Posted on 12/14/2001 4:53:43 PM PST by Dr. Octagon
As I write these words, a friend of mine is out on the highway, counting down the hours to the death of his unborn child. Before leaving, he wrote his (now former?) girlfriend a check for half the price of the procedure. He said it made him nauseous.
Long years ago, having nowhere to drive (or perhaps the car was in the shop), I did my own countdown in an Eames chair with a bottle of scotch. I do not recall writing a check, or offering, or being asked. The nausea occasionally returns.
My friend is a young man, the kind who almost makes you believe the X in GenX can also stand for excellence. Intelligent, well-educated, thoughtful, college football player/philosophy major, with a limitless future in a field so high-tech I can't begin to understand what he's talking about.
I understood well enough, however, when he told me about his on-again, off-again girlfriend, brilliant and beautiful and volatile in the harsh, addictive way that brilliant, beautiful young women often are.
She had gotten pregnant on a night when off changed, somewhat unexpectedly, back to on. He does not doubt that he loves her, or she him.
I asked him if this was the first time he had faced this kind of situation. He answered, yes. Then welcome to reality. Before it's over, you're going to learn a lot about who and what you are.
We talked. Baby Boomer wisdom available here. Been there, done that, no charge. Of course, I didn't tell him anything that a few million other guys couldn't have. Hannah Arendt, the great political philosopher, once wondered how many killers she and the rest of us passed on the street every day, the men who had fought our three mid-century wars, walking by with their horrors and their nausea inside.
Perhaps, today, the same question might be asked in re the millions of fathers of the trashed-before-birth.
My young friend said he wanted the baby, and he was willing to marry. But there were problems between them, numerous and real. I told him, yes, but there are three of you now. Whatever happens . . . forever, three. I told him to spend time with her, talk with her, hold her lots, listen to what she said and what she didn't say.
I suggested that, if they could get to it, they might play a game. Pretend the decision to keep the child has been made. Start planning your futures, married or not. The normal stuff that folks with children face, and how to balance it all.
They never quite got there. Women come equipped these days with a slick and deadly defensive vocabulary, carefully formatted to avoid certain kinds of issues. Where do they get it from, the words? From a few thousand talk shows and magazines, of course. From the psychobabblers and the feminista, from the government and the universities, from the ads and the pulpits, and from every other branch and unit of a big-bucks industry dedicated to telling them what to think and feel and do and how to justify whatever needs to be justified at the moment and, if they're lucky, for all the years and ghosts to follow.
Anger also works. I saw my friend the day before he left (a necessary and legitimate trip). I asked him if he had done everything he could to persuade her not to opt for the procedure. He said he had. Then I asked him about the little man standing off in one dim corner of his mind, the little guy watching with his arms folded and a hideous smirk on his face.
The little guy with the little voice that said, "You're off the hook." My young friend wiped his eyes and I saw no reason to mention that, for reasons now obscure, I gave my own little guy the name of Buster.
And Buster doth make cowards of us all.
You told me everything that would happen, my young friend said before he took off. Sure did, right up to and including, "Whatever your feelings, can a man of honor go back to a woman who killed his child?"
Another friend, a woman my age, likes to point out that in the years before the procedure became legal-on-demand, the procedure's advocates argued far more than Woman's Body, Woman's Right.
The procedure, plus all the dandy new contraceptives, would guarantee that every child would be a wanted child. Illegitimacy would all but vanish. Divorce, child and spousal abuse, single parenthood, poverty ditto, more or less. We could contracept and procedure our way to paradise.
Didn't quite happen that way. Anybody willing to be honest about why?
We can neither approve, nor prevent an abortion. We can not decide whether we want, or do not want to be a father-figure, we again have no options. We have no voice on whether the child is going to be aborted/ adopted or raised by the female alone, or with state mandated payments (and these decisions may change as time goes by, with no recourse available to the father). If we do NOT want to be a father, our money is taken regardless. We can not decide where the child will live, as the woman is free to move about the world as she see's fit; however we must constantly pay child support for a child we may never see. In Washington, just living with a woman entitles her to child support (even if the child was born before you entered the picture, and is NOT yours). My favorite part is a father who pays child support for 18 years, then finds out that he is not the biological father, has been de-frauded out of tens of thousands of dollars. This is the only legally encouraged form of fraud in the USA. A man may NOT sue the woman for her deception, in fact he must prove himself innocent via DNA tests, to get off the hook. The courts tend to take the woman's word for the father's name, when she states a father's name on the Birh Certificate. The accused father is usually not even informed that his name is on a legal document. Until the laws change, we have no choice but to go along with whatever the female decides.
Will you help in getting them changed?
And will we lie down and embrace slavery?
Or will we fight?
Or will we keep our zippers closed?
Millions of good-hearted women object to such, even when they're a thousand miles from the baby in question.
Now picture this being done to your baby!
With the law saying you haven't the right to stop it.
And feminist-society saying you should not care. That you should not exercise every fibre of manhood within you, telling you, "For God's sake, protect your own!"
This is the legacy of feminism on men.
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