Posted on 12/16/2021 7:11:47 PM PST by workerbee
This May, I’ll graduate from law school and start my career as a public interest lawyer — a dream come true. At 28, after 10 years of college and multiple graduate schools, in many ways, it feels like my life is just about to begin.
It would be a terrible time to have a baby.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve always wanted to have kids. I love the relationship I have with my parents and can't imagine not getting to experience fatherhood. I think I’d be good at it. That said, I’m not in a relationship. I haven’t built a nest egg. And, frankly, after two years of a global pandemic, I want to eke out and enjoy every last minute of my 20s. In too many ways, I'm unsettled.
We often talk about the ways access to birth control and safe abortion empowers women. And it does: I believe that access to safe abortion is a basic human right. On a human and policy level, it’s infuriating to watch a partisan Supreme Court erode and threaten to eliminate that right.Women’s bodily autonomy should not be up for debate.
But men like me have also long been the direct beneficiaries of safe abortion access. Giving women the choice not to carry unwanted pregnancies often means we, too, can delay parenthood until we are ready.
Since I've spent 10 of the past 11 years as a student, most of the women I've had sex with were also students, also progressive, and also not at a point in their lives where they were looking or ready to have children. I try to share responsibility for birth control and if a woman tells me she's on it, I also trust that. If she still got pregnant, however, though entirely her decision, I assume we would both want the same thing: an abortion. In longer-term relationships, we've had explicit discussions about this.
It is the duty of both sexual partners to be proactive about safe sex, but in reality, too often this burden falls disproportionately on women. Admittedly, I’ve often relied on my female sexual partners to protect me from unwanted pregnancy. During my MBA, I recall panicking in an Uber to the train station after hanging out with a medical student I had met on Tinder and had seen a few times. She had a latex allergy. We didn’t use our best judgment. Then I got her text. She had decided to take plan B as an extra precaution. I was relieved.
To my knowledge, I’ve never gotten anyone pregnant. On an academic level, I’ve followed the entrenched, decades-long, conservative effort to undermine access to safe abortions. Yet until this moment, I've viewed accessible abortion as something my partners and I could reasonably rely on as a last resort. That security has informed my approach to sexual exploration and relationships. From this vantage point, access to abortion is not just a women’s issue, but a public health issue that directly affects anyone who engages in sexual relationships that might lead to pregnancy.
Of course, these are merely my preferences. All kinds of people of all backgrounds make great parents — even when they weren't planning or prepared for children. Still, I feel I owe it to myself, my future partner and my future children to establish a foundation that allows me to be the best dad I can possibly be. As such, the timing and circumstances matter.
I admit I’m scared of what eliminating access to abortion would mean for my own life.
What if I got a woman pregnant? What if she didn’t want to continue the pregnancy, but could not get an abortion? Would we try to stay together, even if it wasn't a fit? What kind of custody or visitation rights would I get if we weren’t together? How would I provide for the child? Would adoption really be a consideration, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently glibly suggested? If so, would the child face an abusive welfare system? The questions and worries abound.
Too often, male engagement with the pro-choice movement has been articulated solely through the lens of female empowerment. (Or with some trite narrative of fathers talking about their daughters, or brothers, their sisters.) Of course, men should serve as allies in defending women’s bodily autonomy. Again, control over one’s person is a basic human right.
My goal is not to equate — or even compare — men’s relationship with safe abortion policy to that of women. However, in viewing women as the only beneficiaries of safe abortion access, many men conveniently side-step defending a policy they have long taken for granted. At the least, men should be honest about the ways we also benefit.
Such a fancy way of saying "I'm a horndog Ievery chance I get. If she gets knocked up, eff it. Her problem!"
Every person’s life would be more convenient if they could just get rid of inconvenient people.
(If you like this idea, I can point you to some 20th century tyrants you might be interested in idolizing.)
When was that?
I read manor court records and there are judgments entered against men who knocked up some chick a thousand years ago.
If you read colonial court records you find the same thing.
The child had financial provisions made for them.
> Men like me benefit from safe abortion access <
Yes, and persons in a will benefit when the maker of the will is murdered. That doesn’t make the murder right.
Sounds like a real Romeo...women must swoon over him.
"Many conservatives" are wrong.
"Many conservatives" are White Knights who fear criticizing women. When men do wrong, they blame men. When women do wrong, they blame men.
Similarly, many conservatives prefer attacking "white liberals" for black dysfunction, rather than blacks themselves.
"Many conservatives" prefer to focus their attacks on white men, to prove that they're not sexist or racist.
Can’t remember where I read it long ago but they said in all surveys from the beginning the biggest group in favor of abortions was young males.
And somewhere there’s a statistic on the estimated number of coerced or intimidated decisions to have an abortion by men toward their pregnant women sex partners. It was high. Can’t find a good reliable source right now.
Can’t you keep it in your pants, a$$hole?
(I was halfway through this before I realized it was not the Bee...)
Gibberish. And false.
Many men never know. Pregnant women don’t have to tell them and many don’t. Source: my theee years employment at a crisis pregnancy center.
So yeah don’t say “whew I never got anyone pregnant. None of my children got killed.” If you use whores or sleep around they may well have.
Almost perfect solution: only do your wife and marry a decent person. In three years, I had ONE married woman abort. One.
What a prince.
It’s scary to think this person would ever be a parent. Perhaps he should consider being neutered.
Yes my experience at the cpc:
Women who liked or loved the dads and the dads wanted to keep usually kept.
Women with one night stands or men they don’t like usually kill. And if the dad doesn’t want it they virtually never keep.
RE: not safe....
Someone on FR once commented to me that he is a medical doctor and it is tragic and common a hospital emergency room will handle a woman rushed there after a botched or crudely handled legal abortion. Abortion place won’t say they did it, of course. He said the staff has to somehow discern what drugs were given to her and in what amounts during and after it, and may not have any record of her past heart or blood pressure or breathing problems and so on.
That is not “safe.”
Yep, and it’s a very inconvenient truth for some to hear.
Hey, what if she DID want to continue the pregnancy? You'd face the same questions. And many, many more. That can happen when you don't "use your best judgment."
10 of the last 11 years a student. I think I see the problem. Well, at least he has spent his long childhood studying something he's going to need...
But along the way, he's missed some other things he's going to need. Morals. Responsibility. God.
You know what kind of men benefit the most from legalized abortion?
Rapists. Especially child rapists.
Makes it so much easer to cover up the crime. Plus, there is the added ‘benefit’ of further traumatizing and silencing the victim by shackling her with shame and guilt, as she will feel powerless and complicit in the crimes perpetrated against her.
Women themselves are to blame for "psychologically damaging" themselves by sexual liberation. They asked for it -- they demanded it -- they got it.
Try tell a modern young woman that she can't sleep around, or get an abortion, and most will bite off your head.
I suspect there are more honorable young men out there, seeking a wife, than young women looking for marriage. Read what young men are saying on the manosphere. Women these days (including Christian and conservative women) don't want to marry until after they've "experienced life" (i.e., slept around).
As for the author of this article, I detect a groveling tone. Constantly groveling about a woman's bodily autonomy, which is sacred and which he'd never dare challenge.
This man isn't taking advantage of women. He's groveling before them, hoping he's saying the things they want to hear, pretending that he likes the same things she likes.
Such a cavalier attitude they have toward taking a precious baby’s life.
Heartrending.
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