Monday, January 09, 2006
Women Want It Both Ways On "Choice"
Grim makes a good point on the Alito nomination:
The nomination of Alito has been a good thing for the country, if only so we could have this debate. The question is, "We've come to something of a settlement on a woman's rights. Now, what rights does a father deserve, and how do we balance the two?" The de facto answer is that we don't: the father's sole reproductive right is to keep his pants on. After that, the woman alone has the choices.
Silly man. Abortion is a women's issue - did anyone ask him for his opinion?
The casting of abortion, or stare decisis as it is euphemistically referred to on Capitol Hill, as "pro-choice" could not be more misleading, for in this debate only one of the three parties concerned (man, woman, and child) has the slightest semblance of a choice. Only slightly more honest is the strident call of abortion advocates who swear to defend "a woman's right to choose". Pro-choice lobbyists strain our credulity by beating beleaguered district attorneys over the head with this mantra when they attempt to prosecute sexual predators who prey on ten year-old girls. No "woman" chose to have sex with those monsters, or to end the tragic new life that began and ended shortly thereafter as a result of that crime. But so jealous are these activists of their "privacy rights" that they'd rather see criminals go free than allow courts access to records of abortion clinics which practice illegal late-term abortions on minors. After all, we're talking about a woman's right to choose here. It's in the Constitution.
As we are constantly reminded, the abortion debate is all about something called reproductive choice. Of what does this reproductive choice consist? If a man and a woman, married or unmarried, conceive a child together, both are on the hook financially to support that child until he or she is grown. But there are rules. If the woman decides to rid herself of a fetus that she does not want, but the man does, she may kill it and this is perfectly legal. If the man decides to rid herself of a fetus that he does not want (perhaps by slipping her an abortifact that does not otherwise harm her), but the woman does, this is murder and he will go to jail.
Thus, two utterly contradictory things occur at the moment of conception:
Legally, from the point of view of a woman: the fetus is a lump of tissue which may be excised at will if she subsequently regrets having conceived a child. It imposes no obligation or legal duty unless she chooses to accept it.
Legally, from the point of view of the man: the fetus is a human being which must be allowed to live, even if he subsequently regrets having conceived a child. It imposes an absolute and irrevocable legal duty, regardless of his wishes in the matter.
In other words, if you have a y chromosome you have no reproductive choice. Except, of course, to pay at least a half-share of whatever "choices" your sexual partner may make, whether you are married or single - it makes no difference. When one considers that women can have multiple orgasms (and that ours generally last longer), something tells me men are getting the short end of the stick.
The following story makes that crystal clear:
...a lesbian couple wished to have children. An understanding and liberal-minded male friend agreed to donate his sperm, and three children were born to one of the two women between 1992 and 1996. But then relations between the two women deteriorated, and they split up.
The mother of the children found herself alone and in difficult straits. Who would support her, in her—and her children’s—time of need? Her former lover was unwilling, because—after all—she was no relation of the children. The sperm donor had made it clear from the first that he had no wish to be a father in any but the most literal biological sense; he thought he was merely doing the couple a favor. He therefore felt no moral obligation to support the children, and his conscience was clear.
You can probably guess where this is going:
Nevertheless, the government’s department of social security—the potential surrogate parent of every child—sued to force the sperm donor to pay. After a case lasting four years, he found himself obliged henceforth to support the mother and children financially.
The president of the Swedish Federation for Sexual Equality declared the legal decision an outrage. “It is scandalous,” he said. “The man has been condemned to be a father even though he did not take the decision to have the children. Above all, one of the women who took part in that decision has been absolved of all responsibility. If one desires equality of rights for lesbians, it is anomalous that it should not be she who was obliged to support the children financially.”
This is an interesting case for many reasons. The knee-jerk reaction is to say, "Well of course: the poor man did nothing but deposit his sperm into a cup. Why should he pay?"
In truth, several social institutions are shown to be foundering here. Marriage itself, so fervently desired by the lesbian community, as well as child-rearing, does not come off well. Four years? Hardly a serious commitment to making a relationship work. My sons both dated their girlfriends longer than that - they have shown more maturity in their teens and early twenties than either of these women. Not that the heterosexual world is doing a bang-up job at marriage either (mind you) these days. But two people stood up, presumably, and promised to love and honor each other "'til death do us part"... or until they tired of it, whichever came first.
The concept of family as an unseverable bond is another. Divorce happens, but children are forever. Only one half of this "couple" walked away from that. When she took wedding vows and decided to take on the responsibility of having three children in four years, that responsibility did not end when she tired of the relationship.
But what is in danger of getting lost here is the role of the sperm donor. On the one hand, I completely agree that his responsibility should be by far the least of any party involved in this. But there is still something unseemly in the Swedish President's use of "condemned to support the children", for without his intentional act those children would never have come to be. Did he never give a thought, when he deposited his sperm in that cup, that living, breathing human beings would one day walk the earth?
That they might, one day, wonder who their father was? That they might need him? Theodore Dalrymple comments:
If women have a “right” to children, in the sense that not having them if they want them is an infringement of their rights, then of course lesbian women can no longer accept childlessness as the natural consequence of their condition. Let it not be said that new medical technology is responsible for this change in attitude, incidentally: the kind of artificial insemination offered in a domestic setting by the sperm donor has been possible for a very long time. No, the culprit here is the idea that the fulfilment of our desires, no matter what our condition, is a right. As for the well-being of the children in this case—beyond the provision of sufficient financial support for them—that seems to have entered into no one’s thnking.
And that is the whole problem with the abortion debate: everything is cast in terms of the woman's rights.
Has a man no reproductive rights? Why don't we ever ask that question?
Yes, gestation takes place solely within the woman's body, but it could never take place without the man's unique and special contribution, and while not all men care about their progeny, some men do want, and love, and very much desire to protect and nurture, the children they conceive. In a rather caustically-worded excerpt at Protein Wisdom, Jill from Feministe said:
Alito distanced himself from previous Supreme Court views on undue burden, writing that “an undue burden may not be established simply by showing that a law will have a heavy impact on a few women but that instead a broader inhibiting effect must be shown.” So if a particular requirement which infringes on the right to privacy — husband notification for abortion, for example — only has a detrimental effect on some women, that isn’t a good enough reason to disallow it.
Hmmm... since she disagrees with Judge Alito's dissent, if abortion without the consent of a woman's partner only has a detrimental effect on some men, isn't that a good enough reason to disallow it?
Grim comments:
...feminists insist that abortion be seen as a medical procedure that is the woman's business and no one else's. The child has no rights that ought to bind her, because the advocates for the woman's position in our law insist on that point. The masculine understanding, however, holds that the man's rights are overwhelmed by his responsibility for the child. The men who have ruled the discussion, men like me, feel that fathering a child is an awesome duty and one that ought to bind you. The compromise position gives both sides what they want: the leading thinkers of the women's position have demanded freedom for women; the leading thinkers among men have demanded responsibility for men.
The feminist position on "reproductive choice" closely resembles the Rad-feminista position on many other issues of the day: so-called "equal pay for equal work", Mommy-friendly workplaces, flex-time, and cries of gender discrimination in math and the sciences: they want freedom without tiresome responsibility. It is a childish and petulant stance, unbecoming to 'liberated' women. There is enough genuine discrimination in the working world to combat without tilting at strawmen.
If we ever hope to be equal with men then we must, with our "equal rights", accept equal responsibilities. It is, truly, that simple. And if women ever, by and large, come to do so and quit the silly whining that occupies so much of the airwaves, they will very likely find that a great deal, though by no means all, of the 'discrimination' they experience will vanish into the ether like a bad dream. Life is never going to be a level playing field for women, but then it's not a level playing field for anyone. We all bring different talents, different strengths, and if we are honest, different aspirations to the table. The one inescapable fact of life however, is that there are always tradeoffs.
The sad thing about the abortion debate is that by simply exercising a tiny amount of responsibility before conception, grown women could easily avoid a situation where they inflict the results of their own negligence on their partners, while depriving them of the "reproductive choice" they so ardently defend for themselves.
23 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Jan 09, 10:18:00 AM:
A liberal male friend. Okay, this is where the rubber meets the road: I am PAYING for welfare for single parent families because of liberalism. Why didn't she run to the closest welfare office and holler for help?
That is what she would have done had she gotten the sperm from a bank, right?
But because she knew the identity of the father, she could hit him up for support.
I know this isn't on abortion, as for me the lines are clear so I won't go there.
However, in terms of social justice and equity, I sort of believe that he made the deposit, he should pay the penalty for withdrawal.
By 
Cassandra, at
Mon Jan 09, 10:57:00 AM:
Well for me, the really interesting wrinkle on this is that we have "divorced" marriage and family.
Clearly we have placed the responsibility for rearing a child, not on the marital couple who decided, together, that they would have children, but on the biological unit that produced the child.
And even of that biological unit, only one of that pairing was irrevocably bound at the moment of conception.
So we have 3 people. Two made vows to form a family unit for life. Then they made a joint decision to bring children into this world. They asked society to sanction their partnership, and it did.
They were unable, for biological reasons, to have children on their own so they enlisted the aid of a third party. He never promised anything and contributed only biological material.
Yet he alone, by virtue of his gender, was bound. The other two, though one contributed half of the biological matter that formed the fetus, was not bound.
The third, though she vowed to mate for life, waltzed away scot-free.
Some "reproductive choice".
The stunning implication here is that marriage really means nothing, and as far as spousal notification is concerned, a man is guilty by virtue of marriage until proven innocent if his wife gets pregnant, yet she is presumed to have the "right" to terminate the pregnancy that he is irrevocably bound to whether he is or is not in fact the father without notice.
Something is very wrong here. With rights come responsibilities, and vice versa. We need to stop infantilizing women and demonizing men.
A little sanity, please.
By TigerHawk, at
Mon Jan 09, 11:18:00 AM:
I am not "pro choice," and agree with your post, which is one of the best you've written on this blog.
I am, however, a supporter of lawful abortion, suitably regulated. Given the heat I'm taking today, though, I think I will keep my reasoning to myself. At least today. :)
By Consul-At-Arms, at
Mon Jan 09, 11:22:00 AM:
Cricket, I was under the impression that the mother didn't go after the father for support, but that the welfare agency did. That's how the law in most U.S. states works, I think. If there's a father, he's on the hook for child support, not the state.
By Cassandra, at
Mon Jan 09, 12:11:00 PM:
Yes, well I wish I had time to think. These past two months have been awful - I'm just churning out blather. Speaking of which, I have regression trends awaiting me. Yuck.
************************
Consul-at-arms: that's my impression also.
Perfect example of unforeseen consequences.
That's one reason, ironically, I don't favor gay marriage. It's a crappy reason. It's damned unfair, frankly. But there are a million things like that that come into play, where biology continues to rule us however we wish to pretend otherwise, and the law follows suit.
Funny, isn't it?
By , at
Mon Jan 09, 12:25:00 PM:
Okay. I see Cass' response and as usual, clarified some more things for me.
I don't know if she did hit up social agencies for help, but if she did, and the identity of the father was known,
then the state laws regarding deadbeat dads would kick in.
Just curious, were there any legal contracts of any kind regarding surrogate fathering? I have wondered how that would fit in with surrogate mothers being impregnated, but isn't it a different side of the coin?
Don't mean to open a can of worms here, as Cassandra DID make a really good case for adulthood to kick in and responsibility and accountability...
just thought I'd ax the question.
By geoffrobinson, at
Mon Jan 09, 01:15:00 PM:
I think we are missing the main point. Roe is just bad law. 9 is divisible by 3 so the baby gets different rights depending on the trimester. What would happen if the human gestation period was a prime number?
By Cassandra, at
Mon Jan 09, 01:48:00 PM:
I think that violates the Space-Time Continuum, causing the Fetus to go back in time and become it's own grandmother.
At that point, no one on SCOTUS has ever been born and the light from various emanations and penumbras won't reach earth for another 25 years. The Fetus is then forced into a tragic choice: should it race for Chappaquidduck and try to save Mary Jo Kopochne, or sit around and wait for Teddy Kennedy's book to come out?
What to do? What to do?
Anybody got a match? It's *dark* in here....
By Cassandra, at
Mon Jan 09, 01:50:00 PM:
...which probably explains why I can't type.
Or spell, apparently.
just thought I'd ax the question
You did that on porpoise, you fool :)
By Cardinalpark, at
Mon Jan 09, 02:40:00 PM:
My mother was always quick to point out to me that it was really 10 months that women had to bake a baby, not 9. I wonder why so few ever point that out -- except for my wife of course.
My mother was a GYN. She finished her training in the 1950s, so she was an early female doc focused on GYN. She also specialized in infertility -- in Baltimore, a place known for good medicine -- and she was an early D&C specialist.
Abortion is quite the amazing ethical dilemma, and it occurs to me today that had I chosen this subject as my college entrance essay, there is no place I wouldn't have gotten in. But alas...
My mom is many years gone now, but I always try to keep in mind some of the rules she made for herself in counseling her patients and choosing what she wanted to do.
1) Aspirin is excellent birth control -- if placed between the knees and held tightly. Otherwise, women need contraception or abstention. Don't rely on a guy for contraception unless he's income producing. If he doesn't pay taxes, he won't be thinking with the right part of his anatomy at the important moment. She even told me that as a teenager..imagine!
2) Abortion (a D&C in her day) should be legal -- but only as a matter of societal justice for the poor and downtrodden. Her view was that any wealthy or intelligent woman could terminate a pregnancy and had been able to do so for generations regardless of the law. To her way of thinking, Roe V. Wade simply levelled the playing field. So it was less about women's rights per se than about equal access to a low tech, low cost procedure. And she had seen enough unwanted births and the related outcome that she determined that this might be a better outcome.
3) She would always try to talk a patient out of a D&C. The risks were non trivial, plus she didn't really think it was the best thing to do. In particular, a significant % of D&Cs left the patient unable to later have children.
4) She would not perform one after 3 months.
To me, the grave flaw with Roe v Wade besides its circumvention of popular government and the legislative process was that it didn't make rules and say what was acceptable and what was not. We just need to fix that. And since it indeed is an ethical dilemma, and there are legitimately different views, we need the popularly elected legislators to hammer it out.
Great post, Cass. Anything that gets me thinking about my mom is ok with me!
By , at
Mon Jan 09, 03:33:00 PM:
Wow. Fantastic input, but again, abstinence and prevention is worth a pound of cure, and they don't need a moral foundation to make the case.
Just the consequences of sex are enough.
Your mom sounds like the kind of doc I would have loved to have had for my own family...regardless of her specialty.
Yes, Cassie, I did that on purpose.
I was thinking about the Cetacean wedding and how biased the reporters were about the bride's religion.
What were the dolphin's beliefs? Was there a prenup?
And on and on and on...
By Cardinalpark, at
Mon Jan 09, 05:40:00 PM:
Compliments about my mother will earn you tremendous goodwill.
She was a great physician, her patients loved her -- and one of her favorite observations about her job was that she was both GYN, and shrink.
But, she would not do OB. So she lacked compassion toward her patients in this regard - "honey", she would say, "you could knock on my door with that child falling out of you and I would not deliver it."
What she did not say was that her husband - a surgeon - would have (in those unfortunate circumstances):-)
Oh - and as good physicians - they really didn't like lawyers all that much...sorry TH.
By TigerHawk, at
Mon Jan 09, 06:44:00 PM:
No offense taken. I don't like lawyers that much.
By Papa Ray, at
Tue Jan 10, 12:04:00 AM:
Sometimes late at night, when I can't sleep, I roam the cable system, having ruined my eyes on the computer, having put my one and only Sweet Grand Daughter to bed and wondering where my daughter might be staying that night.
Anyway, I pause sometimes at the commercials or infomercials that show the starving children and the old guy asking in his urgent voice....' could you not spare the cost of a cup of your favorite beverage a day to keep a small helpless child alive?" Guilt passes briefly as I think of the imperial quart of vodka I consume about every two days. But then I think, I can't solve a problem that the major powers in this world can't solve and keep making worse.
Sex is good, at it's worse, its still good, if everybody involved is willing of course. But if it's so good, and addictive, why has it not been regulated, controlled or otherwise choked by big governments like everything else has been?
Should we announce a "War on Sex?" or just a war on procreation? The Muslims are breeding faster than most other cultures, is it on purpose, do they know the power of demographics?
Is there a lesson or a warning there? Like others here, my mind is befuddled and bewildered sometimes over these problems, and the dearth of solutions.
Should Mary Jane, 14 and unwed, ruin her life and have a baby she can't care for because she is nothing more than a spoiled brat herself?
Should the 13 y/o Muslim girl in Indonisia be allowed to have six children before she is 21 years old? When they are most likely going to live in poverty and be educated to hate and kill everyone not a "true believer of Islam?" ...and to be killed by an Armored Crusader from the West?
These are questions for God. Is man supposed to have any say so, should he?
I just don't know.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
By Cardinalpark, at
Tue Jan 10, 08:40:00 AM:
Papa Ray:
Your liver must be kinda hard. Easy on the vodka...
By Cassandra, at
Tue Jan 10, 10:16:00 AM:
Or just go down to your local health food store and take standardized extract of Milk Thistle.
I'm completely serious about this. I'm a bit of a natural remedies nut - Milk Thistle is used in Europe as the only remedy for death's cap mushroom poisoning. Very good for the liver. I've had 2 friends with damaged liver function take it and it turned them right around.
Nothing like gratuitous advice, huh? But I take migraine meds that you're not supposed to drink alcohol with (and they're also bad for your liver), and I *refuse* to give up my nightly drink, so... :)
By Papa Ray, at
Tue Jan 10, 10:17:00 AM:
I'm sure you don't really care, but my liver is fine, it's my heart that is breaking for my GrandDaughter's not so bright and safe future.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
By Cassandra, at
Tue Jan 10, 12:24:00 PM:
I picked up on that, Papa Ray.
Sometimes you get an offhand answer out of me when I am moved and don't know what to say.
And by the way, I do care, for what it's worth. I wasn't being a smart aleck.
I just saw something that might brighten your day, but I had to soften my humor a bit. I'll post it when my head clears.
By , at
Tue Jan 10, 12:40:00 PM:
Papa Ray,
Your grand daughter has YOU. She has a safe place and love. Sometimes, food and clothing aren't enough if love isn't part of the equation.
Her future is good and bright if you can teach her about the consequences of choices, and help her make some good ones.
I worry about my children's future too, which is why I made the choices I did.
You have my respect and prayers.
And in addition to the Milk Thistle Weed, choline, inositol and methionine are excellent nutrients for the liver.
*managed a HF store in CA*
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Jan 10, 12:46:00 PM:
Either of you ladies use eye of newt for anything?
The Medical Technology Guy (I've decided that this is better than being "the porn guy")
By , at
Tue Jan 10, 01:49:00 PM:
Dang, I hate it when someone catches me dancing around the cauldron after ululating to the Menstrual Moon.
By Cassandra, at
Wed Jan 11, 10:31:00 AM:
Damn.
Cricket and I have been caught, ovulating pointlessly in the moonlight... again.
Now where's that Eye of Newt?
By , at
Wed Jan 11, 11:39:00 AM:
Joe,
Women don't have to be drafted in an all volunteer military.
And saying that about women is exactly what the Marxist state would love: Problems will be solved by the state so no one has to bear the brunt of their decisions.
I think Cass hit it on the head with the partner who opted out after her beloved had children. Where is 'her'
accountability to support the children and pay alimony to her former spouse?
I submit to you the reason why this didn't happen is because most states do not recognize same sex relationships as marriage and so did not sue her for child support or alimony.
Had the state done so, it would have established a precedent without a legal test of some kind...I am just bloviating here, so consider the source: I am not a lawyer, I am not writing like one, but just speculating.
