On opting out
The case sometimes trumpted as "Roe vs. Wade for men" has been on my mind lately, mostly because I find it confusing.
On one hand, my immediate reaction is "Are you kidding? It took you both to make the baby in the first place!" But then, if I were to accidentally become pregnant, I would have various options available to me: I could have a baby and raise it or, with the father's consent, put it up for adoption. Since I don't live in South Dakota, I could have an abortion. In some states, I could take advantage of the "Baby Moses laws" that remove or reduce criminal penalties for babies abandoned at designated locations like hospitals.
The father wouldn't have nearly as many options. He could try to exert pressure on me to make a particular decision, or choose to give or withhold consent to give a baby up for adoption. But if I chose to have the baby and raise him or her myself, even if he chose not to participate, he would have no legal recourse against a demand for child support.
He also doesn't have the same kinds of options I do to prevent pregnancy in the first place. I think it is perfectly appropriate that reliable methods of birth control were developed first for women, but decades later, men's options are still limited to condoms or sterilization. Would a case like this one even be necessary if he had the option of popping a daily pill in return for excellent odds against his partners becoming pregnant?
As much as I emotionally rebel against the idea of a father opting out of the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood, I do think he should get some choices. What I don't like about this case is the bizarre equivalency it draws between a woman's ability to "opt out" via abortion and a man's potential ability to do so via money. The message sounds to me a little like "You have the option to have an abortion, so if you don't, be it on your head!" (Women can, of course, opt out financially by giving a baby up for adoption, but that still seems a far cry from signing on a dotted line.)
At this particular moment, I think this kind of law may be the most palatable of a set of bad options; I certainly consider it far preferable to any change in abortion law that would give men more control. And everyone, including the plantiff, seems to believe that the present case is valuable more as a discussion-opener rather than a serious legal move. In that sense, it seems deserving of our consideration: is it a viable or acceptable option? If dads opt out of financial responsibility, who picks up the slack? If none of our current options are acceptable, what would be a better one, and how do we get from here to there?
On one hand, my immediate reaction is "Are you kidding? It took you both to make the baby in the first place!" But then, if I were to accidentally become pregnant, I would have various options available to me: I could have a baby and raise it or, with the father's consent, put it up for adoption. Since I don't live in South Dakota, I could have an abortion. In some states, I could take advantage of the "Baby Moses laws" that remove or reduce criminal penalties for babies abandoned at designated locations like hospitals.
The father wouldn't have nearly as many options. He could try to exert pressure on me to make a particular decision, or choose to give or withhold consent to give a baby up for adoption. But if I chose to have the baby and raise him or her myself, even if he chose not to participate, he would have no legal recourse against a demand for child support.
He also doesn't have the same kinds of options I do to prevent pregnancy in the first place. I think it is perfectly appropriate that reliable methods of birth control were developed first for women, but decades later, men's options are still limited to condoms or sterilization. Would a case like this one even be necessary if he had the option of popping a daily pill in return for excellent odds against his partners becoming pregnant?
As much as I emotionally rebel against the idea of a father opting out of the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood, I do think he should get some choices. What I don't like about this case is the bizarre equivalency it draws between a woman's ability to "opt out" via abortion and a man's potential ability to do so via money. The message sounds to me a little like "You have the option to have an abortion, so if you don't, be it on your head!" (Women can, of course, opt out financially by giving a baby up for adoption, but that still seems a far cry from signing on a dotted line.)
At this particular moment, I think this kind of law may be the most palatable of a set of bad options; I certainly consider it far preferable to any change in abortion law that would give men more control. And everyone, including the plantiff, seems to believe that the present case is valuable more as a discussion-opener rather than a serious legal move. In that sense, it seems deserving of our consideration: is it a viable or acceptable option? If dads opt out of financial responsibility, who picks up the slack? If none of our current options are acceptable, what would be a better one, and how do we get from here to there?
posted by Sarah at 10:51 AM
6 Comments:
A half-finished line of thought:
Would the answers be clearer if magic artificial-womb technology made it possible for a woman with an unplanned pregnancy to choose adoption without going through most of pregnancy?
It seems to me like it would-- if you take away a bunch of the reasons people have qualms about abortion, saying "you chose to have this baby; now you have to take responsibility" largely changes from creepy to reasonable.
Which is to say that we (as a society) tend to think an unexpectedly-pregnant woman has more or better reasons to have a baby than an accidentally-impregnating man has to accept financial responsibility. Something feels wrong about that, to me.
I agree that it would be clearer if there were some way to take pregnancy out of the equation: it would give women an equivalent option to a dotted-line signoff of responsibility and rights.
Which is to say that we (as a society) tend to think an unexpectedly-pregnant woman has more or better reasons to have a baby than an accidentally-impregnating man has to accept financial responsibility.
I think this is true because of a number of cultural assumptions, among them that women want kids and men are largely indifferent and that men want casual sex and women don't. Both of these seem patently false to me.
I also think we tend to assume that even with an unanticipated baby, pregnancy and its attendant hormones will cause the mother to develop some kind of affection and attachment for the baby-to-be, and thus by the birth, whle dad may remain indifferent, she will not. This one I have no experience with and so can't comment about.
But regarding this particular case, I think there's a third point, which is that after the pregnancy is discovered, a woman still has several chances to exercise her will about whether or not to have a baby, where a man has to stand by and wait to find out if he has accidentally incurred fiscal obligations. And this precisely is the source of my conflict: Is the best reaction, "Damn straight! You don't see him getting morning sick, do you?" or "Yeah, that kind of sucks?"
I could MAYBE see this in the case where the partners had a written agreement beforehand that the woman would abort if she got pregnant, and then she changed her mind.
For the test case, it's not clear to me whether she lied or was just incorrect about her fertility and birth control situation, and that matters to me.
I have yet to see any suggestion that the woman involved in this test case deliberately misled the man. I have yet to find any conclusive information on whether or not a man has legal recourse if a woman lies to him about her fertility or use of birth control, but clearly that's a case of bad faith in which it seems entirely unfair to hold him responsible for the results.
This whole thing is so fraught with unfairness in so many directions. Human nature, I feel, dictates that unplanned children lead to the worst of human behavior.
Think of this: a girl gets pregnant. The father and father's family try to get her to have an abortion. She doesn't. They get married. She leaves the guy. The guy and his family sue her for custody and child support for a child they never wanted in the first place. They win.
True story.
This whole thing is so fraught with unfairness in so many directions. Human nature, I feel, dictates that unplanned children lead to the worst of human behavior.
Think of this: a girl gets pregnant. The father and father's family try to get her to have an abortion. She doesn't. They get married. She leaves the guy. The guy and his family sue her for custody and child support for a child they never wanted in the first place. They win.
True story.
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