Letters to the Editor

• Biology sucks.

  [Read the article: Should men have to support children they father but don't want?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  When the only reliable method of birth control in existence was the condom, BC was entirely in the hands of men. Women suffered the stigma of the unwanted pregnancy, had to have the dangerous back-alley abortions or the heart-wrenching giving up the baby or the drudgery of single parenthood. Men could choose to use BC, but if they didn't, women generally had only the recourse of refusing to have sex in the first place. No law could fix that. We needed technology to do it.

  Now the law has equalized the playing field as much as possible, but the reality is: women have more BC options because it is easier to control female fertility -- it has innate controls built in, whereas male fertility doesn't. When a child isn't in someone's body the rights of the mother and father should be exactly equal -- my husband is a custodial dad who gets child support from the bio-mom of his children, when the state she works in feels like sending it, which lately isn't often. Men don't pay child support, non-custodial parents pay child support. Usually, of course, they're men, so men think of this as a men's rights issue. Unfortunately it's a children's rights issue and children have the right to receive support from both parents (custodial parents pay a lot more than non-custodials do, generally, but they pay it by living with the kid.)

  Your rights to your own fertility and the right to control it extend solely to control over your own body. Men don't have all the fertility control options women do. That sucks. Men can't terminate a pregnancy after it's begun. That sucks. Women can't terminate a pregnancy after it's begun without surgery or drugs and usually after jumping through outrageous hoops set for them by the religious right. That sucks. Women's health can be destroyed by pregnancy. That sucks a lot. Suckage all around. But men don't have the right to "financially" abort a child because women don't either -- the fact that women have the right to abort rests on the fact that it's in their body, and if it wasn't in their body I should think they would lose rights. (For instance, if I want another woman to bear my child because I can't physically handle a pregnancy, and I donate an egg, and she bears the child, and then I change my mind and I don't want it, I no longer have any rights to terminate. it's biologically my child but it's in her body. Once it's started, I can't stop it if it's not in my body. Actually, that recent case in England seems to say that one parent's desire to abort trumps the other's desire to have a child *if* the embryo is not in either of their bodies at the time.)

  Honestly? Men need to stop agitating for the right to legally not pay for their own child, and instead agitate for greater fairness in child support enforcement (part of the reason so few men pay is THEY DON'T HAVE THE MONEY, and the system is set up to assume that the non-custodial father is a deadbeat dad, not to provide him social services, help getting a job, or ensure his rights to visitation with his children.) If child support enforcement didn't arrest men who have no jobs for not having jobs, boot the cars of men who can't pay child support so they can't get to work (because that sure helps them pay, all right), or generally treat men like criminals for not paying when they *can't* pay instead of helping them get into a position to pay, maybe it would be less of a burden on men *and* men would skip out less, making it less of a burden on women. But you men who want the right to financially abort a child? You'd better make damn sure women retain the right to physically abort, or you're even more screwed than you already are. Robert Franklin's contention that men don't care about abortion rights because they don't have abortion rights is bass-ackward. Men have the right to not pay for a child that the mother has chosen to abort. If she loses the right to terminate, you lose what very little control you have -- right now your only power is to talk the woman into having an abortion, and if she can't get one you lose even that. (And if she loses the right to BC, you can kiss your ability to have casual sex *ever* goodbye.) Yeah, biology is unfair in that women have a longer window of time to prevent a birth than you do, and you are never going to solve that except through technology, so lobby Big Pharma to work harder on a male pill. But if women lose the right to an abortion, then every man who got a woman pregnant who *would* have had an abortion if she could will be on the hook for 18 years, not just the guys who sleep with women who *don't* want abortions. You need to be working with us on this, not "nya nya, if we can't walk away when you say no, you shouldn't be able to walk away either!"

  Permalink Thursday, March 9, 2006 06:10 PM