Vice President aspirant and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said this week that not only does abortion liberate women, “men are also more free in a country where we have a president who stands up for things like access to abortion care. Men are more free.”
Buttigieg is right about that. Abortion does in fact make men free. They are free from their fatherly duties, thus allowing them to prey on women—in the name of liberating them—while appearing to be on their side. It’s a dream come true.
In an article by Judith Blake inScience,published in 1971, two years before abortion was legalized inRoe v. Wade, she found that college-educated men were the strongest supporters of legal abortion. Indeed, little has changed since then.
When I taught a course on Family Relations at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, I asked my students, most of whom were nursing students, to explain why single men have always been the greatest champions of a woman’s “right to choose”? Is it because they have long been closet feminists? Or is there something else going on? The women knew exactly what was going on. Reckless men love abortion.
In a 2022 article published by Business Insider, it found that the majority of young men (and young women) were supportive of abortion rights but that older men (those over 50) were the least supportive. This makes sense. Reckless older men have less of a vested interest in abortion, but reckless younger men see it as freeing them from their responsibilities. It allows them to tell their pregnant girlfriend to find an abortion clinic and liberate themselves of their baby; ever obliging, she can even charge it to his credit card. It’s a win-win. For him.
Survey after survey shows that public support for abortion declines markedly the later into pregnancy a woman is; there is very little support for late-term abortions and partial-birth abortions. Buttigieg disagrees. His enthusiasm for abortion rights knows no limits.
On “The View,” Meghan McCain asked Buttigieg in 2020 “exactly [what] your line is” about when to draw the line on abortion. He said “it shouldn’t be up to a government official to draw the line. It should be up to the woman who’s confronted.”
McCain pressed him, asking if he was okay with infanticide. His answer was disingenuous. “Does anybody seriously think that’s what these cases are about?” She responded, “I think that people care about that, yes.”
Similarly, the year before, Chris Wallace on “Fox News,” said to Buttigieg, “So just to be clear. You’re saying that you would be okay with a woman well into her third trimester deciding to abort her pregnancy?” To which he said, “Look, these hypotethicals are usually set up in order to provoke a strong emotional….” Wallace retorted, “It’s not hypothetical. There are 6,000 women a year who get abortions in the third trimester.” He answered, “That’s right, representing less than one percent of cases.”
In other words, Buttigieg disagrees with almost everyone. He is in the tiny minority who believe abortion should be legal in virtually every instance, regardless of how late into pregnancy it is. He can’t even condemn infanticide. This explains why he is opposed to legislation that makes it illegal to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion. It doesn’t get more radical than this.
Notice, too, that when Wallace said that 6,000 women a year get an abortion in the third trimester that Buttigieg erased their humanity by citing a statistic. That’s the way extremists think: they don’t see the faces of women or their unborn babies—they dissolve them to a stat.
Buttigieg does not want to make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” His idea of male and female liberation is to make it as frequent as can be. He is way out there.
Contact Buttigieg’s chief of staff, Mohsin Syed:mohsin.syed@dot.gov
