S-e-x missing from abortion column in The Kansas City Star
Melinda Henneberger, a member of The Kansas City Star’s new editorial board, has thoughts about abortion. One of the ideas she’s tried to advance throughout her itinerant career is that Democrats need to make room for people, like Melinda Henneberger, who consider themselves pro-life. She wrote about it in 2007 and 2012 and before the November election.
Henneberger returned to the theme in an opinion piece for the Star that coincided with Friday’s March for Life in Washington, D.C. “The stubborn one-third of Democrats who self-identify as pro-life, despite the party’s repeated invitations to get out of the tent, will be well represented,” she writes.
Reasonable minds may differ on the extent to which the Democratic Party should give ground on legal abortion, support for which is as high as it’s been in two decades.
What’s strange about Henneberger’s column is that doesn’t talk about sex.
Are you confused by people who want to restrict abortion rights yet seem to lose interest in fetuses once they approach term? Nearly half of the births in the United States are covered by Medicaid, a program that Republicans are eager to cut.
Can’t understand those who think abortion is so abominable yet want to limit access to contraception? The abortion rate is falling, and a new analysis suggests that better contraception use is the main factor.
The answer to these seemingly bedeviling questions is simple: s-e-x. Many of the people who want to overturn Roe v. Wade, defund Planned Parenthood and fuss about insurance covering birth control resent that other people are having sex in a way that is or was unavailable to them.
One of the smarter analyses in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking win was written by the authors of the book The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It. The authors, Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban, argued that Trump voters are not as irrational as they appear.
On the surface, it does not make sense that 81 percent of evangelical Christians would support a thrice-married casino operator who once joked that he wanted the mother of one of his children to have an abortion. But as a candidate, Trump ran on a platform to Make Sex Punitive Again. In addition to pledging to appoint Supreme Court justices willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump said in an interview that women who seek abortions should be punished if the procedure is banned. (He later walked back the remark and said abortion providers would be held legally responsible.)
As Weeden and Kurzban explained, Trump’s message appealed to religious conservatives who “travel a more monogamous path with less-controlled fertility. And they often view those with more casual sexuality as disruptive to their lifestyles.”
Weeden and Kurzban go on to characterize religious conservatives as “trying to stick to a diet in an office where everyone else has candy bowls on their desks.” For these voters, making casual sex more costly is in their “rational interests.” By voting for Trump, in other words, they were voting to take away the candy dish.
In her Star column, Henneberger writes that “pro-lifers are not a monolith.” She notes that some of the people who marched Friday are more concerned with caring for women facing unplanned pregnancies than shutting down clinics. She signals her preference for abortion laws “like they have in Europe, where abortions are typically banned after 20 or 22 weeks, with health exceptions.”
It’s true that abortion laws in Europe are more paternalistic than you might think. But Henneberger’s column is hard to take seriously. You can’t write about diversity in the anti-abortion movement without mentioning the scolds who care more about boners than about babies.
