The legal scholar Erika Bachiochi offers a critique of modern sex, contraception and abortion.
By Annie Galvin Associate Producer, Opinion Audio |
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, as Justice Samuel Alito's leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization suggests it will be, then we will enter a political world that anti-abortion activists have dreamed of for years. But is it a world they, or their movement, are ready for? Where will social conservatives put their energy after Roe falls? |
That's a question we've been mulling at The Ezra Klein Show, a Times Opinion podcast. As part of our series exploring the rising intellectual currents on the right following Donald Trump's presidency, we began asking conservatives who they thought was doing the most interesting work to map out a post-Roe vision. One name that kept coming up was Erika Bachiochi, director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute and author of "The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision." Bachiochi does not support the right to abortion on moral grounds, but she goes further than that: Her argument is that the sexual revolution, techno-pharmacological contraception and abortion have harmed women as a class and allowed the market to take primacy over the family. |
"The abortion-backed contraceptive revolution gives men more reason to walk away from unexpected pregnancy," she tells Ezra Klein in today's episode, arguing that this has "stalled" women's progress toward equality with men. In their conversation, Bachiochi posits that access to hormonal contraception and abortion led to a wider embrace of "casual sex culture." She believes this has caused destructive outcomes like the breakdown of the traditional family structure, the feminization of poverty and a capitulation of the feminist movement to free-market demands for endless work over flexibility for caregiving. To her, the radical promise of the women's movement was lost when some feminists in the late 1960s started to fight for abortion rights alongside their anti-discrimination efforts. That shift served the needs of corporations at a great cost to women, she argues. |
Bachiochi's vision of the future challenges both liberal and conservative orthodoxies: She would like to see Roe overturned and abortion tightly restricted, but she also advocates for a robust slate of family policies including paid family leave, child-tax credits and even retirement benefits accruing for parents who work "in the home" rather than for wages. These dovetail with, and even go beyond, the care work provisions in President Biden's ill-fated Build Back Better bill. Bachiochi contends that restricting abortion would lead, out of necessity, to more support for families — but does that argument hold up? It's one of many questions that she and Klein debate. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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