Update (already!): Note that Anne Laurie beat me to this topic this morning. See that post for a couple more fine links to posts explicating the failings of young Ross. All Douthat all the time is a pretty grim prospect, ain’t it folks.
Plenty of folks on the blogs, including here, have had their way with the recent essay in defense of the use of poor white women as baby farms for discerning elites, written by the lesser half of The New York Times’ current conservative op-ed. embarrassment, Mr. Ross Douthat.
__
I’m not going to repeat what others have said better. Read our own Anne Laurie’s take; check out Amanda Marcotte, who ropes, ties, brands and clips young Ross in a thousand words or so; see our own (again!) AsiangrrlMN’s riff on the apparently foreign (to Douthat) notion that some women might actually, sincerely, decline to accept motherhood as a necessary fulfillment of their personhood; delight to Tintin’s allusive stylings over at Sadly No; and with TBogg, always trust the shorter.
__
With all that out there, in this post I just want to poke a few more holes in Douthat’s reputation for intellectual honesty/fun with numbers, and then, in a hopefully more concise item to follow in a few hours, to use a lovely piece by a former student to shine a little historical sidelight on the monstrosity that Douthat seeks to gussie up with a bucket load of nostalgic fantasy.
On the numbers: Douthat in his column states that before 1973 there was a comparative abundance of babies available for adoption — one out of five single white women making babies gave their kids up.
Now, he writes, only one percent of such pregnancies lead to adoptions, and “would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason…,” basing that assertion, apparently, on the word of Melanie Thernstrom writing in the the Times Sunday Magazine* who claimed that she chose surrogacy because adoption was just too hard.
__
Well, there are actual data on this point, and while there has unquestionably been a drop in adoptions in the US since 1970, the scale of that shift is (surprise!) much less than Douthat implies.
Further to Douthat — Babies, Babies Everywhere…Post + Comments (77)