Tweedledumber

To many, the New York Times's alternating right fielders David Brooks and Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, are as alike as Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, but I have long felt that Douthat is more honest than Brooks, and a more talented and diligent writer. I like the way he provides links to sources in the online versions of his column, and his relative openness about his mental illness (that gloomy Catholic sexual terror, which he probably doesn't recognize as mental illness, but all the same compared to Brooks he is pretty self-aware).

Today, though, his column hits a level of disingenuousness and bad argument that can compete with Brooks at his worst, on the subject of the new Texas abortion law, which jump]
outlaws abortions after 20 weeks and requires places that perform abortions to meet a standard that seems designed to shut down 37 of the state's 42 clinics;  fast-talking like a high school debater assigned to the side he knows to be wrong (the simile has been made before, by a Boring Old White Guy).

What, he begins by asking in a rhetorical question that actually spans two paragraphs, are the likely consequences of the Texas law?

One possible answer is that Texas will make a forced march into squalor, misery and patriarchal oppression. Women’s lives will be endangered, their health threatened, their economic opportunities substantially foreclosed.

But

To the extent that this case rests on facts rather than fear, it’s based on cross-country comparisons. Around the globe, countries with abortion bans often do have worse outcomes — more poverty, fewer opportunities for women and, yes, often more abortions as well.

I.e., they're predicting what could happen in Texas on the basis of what happens in nasty third-world countries. I don't see that that's quite true—the argument depends just as much on the history of the US before Roe v. Wade and other countries with a before-and-after picture as well—but please go on:

many European countries already have versions of Texas’s late-term abortion ban on the books. France, Germany and Italy all ban abortions after the first trimester, and impose waiting periods as well. Notably, these nations tend to have lower abortion rates than the United States.

That "already" is a little misleading, giving the impression that Texas is just following the French lead. It would be better to stay "still": the fact is that all three countries have been on a liberalizing path for many years that just hasn't gone as far yet with respect to abortion as New York and California have (though certainly not in any other respect). Nor is it exactly that similar to the Texas law: it is possible to get a legal abortion in France and Italy after the 12th week, just a good deal more difficult, and there are no more restrictions on abortion facilities than any other medical offices.

Most importantly, they have single-payer health care systems that cover most or all of the cost of birth control (given anonymously to minors on their request), so that there's far less unwanted pregnancy. (In that respect, Texas is much more like El Salvador than France.) Their abortion rates are lower than they were when abortion was completely illegal (in Nazi Germany, abortion of an "Aryan" fetus was a capital crime).

Douthat acknowledges it, too, in a way:

So perhaps, it might be argued, abortion can be safely limited only when the government does more to cover women’s costs in other ways — in which case Texas might still be flirting with disaster. But note that this is a better argument for liberalism than for abortion.

No! "Abortion can be safely limited" is not an argument for abortion at all!

If he means to say that restrictions on abortion are more tolerable in a society that takes care of people, and women in particular, in other respects, that's pretty clearly true enough. Nobody's getting an abortion who wouldn't prefer not to need one in any case. The argument for abortion is not about what's practical but about personal liberty, and the idea that it applies to women as well as men. And if the consequences of restricting abortion are less bad for people in France than they are in El Salvador, well, lucky France; but they're better off still in the Netherlands, where abortions are considerably freer, and considerably fewer, as Ross Douthat knows very well. The social consequences flow from the freedom, as conservatives pretend to believe, but liberals actually do.

But Douthat isn't going there:

And it raises the possibility that a pro-life liberalism — that once-commonplace, now-mythical persuasion — would actually have a stronger argument to make than the one Texas’s critics are making now.

Oh, really? Would Douthat vote for it? I thought not. He's just concern trolling. Screw him.

Update:

Little Green Footballs, via GOPathetic, gives some newish evidence: Free birth control brings dramatic reductions in abortion rates.