At the point which a fetus is considered a life worth protecting, the men on the SCOTUS in 1973 determined that men and woman both may have a say in the outcome of a given pregnancy in the form of government legislative policy. Concerning the rights of each parent to determine the fate of a developing fetus, the mother within the constraints of existing abortion law gets the final say. Although given the same legal constraints, the father should have the option to be relieved of parental responsibility if his desire to end the pregnancy is rejected by the mother.
And here we reach the heart of the matter.
Here's when a man makes his decisions: First, when he engages sexual intercourse; second, when his seminal fluid touches her body. From there, every last drop of risk he contributes is
his risk to bear.
To consider your source article:
Susan Appleton, a professor at the Washington University School of Law, has written extensively on reproduction and regret, most recently for the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. She told me that in family law, there is a strong policy of "personal responsibility." Or, in other words, "Dubay made the choice to engage in heterosexual intercourse without using contraception himself; he assumed the risk of becoming a parent when he ejaculated."
Appleton teaches cases like Dubay v. Wells to students in her Family Law course who she says love discussing it. "They appreciate Dubay's arguments about unfairness and inequality, but they almost always reach the conclusion that no other outcome is possible."
Ten years later, the status quo that Dubay challenged in Dubay v. Wells remains in place today. And there haven't been many similar lawsuits since, in part because of the precedent set by the outcome of Dubay v. Wells.
Politicians have also declined to propose legislative changes that would allow men to have reproductive rights, perhaps due to the assumption that doing so would open the proverbial floodgates and result in an unprecedented number of men opting out of fatherhood. For the foreseeable future, at least, the idea of a man's right to choose will continue to gather dust in the legal history books.
(Lawton↱)
If we consider the point of unintended pregnancy itself: That a man could not keep it together when it absolutely matters does not confer unto him ownership of another human being, nor anything taking place inside that person; he does, however, assume liability for the consequences of his actions.
One of the interesting things to watch in the abortion discourse is an aspect
mentioned earlier↑:
• In Roe, the Court refused to answer a question nobody had been able to answer before, about what constitutes the beginning of life that is at stake in this discussion. The anti-abortion response has simply been to insist, loudly, and the one advantage they enjoy about that is how many people who would otherwise not be anti-abortion just can't cope with the idea that women are human beings who have human rights. Even those ostensibly pro-choice advocates are giving their permission, because they just can't countenance an outcome whereby women don't need that noble, compassionate dispensation.
Sometimes, what we see is simply what it is. That is, many who can recite basic talking points about a woman's right to choose are simply reciting the talking points as a way of participating in the discourse. There are, within that larger set, however, another important subset, and these are utterly selfish; the bluntest expression is that they need women to have abortion access so that they might escape child support. Also, as previously noted about this thread in general, women are an existential reality who do not need anyone else's permission to exist and function; as such, this part is simple:
Neither can anyone force her to terminate a pregnancy, and occasional assertions to the other occur under extraordinary circumstances that are, themselves, of dubious pretense to legitimacy. That is to say, sure, it happens, but we can only deal with that by dealing with the larger problem, such as what goes on in human trafficking and managed sex trade;
i.e., the fact that coerced abortion occurs in the world does not inherently justify itself.
Quite honestly, if the existential fact of womanhood is insufficient to prevent the monopoly on coercive force from requiring her pregnancy until its natural end, sure, my
cynicism is willing to remind that
of course masculine incompetence is sufficient reason to invoke the monopoly on coercive force to require a woman to terminate a pregnancy because some man doesn't want to account for his offspring, but that is largely because there isn't really a rational justification for either masculine incompetence or some stupid and selfish privilege thereunto, but that is essentially what it comes down to, and the discussion is already afoot, and has been for decades, and it's time for men to stop treating their own sexual inadequacy or fears thereof as something to blame on everybody else. In the end, these pretenses of masculine privilege do share a common element, which is harm. As unpleasant a consideration as this might be, it should not be surprising save for the reality of neurotic disruption; that is to say, yes, the cognitive dissonance on this one is generally painful to the masculine mind that attempts to escape it, but remember that masculine sexual expression is fundamentally connected to masculine expression of violence, which in turn is a simple description of a natural result found in human biochemistry.
There is a reason why so much of masculine political necessity requires the subjugation and suffering of women. There is a reason why the abortion discourse struggles so gravely to avoid direct countenance of female humanity.
____________________
Notes:
Lawton, Zoë. "Should Men Be Able to Opt Out of Fatherhood?" Vice. 3 November 2016. Vice.com. 26 May 2019. http://bit.ly/2MbMxGJ
