Politics Roe vs Wade… for men!
The National Center for Men is filing a lawsuit tomorrow on behalf of a young man who doesn’t want to pay child support for his “ex-girlfriend’s daughter”. This article (via Raw Story) raises some interesting points about men’s reproductive rights.
As the men’s center sees it:
If a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood.
But women’s rights are currently under fire. It’s kind of an inopportune time to be fighting for men’s rights.
“Roe says a woman can choose to have intimacy and still have control over subsequent consequences,” [said Mel Feit, director of The National Center for Men.] “No one has ever asked a federal court if that means men should have some similar say.”“The problem is this is so politically incorrect,” Feit added. “The public is still dealing with the pre-Roe ethic when it comes to men, that if a man fathers a child, he should accept responsibility.”
Feit doesn’t advocate an unlimited fatherhood opt-out; he proposes a brief period in which a man, after learning of an unintended pregnancy, could decline parental responsibilities if the relationship was one in which neither partner had desired a child.
I fully support men having more control in the baby-making process (it’d be great if male birth control would hit mass markets), but it’s a little alarming that women’s choice is being constricted, while some men are fighting for the right to walk away.
Why is that alarming? They seem to go hand in hand.