Free Contraception Can't End the Abortion Debate

Ross Douthat, the resident social conservative of the New York Times opinion page, doesn't usually get angry. But in a blog post Wednesday, he unloaded on liberal columnists who suggest that defunding Planned Parenthood is going to cause more abortions by depriving women of access to birth control. Such columns, he argues, rest on the assumption, stated or not, that America's abortion rate is driven by a lack of that access -- and that if only we made birth control more widely and cheaply available, we could resolve America's rancorous abortion dispute by rendering the issue moot.

I ended up in a long Facebook discussion with one of the columnists he attacked by name, Damon Linker. Before I go further, I should say that both Ross and Damon are former colleagues, and I think they're both brilliant columnists. But on this issue -- not whether abortion should be legal, but whether the main thing standing between America and fewer abortions is better government birth-control policy -- I think Douthat has the better argument.