A Man's Right to Choose?

Last week Dalton Conley ignited a firestorm of debate with his editorial in the New York Times, “A Man’s Right to Choose.” Conley argued that a man should have an equal say as to whether the woman he impregnates has an abortion (i.e., he should be able to have a veto). No, really, he did say that. I’m an avid reader of Salon.com, and one of its writers suggested taking Conley’s equality argument one step further and allowing the man to force an abortion on the woman if he does not want to become a parent. Needless to say, this touched off even more controversy; and the writer later recanted, acknowledging that the practical implications of his suggestion were too nightmarish to contemplate. There are still discussion threads going on about this topic today, and parsing through all the issues they raise was interesting enough to share with a wider audience. [Note: You probably can't get access to the Salon stuff unless you get a day pass. Sorry about that -- it is a pay site.]

Conley’s view that men should have a say in whether a pregnancy is terminated comes from personal experience: an ex-girlfriend of his once had an abortion against his wishes. One must wonder how often this situation occurs, but it’s hard not to be at least a little sympathetic to Conley and to other men in his position. The reason for this is that a pregnancy represents so much potential, and so much change. It is like a fork in the road of life, particularly for people who do not already have children. Follow this path to its usual conclusion (barring miscarriage or stillbirth), and your life is utterly changed … and if a child is something you wanted, to say that the change is a positive thing is probably a gross understatement.

Still, Conley’s argument that men being able to have a veto over abortion (and its logical extension, forcing abortions if the man does not want to be a parent) in order for things to be “fair” and “equal” signals to me a miscomprehension of what equality is. It is the assumption that equal treatment must necessarily be same treatment. Logic states that like things should be treated alike -- this concept forms much of the basis for the way Western legal systems think about equality. And although with respect to most things I would argue that men and women should be treated presumptively equally, reproduction is the outlier, the precise thing that distinguishes women from men. When it comes to pregnancy, women and men are not similarly situated.

Certainly this is in some sense unfair. I sympathize with Conley because I am so enthralled with the idea of conceiving and bearing children that I cannot imagine being relegated to the sidelines in what is arguably life’s most fulfilling enterprise. I understand how powerless and unimportant men have come to feel because they believe that women don’t “need” them anymore (not entirely unreasonably). Not only are they on the outside looking in during pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, now women don’t need their companionship or financial support either. And if some of the angry male posters on Salon are any indication, a good many men feel so marginalized by women’s independence that they pretty much hate all women and conceive of them as controlling, manipulative, and cold. They also seem to believe that our culture is “man-hating” and that women actually have more freedom, rights, and choices in life in general than men do. As we used to say in high school, whew doggie.

About half of this discussion was focused on the power that these men believe women exercise over their (the men’s) sexuality, with a lot of name-calling and accusations of hypocrisy and malice. The other half of the discussion concerned money, specifically the fact that men who father children are financially liable to support those children under our current legal system -- and a number of them resent it. A great many Salon posters either proposed or supported the idea that men should have a window of time in which they can “opt out” of all of the rights and responsibilities of parenthood if they do not want to become a parent. This, many felt, would be an acceptable compromise that would make the problem of unwanted parenthood fairer to men. (Though it would do nothing to solve Mr. Conley’s problem).

Under our current legal system, though, the right to child support belongs to the child, not to either of the parents. If we changed this, what would the practical effects be? Because we have a government that does very little to subsidize caregiving, the effect would clearly be disastrous for the single parents (mostly women) who are trying to raise children without a partner. But at the same time, I can sympathize with the argument that twenty years or so of having your wages garnished to support a child you didn’t want is just a little bit like slavery. Plenty of Salon posters countered that the men had a choice – of whether or not to wear a condom, get a vasectomy, or only be with partners who they knew well enough to be reasonably sure that an unplanned pregnancy would not happen (or that they would be agree on a course of action if birth control failed). But to me, that sounds a little too much like telling women that if they have sex, they should have to live with the consequences – it’s a very sex-negative view that doesn’t cut people nearly enough slack for occasionally making a poor decision, and sets the stage for a lot of rejected children.

Although I found the Conley editorial and subsequent discussions interesting, I have not come up with any easy answers to the questions they raised. Shrugging my shoulders and saying “life isn’t fair” is inadequate. And I am not in favor of a ban on early abortions – which no one on Salon suggested, because, well, it’s Salon, but which some readers in this forum would probably say is the “best” solution.

The best I can do is to point out (as others did) that while a lot of things sound high-minded and just in theory, when you start to think about the practical implications of embedding them in public policy, the picture can appear far different. If a putative father had a right to force an unwilling woman to continue a pregnancy, would he also have the right to shove folic acid tablets down her throat, keep her from changing the cat litter, take a glass of wine out of her hand, or otherwise utterly control how she behaved during the pregnancy? If not, why not, under the logic that men should have an equal right to the product of a pregnancy? Now, I hope it goes without saying that the prospect of this happening in real life is absurd. Ultimately, to me, the fact that pregnancy happens in a woman’s body, and not a man’s, tips the balance. Not to mention that forcing an unwilling woman to continue a pregnancy seems to lead inexorably to a parade of horribles that we really wouldn’t want. Which is why, at the end of the day, I think that most women, most of the time, should be trusted with the choice of whether or not to end a pregnancy.