Feminists agree, at least in theory, that women MUST face the consequences of deciding to have sex. No abortion, no adoption, no safe havens. And if you don’t like it, then close your legs, you whores!

First up, apologies to real, actual whores, who are experts in preventing pregnancies and STDs.  If, after reading this post, you lads decide to never get within ten feet of a reproductively capable woman, always keep in mind that professional ladies are there, and they are fair!  They know what they are doing, in every way that counts.  Pleasure? Check.  Pregnancy? Er, nope.  STDs?  Not likely.  You’ll need to hit up a group of middle aged swingers if you want one of those.

http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/dirty-whores/

College girls will also deliver for you on the oozing dick front.

http://pages.towson.edu/osman/Sexuality%20Powerpoints/CampusSTD.ppt

Do NOT be afraid to trust your average escort, gentlemen.  Know why? Because they’re PROFESSIONALS, that’s why. Screw this Alpha – Beta shit.  Be a John.  Paying a fine beats 18 years of child support, no? I’m being a bit facetious, I know.  The consequences can be much more severe, but it’s worth checking just what they are in your particular jurisdiction and weigh those against the consequences of an unintended pregnancy with your local herd of ladies.

Let’s start with a definition:

fem·i·nism 

/ˈfeməˌnizəm/

Noun

The advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

We’ll keep that definition in mind as we go along.

In the New York Times this past week, Professor Laurie Schrage wants to know if forced fatherhood is a philosophically defensible position, given that reproductive autonomy and equality are such touchstone issues for feminism.  Is it fair to force men to become fathers of children they do not want and did not intend when culturally, we have agreed, that it is unacceptable to force women into such a position?

If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck with years of child support payments.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/is-forced-fatherhood-fair/

The responses at the NYT to Schrage’s question fall into three main camps:

1.  We don’t have complete and utter reproductive freedom for women, so none of this applies!  Ladies are still not allowed to waltz into clinics and abort the day before they’re due, so none of this applies anyways, lalalalalalala I can’t hear you.

StephWAtlanta

Don’t think this issue can adequately be approached until all women have the right to end their pregnancy in a safe manner at a respectable facility. Until then discussing men’s rights confuses the issue.

2.  If you don’t want babies, don’t have sex, you man-whores!

CillasiNYC

Men have the ultimate control over pregnancy and fatherhood. They’ve always had it. Keep your sperm out of women’s vaginas. Period. End of story. Historically, men have always been able to walk away from parental responsibility. Now they can’t. Tough noogies. It’s not forced anything. They just have to choose to be responsible a little earlier.

3.  If you consent to sex, you consent to all the possible outcomes of sex.

CherylLake County, IL

“In consenting to sex, neither a man nor a woman gives consent to become a parent, just as in consenting to any activity, one does not consent to yield to all the accidental outcomes that might flow from that activity.”

I beg to disagree. That is EXACTLY what consenting to sex means.

You don’t get on an airplane expecting it to crash, but you are giving implied consent to that possibility by stepping on the plane. It implies you are willing to accept the risk of undertaking that action. If you can’t accept that risk, or the consequences are too great, you don’t fly.

When you have sex, you know that a pregnancy is a possible outcome, even with birth control. If you don’t want to take that risk, you don’t have sex! If you ignore that possibility, have sex and it results in a pregnancy, that’s the chance you took.

Pretty much the exact arguments come up at Jezebel:

http://jezebel.com/forced-fatherhood-yeah-okay-whatever-513168822

DuchessOfDorkUMeher Ahmad671L

Achem.

Gentlemen.

IF YOU PUT YOUR PENIS IN A LADY THERE IS A CHANCE YOU MIGHT MAKE A BABY. THERE IS ALWAYS A CHANCE UNLESS YOU GET A VASECTOMY. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO TAKE THAT CHANCE, DON’T PUT YOUR PENIS IN A LADY.

Thank you

Let’s take all this at face value.  Okay, we agree 100%.  If you have sex, you are required to face the consequences, no matter what your personal preferences.

Let’s start with reproductive freedom.  Women don’t have unlimited, completely untrammeled rights to destroy the child within their body at whim.  There are some very good reasons for that, but leaving all that aside, let’s take a look at what opportunities men have to control the reproductive tissues of their own bodies.

In other words, male birth control.  Men have basically two choices:

Condoms

Vasectomy

With proper knowledge and application technique—and use at every act of intercourse—women whose partners use male condoms experience a 2% per-year pregnancy rate with perfect use and a 15% per-year pregnancy rate with typical use

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condom

Look at that statement carefully.  Even when we discuss men’s birth control, men’s bodies, men protecting themselves against the consequences of pregnancy, the whole argument is framed in terms of women.  WTF?  How fucking hard is it to write MEN using condoms  have female partners  who experience a 2% per-year pregnancy rate with perfect use and a 15% per-year pregnancy rate with typical use.

Vasectomy, which is a surgical procedure involving a scalpel applied to men’s bodies (which birth control method for women involves a scalpel, again?), and which is only reversible at significant expense, still has a failure rate of 1 in 100!

http://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/news/20040505/vasectomies-pregnancy-prevention

So if a man doesn’t care to have children with YOU, he should get sterilized and never have any children ever?  Oh, right.  That seems fair.  How about we cut women’s fallopian tubes? Perfectly reasonable measure, no?

The reality is that no matter how careful, no matter how responsible, no matter how diligent and conscientious a man is about birth control, failure is possible.  If we are waiting for conditions to be absolutely perfect before we discuss a particular topic, we will wait forever.

And isn’t that the point of argument one?  I refuse to deal with this issue.  No way.  Not talking. I can’t tackle the actual argument, so I’m just going to pretend you aren’t here.

Preposterous.  Fraught conversations still need to take place.  Welcome to being a grown-up.

Argument number two is actually completely hilarious, and it stuns me that anyone, but feminists in particular, would give it a spin.

If you don’t want a child, don’t have sex?

Okie-dokie, whores.  Turnabout is fair play.  If men are REQUIRED by law to face the music, then so are you.  And the argument that women’s bodies are sacrosanct and pregnancy is asymmetrical is nothing more than sophistry.  Turning over a significant portion of your income to a woman who may or may not use that income to provide for a child you did not intend and do not want has a dramatic impact on the well-being of the man required to make remittance, particularly when that man is already poor!

http://www.fathersandfamilies.org/enews/cv/enews-20121011.html

Indeed, Scrage quotes another Professor, Elizabeth Brake, who has precisely that point to make, and she chimed in at the NYT with the following comment:

Elizabeth BrakeTempe, AZNYT Pick

My article, which Prof. Shrage cites, doesn’t argue against legal child support but against one reason often given for it. The political point is that “a just law of child support … must be responsive to the economic situation of individual fathers.”

Women who are pregnant unintentionally have a few choices to mitigate against the consequences of bearing a child:  abortion, adoption, legal surrender.  Women are permitted to end the potential child’s life, and from 1973 to 2008, more than 50 million potential children were destroyed in the United States.

http://www.abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/

Unsurprisingly, the rate of adoption declined dramatically once abortion became a viable option.  Nevertheless, in 2000, the US Census found that more than 2 million children were identified as “adopted”.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/censr-6.pdf

Safe haven laws, which allow WOMEN to legally surrender all parental rights with no obligations and no subsequent responsibilities are in effect in all 50 states.

https://www.childwelfare.gov/systemwide/laws_policies/statutes/safehaven.pdf

If we are going to have EQUAL reproductive rights for men and women, then all these options are EITHER available to BOTH men and women, or to NEITHER.  How would that work, in practical application?

Men can’t physically be pregnant.  Are we going to allow men to force women to abort children on the basis of genetic relationship?  That seems like a pretty scary proposition, although from a philosophical point of view, why not?  If you are going to be held  legally responsible for any humans containing your DNA, why should you not be able to force an abortion?  It’s your DNA.  You own it.  The Supreme Court recently ruled that human DNA cannot be patented. It belongs to the individual person, and if you do NOT consent to that DNA being deployed in the creation of another human, you should have the right to have the person terminated, within the limitations of the law, no?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/13/supreme-court-dna-ruling_n_3435274.html

Unfortunately, the potential human on the butcher’s block is a combination of DNA, and there is an unavoidable King Solomon’s dilemma.  In the name of equality, neither the mother nor the father can unilaterally decide if the child lives or dies.  That takes abortion as an option off the table, unless both DNA contributors consent.

So men cannot force women to abort, but neither can women abort a child the father wishes to keep.  Fair is fair.  If he can’t force you to bear his biological offspring when you do not wish to, then you cannot destroy offspring for whom he is prepared to accept full responsibility.

Oh dear.  That kind of equality sucks, now doesn’t it.  But remember ladies, if you don’t want to have a baby, don’t have sex, you sluts!

The same must be true for adoption:  you cannot surrender a child for adoption without the father’s consent.  That is already technically true, but there is a way around that for women: don’t identify the father.

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/adoption-facts-understanding-the-birthfathers-righ.html

In some cases, the women genuinely does NOT know the identity of the father.  This is particularly true in cases of rape.  But there is little point in making an exception for rape, since all that will happen is that women will claim they were raped.  Unverifiable.  A child cannot be aborted or adopted without the consent of the biological father, no matter what the circumstances of conception.  Full stop.

Oh, boo hoo!  This reproductive equality thing is looking worse and worse.

Needless to say, safe haven laws must apply equally to both men and women, as well.  If a woman cannot identify the father, or does not have the consent of the father to surrender the baby, she is guilty of criminal abandonment and should face the full legal consequences of her actions.

Now here is where the argument gets interesting:  safe haven laws are designed to keep women from strangling their newborns and tossing them in the trash.

Supporters of safe-haven laws claim that the laws save lives by encouraging parents to surrender infants safely instead of aborting, killing, or discarding them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

Cute that Wikipedia uses the word “parents”, when they really mean “mothers”.

Women who have a an actual, physical, living, breathing completely separate human being who DO NOT WANT THE RESPONSIBILITY of caring for that human being are entitled to surrender all legal obligations towards that human and simply walk away.

Accidents happen. Mistakes occur.  Unintended consequences turn into little tiny people who are entitled to love and care and attention and life itself.  And if women can’t, or won’t or don’t want to meet the needs of this new little person THEY CREATED, they can walk away and never look back.  Their biological ties to that person are irrelevant.

Men deserve the same right.  Biology is irrelevant.  Just as any pregnant woman has the right to terminate her legal responsibility for that child, men should have the right to terminate their own legal responsibility.  The practical reality is not even that hard to envision.  Any woman who finds herself pregnant needs to know that the father of the child has the right to disavow paternity in a legal context.

Do you accept responsibility for this child?

A woman must make her decision about whether or not to have the child based on the knowledge that her decision is hers, and ONLY hers.  She does not have the right to unilaterally impose her will on any other adult, no matter what the biological relationship.  The fact that she is pregnant does not make her special, and should not give her any special rights to inflict potentially ruinous consequences on a man who made the mistake of having sex with her.  Not unless she’d care to face the same consequences.

Being a parent should be a choice.  It’s either compulsory for both, or elective for both.

Equal or special.  Pick one.

Lots of love,

JB