Jeff Hart makes an errant point on NRO:
Here we should ask why there existed no large demand for abortion in 1900, indeed not in 1950. Something major must have intervened between then and now. There intervened the changing situation of women, first slowly and then more rapidly. Women’s suffrage in 1912 was advocated by only one of the three political parties in contention, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive (“Bull Moose”) party. In 1920, women received the vote.
A number of social realities drove the changing situation of women. Anyone can name many of these, since they changed much else as well.
There is the familiar fact of the movement from farm and farmhouse, to the city, and with it labor intensive farm production — offspring useful as workers — to office and factory. Today only about 3 percent of the population lives on farms. Family accommodations are very different in the city than in the more spacious farm house. Offspring are no longer needed for labor intensive farm work. Medical advances reduced infant and child mortality. Fewer children perpetuated the family, a widespread goal. Women joined the workforce in large numbers during World War II.
The cumulative result of all these has been the “women’s revolution,” which Diana Trilling correctly said has been the only successful revolution during the Twentieth Century. National Socialism failed, so did Communism.
In my edited chapter published in The Wall Street Journal, I offered reasoned analysis, based on fact. The women’s revolution happened. It is not going to be repealed.
Hart is completely wrong. The women’s revolution is already showing many signs of failing, and it will likely fail even faster than Communism did, if one begins counting from the time when it became dominant in a large nation. Communism lasted 72 years in the Soviet Union, the Equalitarian Society has only been with us for about 35 years so far and it’s already killing the West.
Moreover, the Third Way of fascism is seeing a revival, here in the United States, in Europe and in China. I suspect that this is what will bring about the death knell of the women’s revolution, after women help usher it into power.
UPDATE: Hart is a very shallow thinker indeed. He actually wrote this in the WSJ: “Roe relocated decision-making about abortion from state governments to the individual woman, and was thus a libertarian, not a liberal, ruling.”
Ridiculous. There’s nothing libertarian about the Roe decision, beginning with the violation of the fetus’s property right to his unique DNA and ending with the absurd negation of the paternal parental rights that magically appear should the women fail to kill the unborn child.