Wall Street Journal editorial board member James Taranto falsely claimed that women have full control over reproduction and are choosing to have “illegitimate” children who grow up without fathers -- furthering his history of sexist and inaccurate attacks on women's rights and reproductive freedom.

In his January 6 Best of the Web Today column, Taranto examined an article about studies which claim that boys who grow up in households without fathers are likelier to have discipline problems in school than boys who grow up in families with both a male and female parent. Taranto argued that this was a problem rooted in “female careerism” and birth control. He claimed that the growing number of children born to unmarried women -- what he termed “widespread illegitimacy” -- was a product of women having full control over reproduction thanks to the introduction of the pill and abortion rights, and thus “the vast majority of children who are growing up without fathers are doing so in large part because of their mothers' choices” (emphasis added):

Under the legal regime that has prevailed for more than four decades, any woman who gives birth out of wedlock does so because she chooses to do so. To assign responsibility is not necessarily to assign blame: One may hold the view, for example, that illegitimate childbirth is morally preferable to abortion, or that widespread illegitimacy is not as bad for society as the decline in fertility that would occur, all else being equal, if sex outside marriage never produced a child.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of children who are growing up without fathers are doing so in large part because of their mothers' choices. In our column last month, we half-facetiously raised “the converse lament that young females are insufficiently interested in 'becoming reliable wives and mothers.' ” Let us now raise it half-seriously. It is trivially true that an unmarried woman who bears a child is not a reliable wife. If Hymowitz is correct about the baneful effects of fatherlessness on boys, such a woman also is not a reliable mother, at least to her sons.

Regardless of what kind of household children are raised in, the fact is women have increasingly little control over their reproductive choices, as their rights are under unprecedented threat. A new Guttmacher Institute report stated that in 2013 alone there were 70 different anti-choice restrictions adopted throughout the states. This severely reduced women's reproductive health options and in many cases shut down health clinics in huge areas of the country, blocking women's access to necessary and safe procedures. Indeed, more abortion restrictions were enacted in the past three years than in the entire previous decade.

Taranto's sexism and misinformed attacks on women's reproductive freedom are a regular feature at the Journal, where he has previously argued that a “war on men” began with contemporary feminism in the 1960s, when women dared “to be equal to men” and wanted “sexual freedom.” Below, Media Matters has compiled a selection of some of his worst comments:

Video by Coleman Lowndes