Still, that “What about the men?” line of complaint may tell us more than it means to. We have paternity laws and court-ordered child-support payments and all the rest of that, but none of it is sufficient to assuage the deep sense of a more general and more comprehensive abandonment — an abandonment beyond the merely financial — that one hears in such indictments. And why wouldn’t women in the United States — and in much of the rest of the so-called developed world — feel abandoned? We treat pregnancy as though it were a disease and young motherhood as though it were some kind of tragic automobile accident. From abortion to transsexualism to certain aspects of economic policy, we have created a great deal of dysfunction and unhappiness by cheapening, suppressing, and pathologizing the things that are unique to women, including — especially — motherhood.

The six-week period in the Texas law reflects the gestational stage at which a fetal heartbeat typically may be detected. It is against such heartbeats that the savagery at issue here may most easily be measured. The heartbeat communicates something: that the story about this being a meaningless lump of tissue, the moral equivalent of an inflamed appendix, is a lie, and a fairly obvious one at that.

And now, in its indirect way, the law in Texas takes some note of that fact.