I have a daughter and three sons. If there is better duty than being the dad, I
have never found it. But on one subject -- the nature of sex and its possible
outcomes -- the counsel I'm required to give my sons, if given to my daughter,
sounds unfashionably bombastic, politically suspect if not "incorrect," vaguely
patriarchal. Oughtn't parenting be gender-neutral?
I'm in favor of life, in favor of choice. Life is not easy. Neither is choice.
My daughter and sons are biologically equipped for reproduction. Here are their
choices as I see them. Each can choose whether or not, with whom and where, when
and why, to be sexually active. They can choose how much or how little meaning it
has, how much or how little of themselves to invest. Each can choose what, if any,
precaution to take against an unplanned pregnancy. But should such precautions
fail, the available choices take different directions along gender lines.
My daughter may choose to have the baby with or without the consent, cooperation,
or co-parenting of the fellow (shall we call him the father now?) who impregnated
her. Or she may choose, in light of her life's circumstances, that a child would
be terribly inconvenient and she may avail herself of what the courts have
declared is her constitutionally guaranteed right to a safe and legal medical
procedure that terminates her pregnancy. Whatever discomfort -- moral or personal
or maternal -- she might feel, a pregnancy that resulted from bilateral consent is
legally undone by unilateral choice.
But if the choice as to when one is ready, willing and able to parent is a good
thing, wouldn't it be good for my sons as well? And if that choice may be
exercised by women after conception, then shouldn't men have the same option: to
proclaim, legally and unilaterally, the end of their interest in the tissue or
fetus or baby or whatever it is that sex between a man and a woman sometimes
produces?
As it stands now, paternity, once determined, means fiscal responsibility for 18
years -- not by choice, but by law. If they impregnate and the woman chooses to
have the child, she has a legal claim against the father's earnings. They may, of
course, refuse to pay, refuse their paternity, in which case they are "deadbeat
dads" or some other media-made word for no good. Why oughtn't my sons have an
equivalent choice -- say, within the first two trimesters -- to declare their
decision not to parent, to void their paternity? Isn't this precisely the same
choice given to women by Roe v. Wade and laws elsewhere that uphold this "right"?
Still, pregnancy and abortion, some several will argue, are women's issues, a woman's
body. "Once men can get pregnant, then you can talk!" I am sometimes told. Is it
really all about wombs, then? Is biology destiny, after all?
Is it the species or the gender that reproduces? Aren't pregnancy and parenting human
issues? I know they were when my sons and daughter were "expected." Their mother was
"expecting"; so was I. And while a woman's body is certainly involved in her
maternity, a man's is involved in his paternity. Do we not ask men for 18 years of
work and toil, their bodies' "labor," in support of the baby born of their loins? If
they refuse, which too many do, we do not call it a privacy issue; we call them
scoundrels.
And if I am encouraged to march in favor of a woman's right to choose a safe, legal
and affordable medical procedure to abort her maternity, where are the women who will
march with me to uphold the rights of my sons and their sons to choose a safe, legal
and affordable legal procedure to terminate, for reasons that range from good to not
so good, their paternity?
"If they don't want the responsibility, they should keep their pants on!" is what I
am told by several women of my acquaintance. Truth told, it sounds like sound advice.
But the same advice, tendered to my daughter or to the daughters of my women friends,
is regarded as suspect, sexist, patriarchal.
What would it look like if a million men or so, next year, within 12 weeks of
impregnating their sexual partners, were to declare, for reasons they had to
articulate to no one, their interest in the fetus null and void, ceased and aborted?
What if there were clinics, operated by Planned Parenthood or some benign nonprofit,
where the paperwork could be cleanly conducted for a reasonable fee -- paper
"procedures" performed by lawyers instead of doctors, assisted by paralegals instead
of nurses -- the deliverance, safe, legal, unilateral, constitutionally protected,
the same for the fathers as for mothers?
Would protesters march in front of such clinics? Would signs appear calling them
unflattering names? Would pictures of destitute children and abandoned mothers
punctuate these protests? The politics of reproduction involves not only our public
interests, but our private ones. And in the longstanding debates, the terrible din
of public rhetoric between politicos and archbishops has obscured the talk between
fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.
Women are right to abhor decisions about their bodies that leave them out. So are
men. The reproductive life of the species is not a woman's issue. It is a human one.
It requires the voices of human beings. And the language it deserves is intimate.
Thomas Lynch is the author of "The Undertaking" and "Bodies in Motion and at Rest."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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