Conception Is a Given

Conception is a blessing, Prince Hamlet said, except as your daughter may conceive. Figure that one out. Surely, it tells us that for young women, conception is a curse, one that needs to be eliminated by abortion.

Importantly, within the confines of the national abortion conversation, conception is also a given.

True enough, Republicans are shooting themselves in the head over abortion rights. That is, the issue is working against them politically, and they do not seem to care. Dare we note that extreme positions never play well politically. No abortion ever … is not a winning program. Allowing abortion in the early stages of pregnancy will appeal to voters; banning it in the late stages-- with carefully drawn qualifications-- will also be a winning program. 

If you add up the number of women who have have abortions since Roe was decided, ask yourself how many of them are likely to vote for a party that considers them criminals. 

Some considerable part of the issue her involves the feminist life plan. Feminists have instructed women to defer family and pregnancy until their careers were established. They excoriated a Susan Patton, mother of a Princeton undergraduate, when she suggested, in a letter to the Daily Princetonian, that young women in college would do well to look for husbands and to stop fooling around. As we recall, feminists denounced Patton for being a horrid misogynist, for consigning women to childcare, and keeping them off the shop floor and the battlefield.

And then there was the brouhaha over Anne Marie Slaughter’s assertion that women cannot have it all. You recall that Slaughter was working in Hillary Clinton’s State Department when she decided that she needed to quit her job in order to be more of a presence in the life of her teenage son. After she absented herself from home life, the boy had been suspended from school, had started hanging around with the wrong crowd and had been picked up by the police.

So, Slaughter quit her job and returned home to care for her son. She wrote an article in The Atlantic, explaining that while she was willing to admit that some very few superhuman women could effectively have it all-- that is career and family-- she was not one of them. 

So, she was implying that the feminist plan, to defer childbearing until a career was well-established, was a lie, designed to dupe women into feminism. Since the formula could not work and since women would be the ones who would miss out, on work opportunities or childbearing, Slaughter suggested that it be retired, that we stop telling women that they can have it all.

Cue the feminist outrage. Apparently, feminists who had been insisting that women can have it all, suddenly decided that they had not necessarily promoted this illusion. And yet, promote it they did, to the point where they attacked mercilessly, any woman who had children when she was young, and who might have deferred her career advancement.

Moreover, as Helen Andrews points out in a brave and highly cogent lecture, it is not just the ambiance that tells women that they can have it all, but government agencies and the legal system have rejected any notion that motherhood matters. Any company that treats mothers differently, or that considers actual or potential motherhood in their assessment of workplace performance can easily be sued.

Certain feminists might want to disavow the notion of having it all, but the feminist program has promoted it relentlessly. And that is why abortion is important. If conception is a given, and if women can easily have children up to menopause, then aborting a pregnancy must be allowed-- especially when it grants career priority over motherhood.

Andrews points out that having it all is a basic lie, one upon which feminists have built their cult. 

The challenge of refuting the lie that women can have it all—that is, that they can prioritize career and family equally—lies in the fact that the trade-offs that make it impossible are hidden, not obvious, because mathematically it’s not something that should be impossible.

The situation is unrealistic, for numerous reasons that Andrews lists, but it is also unrealistic for the simple reason that as a woman gets older, finding a suitable mate becomes more difficult.

A 35 year old executive vice president fulfills the standard feminist predicates. Those predicates say that she will, for being more independent and autonomous, be a highly desirable mate for a forty year old man.

Obviously, this is a lie, as many women have found out the hard way. Successful male executives are not always completely besotted by women’s beauty, but they are far more interested in marrying women who want to be wives. As you know, for feminism, “wife” is a four-letter word. 

And, you ask how a certain class of women manages to run a home, bring up children and advance a career, the answer is, Andrews says-- maids. That is, household help:

But look more closely at those households, and almost invariably you’ll see that behind every woman who is balancing work and family, there is an army of low-paid labor, immigrant cleaning ladies, nannies who are paid cash under the table, Door Dash delivery men who deliver the meals that mom never had time to cook. It’s no coincidence that the vast increase in female workforce participation has coincided with the reappearance of something that the more egalitarian America of the early 20th century did not have, and that is a servant class.

But then, the feminist life plan assumes, irrationally, that a woman will find it just as easy to get pregnant at 35 as it would have been when she was 25. Andrews considers this a fundamental lie.

A woman cannot simply wake up at age 35 and decide she wants to have a family. Everyone says that the sexual revolution was brought about by the advent of the contraceptive pill, which was supposedly ushered in at an amazing new age of a new human experience thanks to science. But it actually changed a lot less than we think. We’ve gotten quite good at not having children when we don’t want to have them, but the science that gave us the pill has not made us very much better at making children arrive when we do.

She suggests, sensibly, that it is better for women to have their children when they are young and then to pursue better career opportunities when their children are grown. In other words, the choice is not between children and career. The choice concerns which comes first, childrearing or career. Clearly, the feminist life plan, importantly, does not see this as the choice. It sees later in life pregnancy as the only feministically correct path. It derides women who marry young.

Look at the Supreme Court—a perfect example. The first woman on the court, Sandra Day O’Connor, had three kids, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had two kids, and both of them had their kids quite young. I think the last one was at 32. Both of these women followed the life course of having kids young and then pursuing their career ambitions afterward. And apparently it worked. They wound up on the Court.

Thanks to feminism, millennials are turning out to be the most childless generation in American history. Andrews explains:

 Millennials are on track to be the most childless generation in American history. Projections have it that 25% of millennials will be childless. By comparison, for boomers it’s closer to one in nine. For millennials, it’s going to be closer to one in four. They’re also the least married modern generation. If you want to look at how married a generation is, you look at age 21 to 36. In 1965, 17% of that age block had never been married. In 2017, it was 57%, and that trend shows no sign of decreasing. In fact, 2014 was the year that the balance shifted and the majority of adults over 16 had never been married before that 36-year cutoff.

Nowadays women are rather cavalier in thinking that what with frozen eggs and IVF, they will easily have children whenever they want. The notion that reality is going to accommodate your desires is one of the great illusions that therapy has foisted on us:

Many young women today lack knowledge of basic facts of biology.

Consider the case of Nicole Shanahan, wife of Sergei Brin. She was smart and wealthy, a woman of means. And she was grievously misinformed about female fertility:

But now that she’s a wealthy woman, Nicole Shanahan has chosen to make one of her philanthropic causes female fertility research—or, as she calls it, reproductive longevity—because, as she told interviewers, when she started to think seriously about motherhood in her early 30s it was “eye-opening to me that there are biological factors that would impede that dream.” She had assumed she could simply freeze her eggs and then come back to them when she needed them. She didn’t understand that IVF does not work like magic, that it was possible to, as she did, go through several rounds and end up with nothing. Eventually she and Sergey were able to have a child, thankfully, but imagine a woman that brilliant and accomplished lacking this basic knowledge.

The situation is just as grave when it comes to female physicians, people who presumably know everything there is to know about the issue. Given the long and arduous training that they undergo, many female physicians do not even try to have families until they are in their mid-thirties. But, they have bought the feminist lie, that it is not going to be a problem:

From the byline in Ann Arbor, Michigan, this letter writer wrote, “As a reproductive endocrinologist, I have seen countless 40-something female physicians seeking fertility treatment only to be genuinely shocked that their peak egg number and quality,” that is their peak fertility, “has long since passed. Often the only viable treatment at that point is using donor eggs from a much younger woman.” Family planning, to the extent that it is taught in our schools, focuses entirely on the prevention of undesired pregnancy. There is apparently no reliable time in any American’s life, including our physicians, when they are taught the basic limitations on how to become pregnant.

Why are these facts not common knowledge? Andrews explains that feminism has been working long and hard to ensure that women do not know about the realities of their own fertility. Feminism does not merely recommend deferral; it insists that this is the only way to live:

 Well, one reason is the deliberate suppression of the truth by feminists. In 2002, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine bought some ad space in movie theaters and on buses here in Washington, a ton of PSAs. These PSAs were entirely innocuous, they said things like, for example, “Advancing age decreases your ability to have children. For more information, see the website of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.” NOW, the Natural Organization of Women, organized a campaign and had those PSAs pulled because “they sent a negative message to women who might want to delay or skip childbearing in favor of career pursuits.”

Besides, it is illegal to publicize the facts, that is, the science:

So why haven’t elder generations been fulfilling their responsibility to impart that wisdom to younger people, especially younger women? Obviously in part because it’s socially taboo, but also because in many contexts it is illegal to do so. As you may know, if you’ve ever hired somebody for a position at your organization, it is illegal to ask a woman in a job interview if she is pregnant or planning on becoming pregnant. If you are mentoring a female employee at your company and you tell her that your personal advice is that she should have kids before she gets too old, even if that means putting a pause on her career, that remark can get you into trouble. If that woman is ever passed over for a promotion, she could turn around and sue the company for sexual discrimination and use your remark as evidence.

Consider a Supreme case from five decades ago:

It was a Supreme Court case named Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation (1971), which involved a company that had a policy of not employing women with preschool-aged children. The Court found it was a violation of the Civil Rights Act because the company did not also have a policy against employing fathers with preschool-aged children. The idea that mothers and fathers of young children have different responsibilities was dismissed by the Court as an outdated stereotype. In other words, we live in a regime where agreeing that women can have it all is legally mandatory. You cannot express dissent from it or operate your private business by a different set of assumptions.

So, it is illegal to follow the science. Ideology trumps all, and, by now, dare we say, older women, professionally accomplished and seeking mates, are not at all happy about competing against younger, more fertile women.

Thus, older women have done their best to keep these younger women on the sidelines. They do not want the competition. And they are more than happy when such younger women, when they do connect with older men, do not allow a mere pregnancy to stand in the way of their careers.