In what’s actually a pretty reasonable and thoughtful piece, one woman says yes: That abortion rights given women an out from being parents, and we shouldn’t tell men that having sex means taking on the responsibility to have a child:
Women’s rights advocates have long struggled for motherhood to be a voluntary condition, and not one imposed by nature or culture. In places where women and girls have access to affordable and safe contraception and abortion services, and where there are programs to assist mothers in distress find foster or adoptive parents, voluntary motherhood is basically a reality. In many states, infant safe haven laws allow a birth mother to walk away from her newborn baby if she leaves it unharmed at a designated facility.
If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck with years of child support payments.
Do men now have less reproductive autonomy than women? Should men have more control over when and how they become parents, as many women now do?
The political philosopher Elizabeth Brake has argued that our policies should give men who accidentally impregnate a woman more options, and that feminists should oppose policies that make fatherhood compulsory. In a 2005 article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy she wrote, “if women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.” At most, according to Brake, men should be responsible for helping with the medical expenses and other costs of a pregnancy for which they are partly responsible.
Few feminists, including Brake, would grant men the right to coerce a woman to have (or not to have) an abortion, because they recognize a woman’s right to control her own body. However, if a woman decides to give birth to a child without securing the biological father’s consent to raise a child with her, some scholars and policy makers question whether he should be assigned legal paternity.
Historically, it was important for women to have husbands who acknowledged paternity for their children, as children born to unmarried parents were deemed “illegitimate” and had fewer rights than children born to married parents. Today, the marital status of a child’s parents affects much less that child’s future. Nevertheless, having two legal parents is a significant advantage for a child, and establishing legal paternity for both married and unmarried fathers is a complicated but necessary part of our public policies.
As more children are born to unmarried parents, the social and legal preference for awarding paternity to the mother’s husband becomes more outdated. When there is a dispute about fatherhood rights and obligations, the courts can use different criteria for assigning legal paternity. These include a man’s marital or marriage-like relationship with the child’s mother, his caregiving and support role in the child’s life, and his biological relationship to the child.
The legal scholar Jane Murphy has argued that a new definition of fatherhood is emerging in our laws and court decisions which privileges a man’s biological tie to a child over other criteria. In a 2005 article in the Notre Dame Law Review, Murphy wrote about paternity “disestablishment” cases in which men who have assumed the father role in a child’s life seek genetic testing to avoid the obligations of legal fatherhood, typically when they break up with the child’s mother. Her research shows that replacing the limited “mother’s husband” conception of fatherhood with a narrow biologically based one still leaves many children legally fatherless.
Furthermore, Murphy explains how the new definition of ‘fatherhood’ is driven by the government’s goal of collecting child support from men whose biological offspring are in the welfare system, as well as lawsuits from men aiming to avoid financial responsibility for their dependents. Murphy, then, reasonably proposes that judges and legislators “recognize multiple bases for legal fatherhood” and be guided by “the traditional goals of family law — protecting children and preserving family stability.” Murphy argues for revising paternity establishment policies so that fewer men become legal fathers involuntarily or without understanding the legal responsibilities they are assuming.
Court-ordered child support does make sense, say, in the case of a divorce, when a man who is already raising a child separates from the child’s mother, and when the child’s mother retains custody of the child. In such cases, expectations of continued finiancial support recognize and stabilize a parent’s continued caregiving role in a child’s life. However, just as court-ordered child support does not make sense when a woman goes to a sperm bank and obtains sperm from a donor who has not agreed to father the resulting child, it does not make sense when a woman is impregnated (accidentally or possibly by her choice) from sex with a partner who has not agreed to father a child with her. In consenting to sex, neither a man nor a woman gives consent to become a parent, just as in consenting to any activity, one does not consent to yield to all the accidental outcomes that might flow from that activity.
Policies that punish men for accidental pregnancies also punish those children who must manage a lifelong relationship with an absent but legal father. These “fathers” are not “dead-beat dads” failing to live up to responsibilities they once took on — they are men who never voluntarily took on the responsibilities of fatherhood with respect to a particular child. We need to respect men’s reproductive autonomy, as Brake suggests, by providing them more options in the case of an accidental pregnancy. And we need to protect children and stabilize family relationships, as Murphy suggests, by broadening our definition of “father” to include men who willingly perform fatherlike roles in a child’s life, and who, with informed consent, have accepted the responsibilities of fatherhood.
These are more compelling arguments than those usually used by men’s rights activists, but they still fail. What a lot of “what about the dads??” commentators seem to be forgetting is that child support is for the child, not the mother. Abortion rights don’t mean that a woman can get out of being a parent to a living child. Once the child is born, it’s entitled to support from both of its parents. Yes, women can surrender infants at hospitals — Save Haven laws were passed in most states in response to the “prom baby” hysteria, that teenage girls were giving birth and committing infanticide. But as I understand it, infant surrenders under Save Haven laws are fairly rare. And Safe Haven laws only apply to infants. Jessica Valenti talks about this in her latest book, but a few years ago Nebraska made its Safe Haven laws applicable to any children under the age of 18; something like 35 families attempted to surrender older children, and the state changed the law.
And as a general rule, adoption law requires that the biological father is also notified and can surrender his rights. Outside of infant safe haven laws, women can’t just turn their children over to the state with no consent from the father, if the father is known (and at least in some states, authorities will look for the father of an infant dropped off under Safe Haven). Nor can a mother push the child off on the father and demand he take full responsibility, financial and otherwise. Once the child is born, the rights of both parents are more or less equal, because the state interest is in the child.
Before the child is born, yes, the woman has the right to terminate, because she’s not obligated to use her body to carry a pregnancy against her will. Men who are capable of getting pregnant are also entitled to terminate pregnancies. What these fathers’ rights advocates are asking for is essentially a special right for men that women generally don’t have: The right to not support your own child, aside from surrendering that child for adoption.
I also wonder at what point these advocates would suggest severing fatherhood responsibilities. Before a certain point in the woman’s pregnancy, so that she can terminate if she decides she can’t support a child herself? That seems like it wouldn’t be particularly appealing to pro-lifers (and certainly isn’t appealing to pro-choicers for its coercion). But this author is also concerned about the apparently dim-witted dude so excited about a girlfriend’s pregnancy that he signs the birth certificate but wants to terminate his rights at some later time. So men should just get to sever their parental rights whenever they feel like it?
Considering the fact that child support delinquency is extremely common and payments aren’t strongly enforced by the courts, and that fairly significant shares of women never seek child support, this doesn’t seem like a hugely pressing social issue. And the men who don’t want to pay to support their own children, who a former female partner is doing the actual hard work of raising, aren’t particularly sympathetic.
These folks aren’t asking for equality. They’re asking for preferential treatment, above even the state interest in children.