Glenn Reynolds (“Instapundit”), the heavy-hitting blogger and not the nuttiest conservative around, comes up with a particularly weak version of the “men’s rights” argument for an abortion veto.

[I]n many states [a woman's] spouse — even if he’s not the father of the child — would still be on the hook for child support. Likewise, if he didn’t want children, but she disagreed, lied to him about birth control, and got pregnant. And he certainly couldn’t force her to have an abortion if she did so, even if his desire not to have children was powerful, and explicitly expressed at the outset. (The usual response — “he made his choice when he had sex without a condom” — never comes up in discussions of women and abortion.)

So where’s the husband’s procreational autonomy? Did he give it up by getting married? And, if he did, is it unthinkable that when they get married women might give some of their autonomy up, too?

There is not, anywhere in this piece, a single acknowledgment that the actual situation at hand in any decision about abortion is asymmetrical – that the woman is demanding the liberty to control what is done with her own body, while the man is demanding control over what is done with the woman’s body – or that the salient fact that gives a woman the right to choose an abortion in the first place is that the pregnancy takes place inside her body and no one else’s. There is, however, a lot of hysterical (hee!) nonsense about those perfidious woman’s wiles: “if he’s not the father of her child”, “if she didn’t want children, but she disagreed”, “if . . . she lied to him about birth control”. And, of course, he manages to work in the anti-abortion angle: because men can’t demand an abortion (because they aren’t the ones who are pregnant), it’s somehow wrong that women can (“he made his choice when he had sex . . . never comes up in discussion of women . . . is it unthinkable that when they get married women might give up some of their autonomy?”).

He somehow thinks “procreational autonomy” is synonymous with “making other people carry out your decisions about your own procreation”. There is, again, no reference anywhere in his piece to the locus of autonomy that grounds women’s rights to abortion – that of control of their very own personal bodies – still less any recognition that men do, in fact, have exactly the same right (just not with respect to other people’s bodies, which is what the “men’s rights” people can’t stand).

This is silly, stupid horseshit, and Glenn Reynolds should know better even if most of his fellow conservatives do not.

If he wants to discuss abortion as something other than an encroachement on his personal manly right to make make women bear his children, maybe he’ll be worth taking seriously. But if he merely wants to recycle the oldest, lamest, and most stereotypically, willfully ignorant arguments of the men’s rights movement, he hardly bears listening to, let alone rebutting.