More on abortion
Feb. 24th, 2006 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumAs might be expected there's a lot of talk about abortion in the blogospere right now.
In a few places I have seen the perrenial question, "What about the man's rights to help make the decision?"
As I see it, he doesn't have any. It's a binary choice. This isn't deciding how much money goes on one credit card or the other, or which movie to see tonight.
It's an either or. Either she carries it to term, or she aborts it.
Only one person gets to make that call. There's no way to split the Solomonic Ideal.
But, goes the cry, if she decides to keep the baby, he has to pay for it!
Qu'elle horreur. Shit happens. There are risks to sex. Pregnancy is one of them. If he didn't want the risk of a pregnancy, he ought to get cut, or buy a doll. Yeah, the good one's cost five-grand, but that's cheaper than food, clothes, daycare and college.
And, goes the flipside, what if he wanted the kid and she didn't? Well, he can talk to her, try to arrange a deal where he gets sole-custody, and she owes him nothing, but if she doesn't want to do that, he's SOL.
The argument also gets made, "He ought to be allowed to opt out."
This is the one which probably irks me more than any other.
It usually goes, more or less, like this.
In exchange for offering to pay for an abortion, he gets to walk away. If she takes it, he's out the cost of the abortion and no more.
If she doesn't, he's scot free. He, you see, "did the right thing." He offered to clean up the mess. She refused his noble offer, so she gets nothing more.
Bullshit. That's extortion. Being a single parent is hard. It limits things (jobs, housing, committed relationships) and makes life harder. He gets, in that scenario, to hang that over her head, get the abortion or suffer.
Reprehensible.
I feel for those people who want to make things just; who think that as two people are affected by the decision, two people ought to be involved in making it, but this is that simple. If abortion is an option, the woman gets to choose.
Is it better for the principles to sit down and talk about it. Probably, emotionally they probably both feel better afterwards. But it can't be required.
In a properly run world, abortion wouldn't be a real issue. Single parents wouldn't be any worse off than dual parents. Birth control methods would make accidental pregnancy more rare (and education would make BC more effective because people would use it properly).
But this isn't a perfect world, which means one person has to make the call, and that one person is the woman; she's pregnant. She is going to get stuck if he walks away (in theory he'd have to pay child support, but "dead-beat dads" wouldn't be a recurring theme in Time, and on the evening news if that were the case). He will be seen as the victim when she tries to get that child-support. She will be cast as a tramp and a harlot, conniving to get pregnant so she can live the easy life of a single mom without a husband to clean up after and all his money letting her stay at home and waste her life away on booze and other men.
It's about responsibility. One engages in risky behaviour, and one accepts the results.
In a few places I have seen the perrenial question, "What about the man's rights to help make the decision?"
As I see it, he doesn't have any. It's a binary choice. This isn't deciding how much money goes on one credit card or the other, or which movie to see tonight.
It's an either or. Either she carries it to term, or she aborts it.
Only one person gets to make that call. There's no way to split the Solomonic Ideal.
But, goes the cry, if she decides to keep the baby, he has to pay for it!
Qu'elle horreur. Shit happens. There are risks to sex. Pregnancy is one of them. If he didn't want the risk of a pregnancy, he ought to get cut, or buy a doll. Yeah, the good one's cost five-grand, but that's cheaper than food, clothes, daycare and college.
And, goes the flipside, what if he wanted the kid and she didn't? Well, he can talk to her, try to arrange a deal where he gets sole-custody, and she owes him nothing, but if she doesn't want to do that, he's SOL.
The argument also gets made, "He ought to be allowed to opt out."
This is the one which probably irks me more than any other.
It usually goes, more or less, like this.
In exchange for offering to pay for an abortion, he gets to walk away. If she takes it, he's out the cost of the abortion and no more.
If she doesn't, he's scot free. He, you see, "did the right thing." He offered to clean up the mess. She refused his noble offer, so she gets nothing more.
Bullshit. That's extortion. Being a single parent is hard. It limits things (jobs, housing, committed relationships) and makes life harder. He gets, in that scenario, to hang that over her head, get the abortion or suffer.
Reprehensible.
I feel for those people who want to make things just; who think that as two people are affected by the decision, two people ought to be involved in making it, but this is that simple. If abortion is an option, the woman gets to choose.
Is it better for the principles to sit down and talk about it. Probably, emotionally they probably both feel better afterwards. But it can't be required.
In a properly run world, abortion wouldn't be a real issue. Single parents wouldn't be any worse off than dual parents. Birth control methods would make accidental pregnancy more rare (and education would make BC more effective because people would use it properly).
But this isn't a perfect world, which means one person has to make the call, and that one person is the woman; she's pregnant. She is going to get stuck if he walks away (in theory he'd have to pay child support, but "dead-beat dads" wouldn't be a recurring theme in Time, and on the evening news if that were the case). He will be seen as the victim when she tries to get that child-support. She will be cast as a tramp and a harlot, conniving to get pregnant so she can live the easy life of a single mom without a husband to clean up after and all his money letting her stay at home and waste her life away on booze and other men.
It's about responsibility. One engages in risky behaviour, and one accepts the results.
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Culture, biology, and responsibility
Date: 2006-02-25 05:40 am (UTC)Now men want to whine that it's unfair that sex always entails some possibility of long-term responsibility? Uhh, too bad?
In a perfect world, it wouldn't be difficult to be a single parent, and we wouldn't bother with useless men who wanted responsibility-free sex anyway. They could go away, and good riddance. And having a baby wouldn't involve physical risks to the mother's health, and all children would be wanted and loved and grow up in clean, pretty neighborhoods with good schools.
But we live in this world. I don't think asking men to sweat the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy as a life-altering experience is too much to ask, or in the least bit unfair. Biology and life are both unfair, but civilization is about evening out the scales.
Re: Culture, biology, and responsibility
Date: 2006-02-25 03:49 pm (UTC)Now men want to whine that it's unfair that sex always entails some possibility of long-term responsibility? Uhh, too bad?
Poor things. Welcome to our half of the matter, where the woman has always born the risks, because biology is an unfair bitch.
Men have a choice. If you ABSOLUTELY cannot deal with the idea of having/supporting children, then have sex with women who CANNOT or WILL NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, have children.
Talk to your partner. Be upfront with her, make her be upfront with you. In addition to the STD talk, how about the pregnancy talk?
DV
Re: Culture, biology, and responsibility
Date: 2006-02-25 04:11 pm (UTC)Many years ago, at a time I was both lonely, and in a set of circumstances where I figured the woman I was seeing (not exclusively) was in no mood to have a kid (it seemed counterproductive) I forgot to have the birth control talk, assuming that, as having a kid would put a whole lot of things on hold for her, she was using some (STDS had been covered).
She turned up late one month and told me she thought she was pregnant.
My reaction surprised her... I didn't ask who the father was/if it was mine, but rather, "how did it happen."
When she told me she wasn't using any sorr of BC... well I was somewhat surprised. She wasn't pregnant, and I laid in a stock of condoms. Later, when sometime after we stopped seeing each other romantically, she and a friend of mine were seeing each other.
I warned him that he might want to take charge of the birth control.
In the lessons learned department that one was a biggie, and one I thought I'd done much earlier than that. Different circles, and so different expectations.
TK