During two of my son’s naps today, I read some academic pro-choice philosophy.
I came across some discussion by professors Laurie Shrage and Elizabeth Brake on “forced fatherhood.” They are addressing the pro-choice tension where mothers are free to abort their children, but if children are born, fathers are not free to walk away from the children. They are forced to pay child support. These men are often referred to as “desperate.”
Quote from professor Laurie Shrage’s New York Times’ piece:
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.
Let’s keep in mind that this tends to be the same crowd that pushes sex education on younger and younger kids, arguably with age inappropriate materials.
It seems that Sex Ed 101 teaches where babies come from. Babies are conceived via sex. Sex = babies.
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If that’s the case and if most people in North America are aware of this fact, how in the world can a man “accidentally” conceive a child?
This can only happen in an abortion-promoting culture where we attempt to separate sex from pro-creation. We all know that no contraception is 100% effective. But what is pretty darn effective is abortion.
And this is what leads to an inconceivable quote like this one:
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.
Therefore sex no longer leads to babies, or unwanted babies in any case, therefore men and women can become “accidentally” pregnant, bear no responsibility and the child in the womb is killed or, if he/she lives, may have to do without a “desperate” parent who opted out.
The rabbit hole goes down further, but my son is hungry. Off I go.
by 
The more I spend time around this issue, the more I come to realize that this is the crux of the problem. But how to solve it? I think that being involved in your children’s education, and really keeping a firm eye on what’s happening in your kid’s sex ed classroom (I had to pull my daughter out of sex ed) is a good place to start, but it’s not enough.
I’m struggling with this from a variety of angles. I plan to write about this a little more. Ugh.
For me it’s an issue of responsibility and maturity. Grownups take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. While we might not hold an adolescent to bear the full brunt of the consequences of their actions (see the Young Offenders Act), once you get past the age of maturity, we do expect you to pony up.
So I don’t really understand where these guys are coming from. Either they really, truly believe that babies are not a natural and expected outcome from sex (in which case it is hard to believe that they passed basic Biology), or they really truly believe that we don’t need to take responsibility for our actions.
Either way it’s an immature position, and I am really shocked that it has taken off so far in our society.
Pam Stenzel talks about this extensively with the teens to whom she gives her abstinence talks. She has alarming stats on STDs, pregnancy rates, etc and she takes the approach of “shocking” teens with these stats. One thing I recall vividly is how she emphasized how men are on the hook for the babies that are wanted, many of them paying support for years. I wish that we had someone like her making the rounds of Canadian schools. Perhaps we do, but I haven’t heard of anyone.
http://www.pamstenzel.com
Thanks for the info on Pam. I think I’ll check out her books.
Abstinence education in Canadian schools? My, my, but the usual loud suspects would go apoplectic, and the person who brought it in would either recant with an apology, or lose his job. (At least that is the way it seems to go to me.)