NYT Columnist Douthat Argues That Abortion-Rights Debate Reveals Different Visions of Women's Equality

January 28, 2013 — "The pro-life cause has proved unexpectedly resilient ... not because millions of Americans are nostalgists for a world of stricter gender norms, but because they have convinced themselves that the opportunities the feminist revolution won for women can be sustained without unrestricted access to abortion," New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes.

Douthat also argues that the abortion-rights movement is "at its most effective when it speaks the language of necessary evils, warning Americans that while it might be pretty to think so, the equality they take for granted simply can't be separated from a practice they find troubling." According to Douthat, "the best pro-choice rebuttal to the young idealists at the March for Life or the professional women who lead today's anti-abortion groups isn't that they're too reactionary -- it's that they're too utopian, too radical, too naive."

He continues, "For its part, if the pro-life movement wants not only to endure but to triumph, then it needs an answer to this argument." Douthat concludes, "That means something more than just a defense of a universal right to life. It means a realist's explanation of how, in policy and culture, the feminist revolution could be reformed without being repealed" (Douthat, New York Times, 1/26).