The attack on women's rights: The even bigger motive behind current antiabortion efforts. By

in the United States

"Women are now far more likely than men are to graduate from college or from professional schools. Upon graduation, they enter a labor market that no longer puts a premium on physical strength and instead values supposedly "feminine" traits like the ability to communicate and collaborate, and in which women are outpacing men. "At a certain point in the last 40 years," Rosin writes, "the job market became largely indifferent to size and strength. From then on, men no longer held all the cards."

Women not only are a larger demographic (by a minor margin), we register to vote in larger numbers and actually turn out to vote in far larger numbers than men. (Though discussions of closing the voter gender gap do still always explain how women lag behind men, obviously a questionable method of analysis.)

Now, most would agree pulling equal is nice but pulling so consistently ahead a problem. Men are in trouble, and that they aren't fitting into the modern world as comfortably as women simply can't be allowed to continue. 

As a reader of moderate rightish and moderate leftish magazines, all the discussions of how to address this problem I've come across have centered on working on men, helping them to adjust to change, adjusting change to fit them better--notably without tearing down women to slot them in better.  

It's now perfectly obvious that there's another way to look at this: The very conservative reactionary way, the religious conservative way: Roll back the clock and put men back firmly on top of women. The way God and nature and men always intended them to be, at least as they style it.  

THAT's the even bigger force behind the social conservatives' and religious conservatives' march to the past these days. Repealing Roe v. Wade is the banner, the white stallion that large numbers will follow as it leads the way for us all back to Father Knows Best land. THAT's how women can astonishingly find themselves in real danger of losing 80 years of hard-won rights. Because significant numbers of women will join these schemers to fight to repeal abortion and only belatedly find themselves fighting for low wages and the right to go to jail for not guarding their sacred wombs carefully enough.

Please note that although abortion has been legal for over 40 years, these men have never brought this kind of commitment to repealing it before, and never this commitment to establishing the definition of life as beginning at conception. Important as these issues may have been to some, the larger number didn't bring this zeal until now.

Please also note that even if we stopped it after it started it'd take a generation to get back where we are now, perhaps longer. When healthcare overhaul was stopped in the Clinton era, it took 17 years to work its way up again--as political scientists predicted. Not the next election or the one after, or the one after that. The ship of state takes a long time to turn. 

Megan Gambino discusses the plight of modern men and the implications for the workplace and home for The Smithsonian: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Its-a-Womans-World-With-the-End-of-Men-169311016.html