Life is less often like an organized road-map that we lay out and follow, and more often a conglomeration of roads taken as they are encountered, those encounters driven either by chance or a directly attributable personal choice or action.
People make choices. Women often make choices to spread their legs and allow unprotected sexual activity with men, and men make choices to go between those legs and have unprotected sexual activity with women.
Those are choices people make. We aren’t beasts that copulate only because instinct tells us we have to do it. We have a choice in the matter.
For centuries, a man confronted with that choice of having unprotected sex with a woman was expected by most cultures to have responsibility in some way for any children resulting from that encounter.
Over time, cultural mores were established, and laws were made to protect women overall from the predations of men who wanted the sexual activity without the responsibility.
Women were encouraged not to have sexual relationships with men outside of marriage at the risk of shame and an unsupported pregnancy.
Men were encouraged not to have sexual relations with women outside of marriage that would result in pregnancy.
Women were encouraged not to have sex, and men were encouraged to have protected sex if they did. Men were also expected morally, culturally, and legally to provide for any child resulting that union.
These were all things, attitudes, penalties, recrimination, shame, that were all put in place with the ostensible end of protecting women from the predations of men. It wasn’t perfect
Between 1950 and 1980, this entire substructure was turned on its head. As Phyllis Schlafly outlined often in her campaigns against the Equal Rights Amendment, it wasn’t good for women because it destroyed the protections for women, as imperfect as they were, that had been built by centuries of experience.
But even though the ERA was never passed, cultural changes acted as if it had, and that left abortion as the only protection. Which is a horrible outcome.
Reading this linked article angers me, because it assumes that men can readily reject any of the responsibilities for their actions and that abortion is GOOD because it allows them to do it.
Well said. Exactly.