NYT - "A Man's Right to Choose"

Dalton Conley, writing in today's Times, expresses a controversial opinion that I must admit resonates with me:

Nobody is arguing that we should let my friend who impregnated his girlfriend off the hook. If you play, you must pay. But if you pay, you should get some say. If a father is willing to legally commit to supporting and raising the child himself, why should a woman be able to end a pregnancy that she knew was a possibility of consensual sex?

...The bottom line is that if we want to make fathers relevant, they need rights, too. If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create.

It's not very fashionable in the liberal circles in which I usually travel to suggest that anyone other than the woman herself should have a say when it comes to bearing or not bearing a child. "It's her body," you'll hear them say. "No one can tell her what to do with her own body."

(This is, perhaps, disingenuous. There are a great many laws that legitimately proscribe what a person can and cannot do with their own body.)

The point that gets missed, the thing that nags at me - and at Dalton - is that this issue is made out to be about "her body" as opposed to "their child."

Why is it acceptable for a woman to unilaterally abort a child that is as much her partner's offspring as her own? Why does one parent have the absolute right to make this decision, while the other parent has no rights whatsoever? Why is it that a father who is legally responsible for providing for his child's wellbeing after it is born has no legal right to see to that child's wellbeing before it is born.

Perhaps the difficulty here for the left (and I admit to normally being happily among those lefties) is that all this talk of a "father's rights" implies that the fetus in question isn't just another lump of the mother's own flesh like a tonsil or an appendix, which she has a right to remove or not remove. It's hard not to use the word "child" when you're talking about "fathers" and "parents." (You'll notice that abortion is never described as something a "mother" has a right to choose... it's always and very carefully an issue of "women's rights.")

I don't mean to imply that there are easy answers to be found here. What seems clear to me, though, is that it is terribly wrong for fathers to be locked out of this decision entirely.

It is obviously best for this to be a matter decided between a loving husband and wife, far from the realms of jurisprudence. But pregnancies happen outside of loving marriages, and as child support activists point out, it takes two to make a baby. We can't turn away from this issue, simply because it is challenging.