-choice movement for decades.
If you believe that a fetus is the moral equivalent of a human person, and that a fetus can be male or female, then abortion obviously affects everyone who was once a fetus. That makes it more than a “women’s issue” for many people. Equally, if you believe that biological sex doesn’t exist, and that the fetus cannot therefore be either male or female (the current woke position), then the question also affects everyone.
It’s messier still because no abortion can take place without a male somehow being responsible at some point (I still hold the now-cancellable idea that you need sperm to make babies). And we obviously don’t restrict the franchise to women when it comes to this or any question. In a democracy, majorities of both sexes rule. And it is hard to argue that women are a minority, with full minority rights, when by definition, they’re actually a tiny majority (50.8 percent).
But the most salient evidence that abortion cannot be simply defined as a “women’s” issue is that there is absolutely no consensus among American women about it. Check out the long-term Gallup analysis of views on this question. It shows that a remarkably steady one-fifth of American women want all abortion banned by law. And that proportion has barely budged in 50 years. The other trend-lines in opinion are not quite as stable, but still relatively consistent. Over nearly half a century, the proportion of women who want some legal restrictions on abortion has gyrated between 45 and 63 percent. And the proportion favoring the full-on pro-choice position has wavered between 22 and 36 percent.
So what is routinely presented in the MSM as the women’s position on abortion applies in fact to only around a quarter to a third of women. (The same paradox applies to events like The Women’s March, which coopts all women for the causes supported only by liberal and lefty women.) It turns out that many more of us belong to the deeply conflicted middle than you’d ever surmise from the public debate.
Do women favor legal abortion more than men? Yes — but not by much. The trend-lines look pretty similar over time between the two sexes, with marginally more men favoring some restrictions, and marginally fewer supporting no restrictions at all. How big is the gender gap? Well, it’s not appreciably bigger than those that Gallup records for the validity of same-sex marriage, for example. The cross-tabs from 2021’s Gallup poll show 73 percent support for marriage equality among women and 67 percent among men. And it would be weird to think of marriage equality as a “women’s” issue.
So abortion is not exclusively a women’s issue; and it isn’t a minority rights issue either. But the comparison with marriage equality tells you a great deal more. In the last 50 years, in stark contrast with abortion, the public’s view of marriage for gays has been transformed. In 1975, when the Gallup abortion polls began in the wake of Roe, the gay marriage question was so unthinkable it wasn’t even asked. The first poll on the question — in 1996 — shows just 27 percent support. But by 2021, that’s 70 percent. Compare that with support for fully legal abortion-on-demand: in 1975, it was 22 percent; in 2021, it was 32 percent (but it was down at 25 percent in 2019). One issue has provoked a seismic change of hearts and minds in both parties; the other hasn’t.
Why the underlying substantive difference? Here we have two critical social issues, both decided by the Supreme Court. Both were very influenced by religious views; both defined cultural polarization at one point; both have been used as wedge issues by both sides; and both are tied to questions of unalienable identity, womanhood and homosexuality. So why such disparate outcomes?
First, timing. In Roe, the Court tried to jumpstart a consensus and failed to secure it, with public opinion very similar now to where it was half a century ago. In Obergefell, the Court waited until there was majority support, which arrived, according to Gallup, in 2011, and the Court then validated a still-growing societal consensus four years later.
Second, the unique gravity of abortion. It’s an issue, to many, of literal life and death, and of the ultimately unknowable question of when a human being’s life begins. For many, a wrong answer to this question can result in mass killing. It’s also an issue that affects women far more than men — and the right to one’s own body is about as basic as you can get. Marriage equality, in contrast, contains nothing close to that profundity. No one’s life is at stake. No one’s bodily autonomy is either. And when an issue is as profound as death, when it directly affects a human body, and when it does not concern an easily-outvoted minority, imposing a one-size-fits-all national policy by judicial fiat is doomed to failure … if it cannot, over time, generate sufficient public support.
And it hasn’t. That’s why abortion in all likelihood is headed back to the democratic arena, where it exists in most Western countries. Because it never should have been excluded from it in the first place. Again, it’s not exclusively a women’s issue. It’s not a minority rights issue. There is no national consensus — and none is on the horizon. It’s a moral-political issue, and a deeply complex and difficult one. No answer will satisfy everyone; but some kind of answer can and must be worked out. And if we cannot let liberal democracy work on that kind of issue, and come up with some kind of state-by-state compromise, we’ve essentially given up on liberal democracy itself.
I guess we’re about to see if it really has gone extinct.
The Tao Of The Beatles
The thrill of Peter Jackson’s epic documentary of the making of the Beatles’ last live performance is that it demystifies something almost never shown in public: how a song comes to be. There are many other ways to appreciate the film — the way in which it gives Paul a chance not merely to tell but to show his centrality to the group; the cocky, carefree geniality of the lads during the tensest of times; the random befuddlement of Peter Sellers; or the role Enoch Powell (!) nearly played in a Beatles’ song. And of course the film makes you want to fall in love with Yoko Ono all over again.
But it’s watching the second-by-second, moment-to-moment emergence of “Get Back” (see clip above) or “The Long and Winding Road” that rivets you to the spot.
This is the holiest of holies — the ineffable mystery behind all great works of art — exposed. And it feels almost sacrilegious to be there. And because this music has penetrated so many of our souls and lives, including my own — shaped us, formed us, directed us — the moments of improvisatory creation seem almost miraculous as you witness them, interventions of the future into the past. And so, I confess, the first time I heard the melody of “Let It Be” rippling with no lyrics through McCartney’s piano riffing, I found myself almost in tears. Where on earth did that come from?
And the answer, if there is one, is not because of genius. Or at least not solely so. It comes from and through practice, repetition, small experiment after small experiment, one shift leading to others, slowly cascading into something new and more coherent, then repeated, again and again, until another intimation unfolds itself.
And this improvisation is already at the end of a long marination in the language and grammar of music, of a mastery of instruments, and then filtered through hours and hours of living and breathing and performing together until something somehow emerges. Suddenly or very, very slowly, unpredictable, yet never out of context, the lyrics chasing the melody chasing the lyrics, with sudden flashes of insight and nuance, until you have something new and indelibly planted in the souls of generations. It almost seems random at times: “Just say whatever comes into your head each time: ‘Attracts me like a cauliflower,’ until you get the word,” John Lennon advised George Harrison when he was writing “Something.”
A song is not created in the head and then applied to paper and instrument; it is never that abstract. It is always the fruit of mysterious praxis. “What the poet says and what he wants to say are not two things,” as Oakeshott wrote. “Nothing exists in advance of the poem itself, except perhaps the poetic passion.” Replace poem with song and musician for poet, and the point is close to proven in this doc. Something somewhere in there is beyond intellectualizing — either in its creation or reception. It’s linked to what is also irreplaceable in life: the knowledge that inheres in doing, in skills, in experience, in living, in leaving books and ideas behind and creating something out of doing something.
I’ve understood this concept before. The distinction between practical and abstract reasoning is, in my view, the core principle of philosophical conservatism. But watching it in front of my very eyes in the act of artistic creation is something else. Peter Jackson has somehow captured something profound that probably cannot and shouldn’t ever be fully captured.
And so you watch. And witness.
New On The Dishcast: The Femsplainers + Frum!
I’ve been meaning to invite Christina Sommers and Danielle Crittenden on the pod since they first had me on theirs, Femsplainers, two years ago. This week we talked about men and women, trans and cis, gay and straight, and they drank rosé and I smoked half a joint, as we did on their pod. For two clips of our conversation — on whether more women staying home during Covid was a good thing, and on how gender nonconformity is often a source of strength — head over to our YouTube page. Listen to the whole episode here.
That link to the pod page also presents a bunch of reader dissents over my views on the Steele Dossier (and even more dissents are below, on this page). Speaking of Russiagate, at the last minute we invited Danielle’s husband, David Frum, to join the Femsplainers episode, because we both wanted to hash out our latest differences over the Trump-Russia media coverage. I think David and I made some progress in finessing where we differ, and why. But you be the judge. (Things got a bit heated is the video clip we embedded on the pod page.)
“There Is No More Time To Reform France”
France has always had a penchant for reactionism. The country of De Maistre and Maurras is rather easily confused with that of Michel Houellebecq and Éric Zemmour. I embedded Zemmour’s full campaign ad above simply to show how potent reactionary feelings can be in politics, and how foolish it is to ignore them.
I don’t mean that we should simply redouble our energies in decrying reactionism, and its followers, however satisfying some of that may be. I mean it’s important to better understand just how unprecedented the experiment in multiracial, multicultural post-national politics of the last half century has been in terms of the pace of its cultural, demographic, technological, and economic change. And to accept that it is perfectly understandable that a reaction would take place. The key for sane liberals and conservatives is to reach out to these voters, to respond to practical needs but also to cultural loss — rather than simply to demonize them, or leave their feelings to be exploited by the far right.
But see how Zemmour touches on all the themes: replacement, patriotism, elites, nationhood. Notice how he starts the speech eyes down and slowly emerges from this pseudo-scholarly pose to look you straight in the eye. Notice the emblems of Frenchness. And don’t underestimate the potency of this kind of message on this side of the Atlantic: “There is no more time to reform America — but there is time to save her.”
The View From Your Window
Nantucket, Massachusetts, 12 pm
Money Quotes For The Week
“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into a treatment program, who is going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach,” - Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm in 2007. His low-bail policy played a role in the Waukesha parade massacre that killed six and injured 62.
“This was an attempted modern day lynching,” - Kamala Harris, former prosecutor, on the Jussie Smollett case, in 2019.
“Never fight a land war in Asia, and never pick a historiographical fight with Trostkyists,” - Park MacDougald, pointing to the latest pwnage of the 1619 Project by the World Socialist Web Site.
“Dislike meritocracy? Consider the time-honored alternatives: nepotism, patronage, cronyism, inheritance, racial and ethnic discrimination,” - Steven Pinker.
“In TV interviews last year, Trump implied that Gold Star families had infected him with COVID at a reception on Sept. 27. We now know that Trump, as he delivered that smear, was aware that he had tested positive on Sept. 26. His depravity is bottomless,” - Will Saletan.
“Trump can run as the president who finally appointed enough conservative justices to overturn Roe. Nobody’s beating him in a primary,” - Dave Weigel.
The View From Your Window
Brooklyn, New York, 4 pm
Dissents Of The Week: The Steele Dossier As Straw Man?
Many readers are pouncing on my latest column, “It Wasn’t A Hoax. It Was Media Overkill.” The first:
Now, I will grant there was some overkill related to the Russia investigation, recognized both in retrospect and at the time. But with the dossier, in every piece I recall reading, the media stated explicitly that it was all unverified information, with later caveats that some items were found false. So saying that the media reported the dossier as fact belies any of the reportage I saw.
Technically, this is accurate. But given what we now know about the dossier, was that an exercise in good media judgment? Should any bunch of unverified gossip that originated as partisan opposition research be disseminated widely by the MSM to advance a narrative of presidential treason — as long as they add a caveat?
Another reader writes:
The hyperventilation over the Steele Dossier is far more a product of the right than the MSM. For a comparison, how much time was spent by the NYT or Washington Post on Hillary’s emails vs time they spent reporting in the Steele Dossier? I expect the ratio is 100:1 or more.
Whataboutism. But also I suspect untrue. The Steele Dossier story went on for years. Another dissenter:
Here’s the short answer I give anyone bogged down in the silly minutiae of what Maddow said on whatever night, or what we’re supposed to think of the Steele Dossier: just read the Senate Intel report. It’s there for anyone who, as you like to advertise, wants to see what’s in front of their own nose.
A good idea. I have. It shows Maddow’s hyperventilated conspiracy stories as reckless overkill. It does reveal a serious issue with the president’s happy cooperation with any actor, however malign, to advance his own interests over the integrity of this country’s democratic institutions. That’s bad enough. I’ve never exonerated Trump on this. I just think the media went a little nuts on the Russia story in an understandable but counter-productive misjudgment. Yet another dissent:
Regarding your characterization of what Putin got from Trump, while it’s true Putin could not get Trump to overturn the overwhelming will of Congress, his bumbling did undermine NATO by fracturing its internal unity. And his piss-poor foreign policy degraded American credibility with our allies, which served Russian interests.
Pleeease. That’s extremely thin gruel. If Trump had presided over the invasion of Ukraine, maybe. But that was Obama! And may soon be Biden again.
And another dissent:
To assert, as you do, that if there was one person responsible for Trump becoming president, it was Hillary Clinton — that’s incorrect, in my view. Clinton, execrable candidate though she was, lost by a total of just 80,000 votes spread across three states. If there was one person responsible for flipping those votes, it was James Comey, whose reopening of the Clinton e-mail investigation less than two weeks before the election had a “large, measurable impact,” according to Nate Silver.
This dissenter looks to a decade ago:
I have two words in response to your condemnation of the media for its breathless, overwrought coverage of the Trump-Russia relationship: Palin’s pregnancy.
Every punch you’ve thrown against MSM figures for unfounded speculation could be said about your 2008 crusade, and then some. The only difference I see is that the media’s hounding of Trump involved a sitting president who refused to come clean about numerous conflicts of interest and clandestine communications with a major geopolitical adversary. On the other hand, your sleuthing of Palin involved the questionable timeline in a mother’s account of precisely when she went into labor.
Yes, Palin was an unqualified fabulist and quack, but to make that point, was Trig’s birth really the most relevant thread to pull? How does that stack up with Russiagate in terms of the public interest or even common decency?
Here’s how I’d respond to that. Palin was in a position to become president — and we knew next to nothing about her. Vetting her was an important media task — it certainly wasn’t done by the McCain campaign — and the chance that she was, in fact, out of her mind, was, shall we say, not insubstantial. The completely loony story of her fifth child was one obvious sign of her instability — too nuts even for Trump to hire — and one page of easily-produced medical records would have resolved the Palin question immediately in her favor. That’s all I ever asked for: readily available evidence to prove any skeptic, including me, wrong.
In contrast, the key element to the Russia story was that Trump was being asked to prove a negative, which was and is impossible. I was asking for a presidential candidate to provide a single piece of evidence to support her utterly deranged and physically impossible stories. She refused. Trump underwent a years-long formal inquiry, which I fully supported, and they still couldn’t prove a conspiracy as such, let alone one which would have delegitimized his 2016 election victory.
For more dissents over my views on Russiagate, check out the pod page this week. Readers also have two corrections on last week’s column: “It’s the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, NOT ‘Nordstrom pipeline’!” The other: “My grandchildren would shout at you if they could: it’s ‘Peppa Pig,’ not ‘Peppa The Pig’!” Mea culpa.
Lastly, a question from a reader: “I love your podcast and emails, but how do I give a Dish subscription as a Christmas gift?” Here’s the link — and you can schedule the gift to arrive on any date. Why not also think of my essay collection, Out on a Limb, as a Christmas gift? You can buy and gift it here.
Meanwhile, keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Cool Ad Watch
A short but sweet Subaru ad directed by the Dish’s favorite pet photographer, Carli Davidson:
The concept was based on Carli’s wonderful series on disabled pets.
Yglesias Award Nominee
“Patriot Purge creates an alternative history of January 6, contradicted not just by common sense, not just by the testimony and on-the-record statements of many participants, but by the reporting of the news division of Fox News itself,” - Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, on their resignations from Fox News. (Sign up for The Dispatch to support their independent, principled, conservative writing.)
ICYMI
I sat down with the talented young filmmaker, Rob Montz, to chat about CRT, Trump, immigration, Hitch, and staring grimly into the darkness:
The booger on my beard as I discuss mortality is mwah.
Mental Health Break
A classic source for MHBs, Bad Lip Reading, does Dune:
Bonus MHB: What appears to be a stoned dude singing the ABCs backwards.
In The ‘Stacks
Razib Khan looks at the long tradition of Thanksgiving culture wars.
The radical trans lobby is on the ropes in the UK.
Cathy Young tackles the disturbing right-wing cancellation of Allyn Walker, the academic falsely accused of endorsing child molestation.
The latest look at how anti-cop rhetoric can kill. Shellenberger notes, “30 times more African Americans were killed by civilians than by police in 2019.”
Caroline Fourest wants to bridge the gen divides among feminists.
What’s the right amount of parental leave?
Emma Collins elucidates the female frontier aesthetic. She adds, “America, like the frontier, is a process, rather than a mere place.”
Using a gender “lens,” as academics so often do, Noah Carl wonders, “Did women in academia cause wokeness?”
“White supremacy” apparently isn’t powerful enough to prevent higher rates of suicide and mental disorders among white people.
Pareene debates Yglesias over Dem messaging. Substack feels more like the old blogosphere every day.
The great short-story writer, George Saunders, makes the jump. Welcome!
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? (Hint: An annual event is happening here next week.) Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions. Happy sleuthing!
The results for the last week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today.
See you next Friday.