30 Years After Roe v. Wade,
How About Choice for Men?
by
Glenn Sacks
© 2003
On January
22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court eliminated a checkerboard of
state laws on reproductive freedom and guaranteed American women
choice throughout the country. Thirty years later, American men are
still waiting for the same right.
When a woman
gets pregnant she has the right to decide whether or not to carry the
baby to term, and whether to raise the child herself or to give it up
for adoption. In many states she can even terminate all parental
responsibility by returning the baby to the hospital within a few
weeks of birth. Yet if she decides she wants the child, she can demand
18 years of child support from the father, and he has no choice in the
matter. When it comes to reproduction, in America today women have
rights and men merely have responsibilities.
Certainly
nobody should be able to dictate to a woman what she can and cannot do
with her own body, thus the feminist slogan "My Body, My Choice." Yet
our current laws allow a woman to dictate to a man what to do with
his body. The average American father works a 51-hour work week,
one of the longest in the industrialized world. It is men,
overwhelmingly, who do our society's hazardous and most strenuous
jobs, and nearly 50 American workers--mostly men--are injured every
minute of the 40-hour work week. Can anybody deny that the sacrifices
required to pay 18 years of child support take a heavy toll on a man's
body, too? Where's his choice?
Feminists are
legitimately concerned that, if abortion were banned, the government
would be exercising control over a very intimate and important part of
a woman's life. But when a woman forces a man to be responsible for a
child only she wants, and when the state child-support apparatus takes
a third or more of his income and jails him if he comes up short,
isn't the government exercising control over his life?
The "Choice
for Men" movement seeks to give fathers the right to relinquish their
parental rights and responsibilities within a month of learning of a
pregnancy, just as mothers do when they choose to give their children
up for adoption. These men would be obligated to provide legitimate
financial compensation to cover pregnancy-related medical expenses and
the mother's loss of income during pregnancy. The right would only
apply to pregnancies which occurred outside of marriage, and women
would still be free to exercise all of the reproductive choices they
now have.
Advocates of
Choice for Men note that over 1.5 million American women legally walk
away from motherhood every year by either adoption, abortion, or
abandonment, and demand that men, like women, be given reproductive
options. They point out that, unlike women, men have no reliable
contraception available to them, since the failure rate of condoms is
substantial, and vasectomies are impractical for young men who plan on
becoming fathers later in life.
Since there
are long backlogs of stable, two-parent families looking for babies to
adopt, there is no reason why any child born out of wedlock to
unwilling parents would be without a good home. In addition, if women
knew that they could not compel men to pay to support children they do
not want, the number of unwed births (and the social problems
associated with them) would be reduced.
Some of those
who fought for women's reproductive choices support choice for men.
Karen DeCrow, former president of the National Organization for Women,
writes:
"If a woman
makes a unilateral decision to bring a pregnancy to term, and the
biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he
should not be liable for 21 years of support ... autonomous women
making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men
to finance their choice."
To date,
courts have refused to respect men's reproductive rights even in the
most extreme cases, including: when child support is demanded from men
who were as young as 12 when they were statutorily raped by older
women; when women have taken the semen from a used condom and inserted
it in themselves, including from condoms used only in oral sex; and
when a woman has concealed her pregnancy from her former partner
(denying him the right to be a father) and then sued for back and
current child support eight or ten years later.
The National
Abortion Rights Action League (renamed "NARAL Pro-Choice America" on
January 1 of this year), has been in the forefront of the struggle for
choice for women for over three decades. They explain that "the
essence of America is the right to determine the course of one's life,
to make one's own choices and shape one's own destiny. A woman's
freedom to choose is integral to that concept of liberty." Fine words,
but is there one of them which does not apply equally to men?
Shouldn't men have a choice, too?
Glenn
Sacks writes about gender issues from the male perspective. He can be
reached at
Glenn@GlennSacks.com .
This article originally
appeared on the Glenn J. Sacks
Website
and appears here with the permission of the author.
Copyright 2003 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
