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.
What an ass, this young generation of "men". In my day, a young man would take responsibility and do the right thing - be a father to the child and help care for it. Guys who think like that ass should get their tubes tied and have their "fun".
You bet. Planned Butcherhood happily steps in to take care of the 14-yr-old and her 28-yr-old “boyfriend.”.
Cretin is too nice a word for this trash.
Isn’t the saying, “ Dumb f@kers gonna f@ck.”
Where did they lose self respect snd self control? This dweeb should put a condom on his face head, until he no longer breathes.
I completely agree. These young women think sleeping around a couple hundred times will give them skills to keep a man.
Honestly, I’d rather marry an inexperienced woman, who was so nervous about sex that she wore flannel pajamas for the first two weeks of marriage, while I worked to make her comfortable.
Rather than somebody who could sexually rock my world on the first night. In this secodn situation, there is no intimacy. There is no growth in sexual experience for the both of us if she’s done it all and I have to just robotically do what she knows stimulates her.
Was it Reagan who said the only people who support abortion have been born already?
Richard Head…..Dick, for short.
Go ahead and have your fun, Biff. If it results in the death of an innocent, well, so what?
Dude is a tampon.
I agree 100%. The Democrat Party that today routinely says abortion is safe is the same Democrat Party that once routinely said that slavery is about freedom.
He admits he's scared of taking responsibility for his part in making a baby.
Take responsibility and get a vasectomy if you you're so scared dumb-ass.
So many stories about people whining about themselves and trying to justify murdering babies.
I’m a mother of 3 young adult men and have told them that they have NO “reproductive rights” and that any woman they sleep with can and will either abort or demand and receive 18+ years of child support of 25% of their salary. (This is not taught in sex Ed in high school.).
Therefore I’ve told them to only sleep with women they love and trust and would be willing to marry and/or have a child with. Women lie about being on birth control and men believe them.
Egad. I think you forgot the cuck alert.
In the end, in horrible way, justice will be done. This ____ is unlikely to reproduce. Absent a serious change in perspective, he will die alone and his passing will go unremarked.
I read this and it screams, it is all about me. He doesn’t have a clue what the public’s interest is. He is more like an 18 year old than a 28 year old.
He was in college pursuing a desirable degree and looks better than the average guy. If he is over six feet tall he could play the field. I am sure he hooked up with plenty of women given the basics and what he wrote. Does he care about any of them?
I feel sorry for him and the people that will have to associate with him.
Absolutely - you cut right to the heart of this idiotic argument.
O Lord, please do not let this “progressive” reproduce. Please do not let him clone, xerox, or replicate himself in any way. Please do not use him as a sperm donor. This young man is a selfish idiot, and, as you know, we have way too many of those already. In your wisdom and using his gifts, please let him live the life of the non-reproductive intellectual in the movie “Idiocracy”. He’s perfect for the role.
Lol...hahaha..good one
So get yourself a “proud to be a douchebag” trophy
*sigh*
Someday scientists are going to figure out what causes pregnancy and how to avoid it, so women don’t have to resort to this...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.