Abortion and parental rights are obviously pretty touchy subjects in our society, and people tend to have opinions that aren't going to be swayed no matter what. I'm one of the few that constantly meanders back and forth, and looks for compromise and nuance and such. I just saw a column which brought up a great point and a suggestion that is sure to ruffle a lot of feathers. It all revolves around the father.
The way things are now, a man has no say in his child's future until that child is born. A woman can abort, she can put a baby up for adoption, she can do a lot of things, and the man has no say in any of it. How about this then? Give men (ones who are not married to the mother) the right to terminate their relationship with the child in the first trimester. It would be sort of like an abortion, but for the man's side. That way if an unwanted pregancy occurs, the man can wash his hands of it if the woman decides not to raise the child. After all, sex includes two people, why is it that the woman gets all the choices after that? This would put some balance back in things.
Of course it still doesn't resolve the issue of a woman who doesn't like the father and doesn't tell him that he got her pregnant until the kid is 5 and she wants child support. That ain't fair either. If you decide to leave the father out of the child's life completely, you shouldn't have the right to drag him back in just because you got some money troubles. You made the choice to leave him out, you should have to stick with it. And the same point applies to men who decide to terminate their relationship in the first trimester. They can't then decide to get back in the kid's life years later.
What about the idea of a man forcing a woman to finish the pregnancy? What if a man REALLY nwats that child, and the woman wants an abortion. The way things are now, the man can go fuck himself for all the law cares, but the opposite is not true. If a woman wants to carry the child and the man doesn't, the woman gets to, and not only that, but she can stick the man with child support. This is sexual discrimination, plain and simple. Is it fair that a woman would have to carry a baby for 9 months? Not really, but it's also not fair that a woman has 100% of the decisions regarding unborn children.
5 Comments:
"she can put a baby up for adoption [without consent of the father]" - I'm not sure that's accurate.
What you fail to see, Wino, is that women always bear the consequences of pregnancy (100% of the time) which is why it's nice to have these laws (which are all quite new, if you hadn't noticed) to protect women in situations where they would have to bear these consequences alone. I do understand that to some extent men are therefore left without certain rights regarding the outcome of the pregnancy, but that is mostly because when a woman elects to have an abortion or to give a child up for adoption, these is because she is either at a stage in her life where she cannot raise a child, or she doesn't have the financial means to raise a child. A lot the time she is not married to the man who fathered her child, and a lot of times the father will dissapear, refuse to pay child support etc. (I don't just make this assumption, if you like I can provide statistics, or we can ask my roommate who worked at Planned Parenthood for years.)
What I'm curious to know is just how many men out there are part of a situation where they don't want the woman they fertilized to abort or give the child up for adoption for a reason other than Jesus says it's wrong (even though Jesus also thinks it wrong to have sex out of wedlock). Are there really lots of unmarried fathers fighting for the rights of their unborn children, or are you complaining because you've found legislation out there that doesn't split rights between men and women 50/50? Because I can point out plenty of pieces of legislation that give rights to men that women do not have. Here's a few for you: women in the military can neither serve on submarines, and cannot train as Navy SEALS. Up until recently there has been no legislation in California protecting women from being raped by their husbands. Women still make less than men in comparable jobs regardless of laws that are meant to prohibit those kinds of things.
I'd say you and your gender have got it pretty well.
I'd think there are a lot of men out there who never found out that they got some woman pregnant, and might have liked to have raised the child had momma told him about it before the abortion. And I know there are plenty of times a man abandons a woman. Just because some men are jerks doesn't mean they all are. The laws are completely biased to the mother and men have no rights. That should be illegal.
Men are just as capable as women of raising a child. Women, by and large, are not nearly as capable as men of surviving Navy Seal training and then combat. That doesn't mean women shouldn't be allowed in combat, but the physiological differences are pretty obvious.
I'm usually for equal rights in all things, but in this case, not. When a man can die in the process of becoming a father, then they can have equal rights in becoming one. Until we can take care of that frightening sometime consequence of pregnancy, biology makes things inherently unequal, and no law can change that.
Then we should acknowledge the differences between genders in all areas, not just pregnancy. Look at what happened to the President of Harvard, who looked at years and years of data and noticed what is quite apparant. In certain academic pursuits, men seem to have more natural ability than women, and in others women have more natural ability than men. Despite the obviousness of this, at least one female professor listening said she felt like vomiting, and Mr. Summers was dragged over the coals for months afterwards. If we are going to admit that women are different than men in one area, then it's dishonest to say they are equal in all others because it's simply not true.
And obviously none of this is universal, even the pregnancy thing. No men can get pregnant, but there are also plenty of women that cannot either.
Hey Pam, you should check out my friend Scott's blog at http://truthbyscott.blogspot.com/ Grnated, he's pretty liberal, and I usually disagree with him, but his analysissesses (I don't know how to pluralize that) are usually much deeper and more well thought out than mine. Of course I post as soon as I think of something to say, whereas he seems to plan out what he writes and posts far less often than I.
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