“My
body, my choice” is a common refrain for women in the
pro-choice movement. I happen to agree with it. What women choose to
do when they get pregnant is truly none of my business.
Yet
the abortion debate swirls and twists and roars as if men played
absolutely no role in getting women pregnant. As if all pregnancies
were some kind of immaculate conceptions.
Our
society and culture puts almost all the onus and responsibility (and,
often enough, blame) on women for getting pregnant. For pro-lifers, a
woman, once pregnant, is then obligated to have a baby and care for
it until adulthood, else put it up for adoption.
But
what about the father’s obligation? After all, unless we’re
talking the Virgin Mary here, she didn’t get pregnant alone.
(And even the Virgin Mary had help of a godly kind.)
I’d
have a bit more tolerance for pro-lifers if they’d agreed to
these rules:
1.
The biological father is also responsible, financially and legally
and otherwise, for raising the baby until adulthood.
2. If the
father isn’t married to the mother in question, and the mother
keeps the child, he is legally obligated to pay for child support.
For argument’s sake, let’s say he’s obligated to
contribute 20% of his pay until the child reaches the age of
eighteen.
If
men were held legally and morally responsible for all the children
they fathered, and this was strictly enforced by
society
and the state, with deadbeat dads becoming society’s new
outcasts, I wonder how long it would take for
abortion to
be made legal and universally available in America?
