Douthat abortion counter
to acknowledge the ways in which liberalism itself has undercut the two-parent family -- through the liberal-dominated culture industry's permissive, reductive attitudes toward sex, and through the 1970s-era revolution in divorce and abortion law.
In the first case, liberals tend to feign agnosticism about pop culture's impact on morals (even though a link is common-sensical and well supported), or to blame corporate capitalism for the entertainment industry's exploitative tendencies (as though the overwhelmingly liberal people making programming decisions had no agency of their own).
In the case of abortion and divorce, liberals expected their revolution to, if anything, stabilize the family -- by reducing unwanted births and dissolving only marriages that had failed in all but name.
But these expectations were naïve. As Janet Yellen and George Akerlof pointed out in a 1996 paper on the social impact of abortion and contraception, the power Roe v. Wade gave women over reproduction sometimes came at the expense of power in relationships. "By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother," they noted, the sexual revolution "made marriage and child support a social choice of the father."
In this new landscape, "women who wanted children, who did not want an abortion for moral or religious reasons, or who were unreliable in their use of contraception" saw their partners' incentives altered for the worse. The result was a world with plenty of unplanned pregnancies but fewer ensuing marriages, fewer involved fathers, more unstable homes.
When liberals claim social conservatives don't have any policy ideas for marriage promotion, then, they're somewhat self-deceived. A sustained conservative shift on abortion policy and marriage law probably would, over the long term, increase the rate at which couples take vows and stay together, and improve the life prospects of their children.
So one hypothetical middle ground on marriage promotion might involve wage subsidies and modest limits on unilateral divorce, or a jobs program and a second-trimester abortion ban.