Conservatives cannot understand why abortion is so important to the left.

At every opportunity, feminists push the issue in everyone’s faces with Bolshevist insistence. It takes precedence in all political discussions, such as presidential election debates. Feminists are determined to make it the dominant issue in this presidential race, and have largely succeeded.

The pressure is intense enough that it now threatens to derail Donald Trump’s campaign, as his recent attempts to back away from pro-life positions undermine support among his base.

Chronicles Editor Paul Gottfried is right to wonder if there is more here than meets the eye. Ironically, feminists are correct about the importance of the question, though not for the reasons adduced by them or by pro-lifers. The sexual left is obsessed with abortion because it forms part of the most fundamental question of our civilization: who controls the terms of reproduction.

The reproductive system involves more than “reproductive rights.” It determines under what conditions children are born and raised, their status in the law, and who is recognized to speak for them and their welfare. All this determines the future of civilization itself.

Women instinctively understand this and feminists are keenly aware of the political power of reproductive issues. Men tend to have other preoccupations. Because most professional conservatives are men, they miss its significance.

Feminists are determined that women alone will dictate the terms of reproduction. Even without abortion, it is they who must control its essential features. Feminists long ago determined that reproduction should be controlled solely by women, and now they are determined to consolidate that control.

It all began in vulnerable low-income communities through the imposition of the welfare system, which was the feminists’ first creation after they obtained the vote. This is when and where reproduction and child-rearing first passed entirely under the control of women, and men were eliminated from the process. This system was then expanded throughout the society by no-fault divorce, which was another creation of the feminists, who devised it as early as the 1940s and managed to get it codified officially during the radical and permissive atmosphere of the 1960s.

(As Catholics like to point out, the pill contributed to all this though, as always, the decisive changes were not technological but political.)

Feminists thus won the main battle before anyone realized it and without firing a polemical shot, and few challenge these innovations today. The ensuing half-century of feminist agitation over matters like abortion has simply been a mop-up exercise.

This is the monopoly over reproduction they are determined to keep within the control of women. They consider women “liberated” from men and from all rules of reproductive order. And it is this monopoly that must be broken if freedom and civilization are to endure. The rest of us must re-establish the regulation over reproduction that enabled civilization in the first place.

In other words, we must restore what the late Daniel Amneus called “reproductive law-and-order.” This will restore not only family stability but also political stability.

“The linchpin in the feminist program is mother custody following divorce,” Amneus wrote in The Case for Father Custody.  “Pull that pin … and the feminist structure collapses”—and with it the radical sexual agenda that now forms the cutting edge of the entire left: homosexualism, transgenderism, and the rest.

More than anything, the legal framework of the family court system is what undermines masculinity and turns men into frightened, impotent sissies. At the same time, it turns their children into aggressive nihilists, rebelling against their fathers and everything else. Until the laws are changed, Amneus wrote, “men must remain afraid of women, of marriage, of feminism.” They must also fear not only “the divorce court judges” as Amneus points out, but all government officials, who learned from the matriarchy how to eliminate due process, weaponize law, enforce news blackouts, and enact the deep state’s bureaucratic tyrannies that understand men heading families poses the principal impediment to their power.

Today’s triumph, not only of the left but the female left, is embodied in Kamala Harris. If she wins the presidency, it will be consolidated and institutionalized to a degree that is difficult to imagine. Despite breathtaking inadequacies and a complete absence of substantive policy positions, she is learning how to take charge by the sheer force of symbolism and the ultimate female virtue: feelings of “joy.”

By contrast, all around us we see male impotence—and with it conservative impotence—on conspicuous display:

• The Republican Party is worse than useless; it is “collaborationist,” even more than previously.
• The rest of the conservative establishment loses all its battles—especially those involving “the family,” such as abortion itself.
• The few journalists and scholars who have promised to explain the ascendency of the left over the last several years narrate the details, but explain nothing—let alone do they provide any remedy.

Meanwhile, the “manosphere” (which is roughly, but not uniformly, conservative though often without coherence or direction) is both exploding with male discontent and ineffectual politically. Its various tendencies are often divided from one another and even more from professional conservatism. Yet it could provide enormous energy, if only it could be harnessed.

Abortion remains politically unresolved because pro-lifers have made it a moral issue. This has kept it alive, for which they deserve credit, but they have not been able to break through with a complete victory, because they shrink from engaging the broader political context, which is the feminist ideological front. Indeed, their own emasculation and eagerness to ingratiate themselves with their feminist enemies is manifest, given any excuse to blame abortion on men and exculpate women from responsibility.

Now feminists sense the opportunity to snuff out their opposition for good, and with a Harris victory they could succeed. It is time to raise the stakes. It should not be just a question of abortion any longer but the larger problem of reproductive chaos.

Restoring “reproductive law-and-order” means restoring real marriage, which is what the feminists hate and fear. In restoring real marriage, we can safely ignore the professional “defenders of marriage.” They do not understand it, and they have repeatedly shown that that they cannot defend it.

Real marriage is not simply heterosexual marriage but marriage with a firm status in law: a legally enforceable contract that confers inviolable parental rights and especially paternal rights. With that, of course, is recognition of paternal authority.

Without this, nothing else will have any impact. No measures taken against the sexual left—and therefore, today, the left generally—will have any effect. We will all remain slaves to the state, and our slavery will intensify. 

J. D. Vance has apparently added his voice to a growing number of conservatives calling for repeal of “no-fault” divorce. These voices instinctively sense that something is amiss, but they but do not really understand the full implications. Without pressure, they will not have the courage to act when they finally begin to understand the far-reaching implications.

The entire concept of “no-fault” justice is a hopelessly unworkable contradiction in terms and a formula for precisely the kind of systematic injustice now dispensed not only by the crooked family courts but by all courts. Restoring “fault” does not mean that any divorces will be denied or that anyone will be forced to remain married. It means that parental—and especially paternal—rights will be sacrosanct within marriage and that no parent can lose his (or her) children—or be subject to any government regulation or interference in his access to them or relationship with them—without transgression of the marriage contract, preferably proven by a jury trial.

This would break the feminist control over reproduction and restore the integrity not only of the family but also the judiciary and the entire machinery of government, and with it a free society.

Achieving it is feasible. All we must do is stop disparaging men and start encouraging them for what some are already doing spontaneously: boycotting marriage and reproduction. When the men’s marriage strike is fully debated in public, and women in particular begin to understand the answer to their question, “Where are the men?” for them to marry—then the necessary changes will be possible, notwithstanding the impotence and incompetence of the right’s political class and the omnipotence in which the left seems to hold us today.