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Salvo 11.22.2024 5 minutes

Against Her Interests

Sonogram of human fetus (B&W)

Destroying civil society to own the cons.

In the waning days of the 2024 campaign, Team Harris made a truly devious effort to revive their flagging poll numbers. Their two-part pitch to the electorate went like this: 1) Men should vote Democrat so their daughters can get abortions, and 2) women should vote Democrat, then lie to their conservative husbands about it.

Part one focused its appeal on the vanishingly small percentage of abortions performed in response to rape. This argument probably appeals to some men. Most Americans are pro-choice in that they don’t much care if their neighbor gets an abortion. And when it comes to their own families, they’d rather have the option than not. Better to keep abortion legal for any reason at all than for my wife or daughter to “need” an abortion and not be able to get one.

In extreme cases, the argument goes, getting your daughter an abortion is an act of fatherly protection. When Charlie Kirk spoke out against rape exceptions, the anonymous X personality known as RadFem Hitler responded with characteristic vitriol. “No genuinely masculine man would ever allow his 10 year old daughter to give birth to her rapist’s baby,” she wrote. “Something is deeply CUCKED within you if you would allow a child molester to pass on his genes at the expense of your own progeny.”

A version of this argument is especially common on the vitalist, racialist right. They long to retvrn to a time when the pre-Christian pater familias exercised total imperium over his gens. Such men used their eugenic veto to defend their bloodlines not only against pollution by rapists and seducers, but against hereditary defects and unwanted gender imbalances. Even a lowly migrant worker, writing to his pregnant wife from Alexandria in the first century B.C., could nonchalantly order her, “if it is a boy, leave it; if it is a girl, throw it out.” Children “thrown out” in this manner usually died of exposure. The lucky ones were rescued by brothel owners, who soon put them to work servicing clients (sometimes including their own blood relatives).

It was Christians who put an end to this practice. Their God was the avenger of Hebrew slave babies, killed in an attempt to limit the growth of an “undesirable” minority. St. Macrina, the fourth-century daughter of Anatolian aristocrats, went scouring the local garbage dumps for abandoned infants. When she found one, she’d bring it to her bishop brother, Basil, to be raised in his new orphanage—arguably the world’s first. 

The lesson they learned from the New Testament is that God is love. At the core of reality was not some fickle Fate or Olympian tyrant but a Trinity whose persons eternally poured themselves out to one another. The God-man who offered Himself for the life of the world performed a greater feat than all the conquests of the Caesars. He who would be first in this new world must make himself last and the servant of all. Henceforth, the paradigm would be not domination, but self-sacrifice.

This is why it makes no sense to talk about protecting abortion for the sake of your daughter. The Christian logic that elevated women like Macrina to a position of veneration, that put power forever in the service of love, is in itself radically anti-abortion. We all come into existence helpless, entirely dependent on our mothers’ bodies for warmth, protection, and nutrients. That total reliance conveys authority, but it also imposes an obligation. “White Dudes for Kamala” voted to free their daughters from that maternal bond of dignified dependence and duty. Pagan patres familias claimed the right to override it. Christian patriarchs are sworn to uphold it.

If you claim to stand for love and joy, as Democrats do, then voting in your daughter’s best interest does not mean enabling her to live as the perfect autonomous individual. It means voting for a society that sustains the bonds of self-giving love that sheltered her through conception, birth, and beyond. When you vote for your daughter’s right to an abortion, you’re voting to dissolve the very ties by which you claim to be motivated.

By the same token, the invitation to save democracy by lying to your husband was insidiously self-contradictory. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want,” said Julia Roberts in the now-infamous ad, as a denim-jacketed wife agonized over her ballot. Her husband, chud-faced avatar of heteropatriarchy, would never know she voted for Kamala.

To call such messaging “political” would be a misnomer. It’s anti-political, in the sense that it erodes the very foundations of the polis, which Aristotle understood to be a community of families. The family is the first society. It is prior to the state, it is the means by which the state is perpetuated, and defending it is the state’s raison d’être.

Good marriages are the glue that holds society together. You cannot claim to have society’s best interests at heart while undermining the family. And lying to your spouse (by commission or omission) is a good way to destroy your marriage and make your life a living hell. 

Nor is the fallout of divorce and single parenthood limited to the families that actually experience them. As economist Raj Chetty has demonstrated, being raised in a community with high rates of single parenthood leads to worse outcomes, even for children raised in two-parent households. The more healthy marriages children are exposed to, the more likely they are to have healthy marriages of their own. The more toxicity and divorce they’re exposed to, the more likely they are to remain unmarried or get divorced.

Undermining marriage for the sake of society is as nonsensical as abolishing the duties parents owe children for the sake of the duty you owe to your children. By discarding the logic that built the West, Democrats have rendered their most basic principles incoherent and, ultimately, destructive in the extreme.

The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.

The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.

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