Men’s Abortion Rights
The New York Times keeps John Tierney’s column behind their “Times Select” firewall, so you’ll either have to pick up a copy of the paper or surf around a bit and find someone who has posted the entire column on the web. But everyone who is pro-choice should read his column today. In “Men’s Abortion Rights,” Tierney walks folks through this controversial idea: Just as women should be able to accept or reject maternity, men should be able to accept or reject paternity.
If the pro-choice side adopted a gender-neutral policy, then either the man or the woman would have the right to say no to parenthood. I don’t’ know of anyone advocating that a woman be required to have an abortion, but there’s another right that could be given to a man who impregnates a woman who isn’t his wife. If the woman decided to go ahead and have the child, she would have to notify him and give him the option early in the pregnancy of absolving himself of any financial responsibility for the child.This option to have a “financial abortion” has been advocated by a few iconoclastsnot all of them men with child support payments…
After years of getting letters at “Savage Love” from teenage boys asking me if they’re fuckedi.e. on the hook for 18 years of child support paymentswhen their knocked-up girlfriends decide to go ahead and have the baby, the right to a financial abortion makes sense to me, and I’m not a man making child support payments. It’s a sexist stereotype that all boys who knock up girls were negligent or abusive and are therefore to blame: I’ve heard from boys whose girlfriends swore they were on the pill when they were not; from boys whose girlfriends swore they were pro-choice and would have an abortion and then changed their minds. Not all men are dogs and not all women are righteousthere are women who entrap men, depriving them of their right to make up their own minds about whether or not they’re ready to become parents. So to me it seems only fair that boys, as well has girls, be given the same right to choose.
When I’ve floated the idea to friends (I also touched on the subject in The Kid), I’ve been told that boys do have a choicethey can choose not to have sex. If a boy chooses to have sex, well, he has to accept the consequences, doesn’t he? That language, however, smacks of the rhetoric the rights uses when it argues against a woman’s right to choose an abortionhell, it is the rhetoric the right uses to argue against abortion. “Not ready for parenthood? Then don’t have sex.” How can that be sexist when the anti-choice crowd says it to girls and progressive when pro-choicers say it to boys?
Maybe I’m just so enamored of the rhetoric of choice and the equality of the sexes that I supportat least in concept (there are a lot of details that would have to be worked out)a man’s right to a financial abortion. Women and men should both be able to choose when and how they become parents, and the ability or willingness of the male to chose fatherhood is certainly something a woman should weigh when she’s deciding whether or not to chose motherhood.
Would a man’s decision to reject paternity have a coercive affect, nudging a woman toward making the choice to have an abortion? Yes, it certainly wouldbut what’s wrong with that? Again, the willingness of the man involved to actually be the fatheremotionally and financiallyis something that a woman should consider when she’s deciding whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
More from Tierney:
If it were just a question of the woman’s rights versus the man’s rights, I’d go along… But if the man gets a financial abortion and the woman goes ahead with the pregnancy, someone else’s rights still need to be considered: the child would be suffering because of the parents’ decisions.
Tierney assumes that the child of woman who goes ahead with the pregnancy is going to live in poverty. But he overlooks the other choice a pregnant woman whose partner has chosen financial abortion can make: she can choose to place her child for adoption.
OR -- she can raise the kid herself, in a healthy environment, maybe with the help of family. Savage, I know you think it can't be done healthily, but it can and it has.