An editorial in the Times under the headline "Arkansas's Attack on Abortion" repeatedly describes abortion as a women's right. "Republican-controlled legislatures have been working for many years to limit women's access to legal abortion care," the editorial says. "it is distressing in 2013 that a woman's right to make her own childbearing decisions is under such aggressive attack by far-right lawmakers. In some quarters of the country, Republicans seem unchastened by their party's lagging support among women. …threatening to women's rights and health."
A news article elsewhere in the same day's paper describes an alternative scenario in a case involving a man the Times describes as "a fast-rising politician with fashionably left-of-center views on social issues":
Pleading "marital coercion," a rarely used defense in British courts, her lawyer cast her as a deeply vulnerable woman, keen to protect her marriage and her five children. He said she was accustomed to yielding to the overbearing demands of Mr. Huhne, who she said demanded on two occasions that she have abortions so as not to disrupt his career with additional children.
This intrusion of a reality-based anecdote interrupts the Times's editorial conception in two ways. First, it suggests that contrary to the editorial's description of abortion as purely a women's right, men might have an interest in protecting access to it as well. Second, it suggests that there are at least some cases in which restricting access to abortion might actually help a woman in a situation where she wants to bear a child but the father wants to terminate the pregnancy.
I'm not suggesting that the situation described in the news article is typical, or admirable, or that it should dictate abortion law. But it never ceases to amaze me how the same liberals who want men to be doing 50 percent (or more) of the diaper-changing and dishwashing and carpooling talk about abortion using the language of "a woman's right to make her own childbearing decisions," as if it were a given that the decision on childbearing were that of "a woman" rather than that of two parents.