William Saletan has been on a tear recently, repeatedly offering his now-familiar argument that the pro-choice community has to find some way of appeasing anti-choicers in whatever guise, and whatever venue, he can find. There was a celebrated spat between him and Katha Pollitt in Slate not long ago. When it was over,  he didn’t seem to have heard that the things he keeps saying - essentially, that women should settle for whatever they can get and “put Roe behind them” - are infuriating to women who want the rights and freedom they’re entitled to, and not just whatever slips under the right wing’s RADAR.

Yesterday, in a Seattle Times Op-Ed, he went on the same kick, urging pro-choicers to “move beyond Roe” by “making it irrelevant”.

He begins by noting that women’s bodily autonomy is in as precarious a position as it has been in living memory.

Three political asteroids are heading toward us that make the latest round of the abortion confrontation inevitable. The first is the so-called “partial birth” abortion ban. Second is the South Dakota law. The third is the potential retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. The order in which they hit will determine how close Roe comes to being overturned. But one way or another, they’ll reignite the cycle of [anti-choice] victory, backlash and defeat.

He also predicts that a precipitous assault on abortion rights, or Roe itself, by the Court’s new anti-choice justices would trigger a pro-choice backlash that could put the Democrats where the Republicans are now: in control of Congress and the White House (and, incidentally, under a Supreme Court that had just got done ruling that Congress can make any laws it wants about abortion). So, from Saletan’s point of view, things are at least somewhat hopeful over the long term, right? Of course not:

[The Democrats] need to ditch their old script. The last time abortion-rights backers were in power over both Congress and the White House, in 1993 and 1994, they tried to enshrine Roe in federal law and subsidize abortions through Medicaid and President Bill Clinton’s health-insurance proposal. A couple of years ago, in a book about the abortion-rights movement, I suggested that its agenda then had been too ambitious. Now I think it wasn’t ambitious enough. Real ambition isn’t about fortifying the territory you’ve won. It’s about moving on so that the territory behind you no longer needs defending. The territory we need to leave behind is Roe.

Naturally. When the Republicans are in control and women’s rights are under assault, it’s necessary to “move beyond Roe“. And when the Democrats are in control and can restore women’s rights under the law, it’s necessary to move beyond Roe. The one thing we don’t want to do, under any circumstances, is affirm a strong right for women to control their bodies.

What Saletan prefers is to make Roe “irrelevant” by reducing the demand for later-pregnancy abortions. Noting that the percentage of abortions in the first trimester has grown substantially since 1973, and that new contraceptive and medical-abortion technologies make unwanted pregnances easier to avoid, and abortions available as early as the first month of pregnancy, he argues that choice supporters should essentially concentrate on contraception and restrict the support for choice in pregnancy to the first three months at most.

Technology can’t avert all our failings or tragedies. There will always be abortions. But when you look at the trends — more foolproof contraception, more access to morning-after pills, earlier and fewer abortions — you can begin to envision a gradual, voluntary exodus from at least half the time frame protected by Roe. That’s the half the public doesn’t support.

Maybe that six-month window made more sense in 1973 than it does today. Maybe, if we spend the next 10 years helping women avoid second-trimester abortions, we won’t have to spend the 40 years defending them. Maybe the best way to end the assault on Roe is to make it irrelevant.

And maybe if we concede 2/3 of the protection offered by Roe right off the bat, and concentrate women’s autonomy rights entirely into a three-month time window that is already under vicious assault by a right wing that does not make distinctions among the abortions it wants to criminalize, as Saletan urges women to do among the abortions they would still like to see legal, then all we’ll really accomplish is to do half the anti-choicers’ work for them while giving them fewer targets they need to attack in the future. Maybe if the bulk of the work of avoiding unwanted pregnancy must be taken up by effective, accessible, and universally-used contraception which is also under attack by the right wing, and especially for the most vulnerable - poor and young - populations, while we’ve agreed to leave those women with a very limited backstop by gutting 2/3 of their autonomy in pregnancy, all we’ll have done is ensured that women - especially teens - are forced to rely on a single, fallible method to preserve their own options, with a ticking time clock on their autonomy set to go off after that method fails. Maybe if we constrain all abortions into a three-month window, including those for the many women who don’t even know they are pregnant until at least the second month, and including those for the women who live in one of the 86% of US counties that have no abortion providers and who then must come up with the money not only to pay for an abortion but also to travel to a distant locale or out of state to acquire it (twice, if they go to one of the 27 states that impose 1-day-or-longer delays on receiving services), and including those for women who live in one of the 15 states with “trigger laws” that will outlaw all abortion entirely as soon as Roe is overturned as Saletan says it should be, maybe then the women for whom contraception is also banned, or unavailable, or failed, will find themselves in an unmanageable bind with virtually no effective rights left to them and mere weeks to exercise those they somehow managed to retain. And maybe when all this happens, Saletan will feel a sense of responsibility for those women, but I doubt it.