Abortion: Male Coercion and Irresponsibility
Consider this: By vesting all reproductive responsibility in the woman, a pro-choice male creates a situation in which men can easily rationalize their irresponsibility toward women who choose not to abort. Plausible? Read on.
As Daniel Callahan puts it, ``If legal abortion has given women more choice, it has also given men more choice as well. They now have a potent new weapon in the old business of manipulating and abandoning women.`` Given that 80 percent of all abortions are sough by single women (according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute) the advent of reproductive rights has created a situation in which a man can coerce a woman to have an abortion by denying his responsibility towards her, or even abandoning her when she gets pregnant and ``chooses`` to carry the pregnancy to term.
According to feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, ``Sexual liberation in this sense does not free women, it frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion thus removes the one remaining legitimized reason that women had for refusing sex besides the headache.``
The anecdotal evidence for this interpretation is compelling. Consider an encounter captured in the CBS documentary ``The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America`` shown on January 26, 1986. The scene is a ghetto in Newark, New Jersey and journalist Bill Moyers is speaking to Timothy, a man in his early thirties who has fathered six children to four different women.
MOYERS: People out there watching are going to say, ``Why didn`t he think about this [his responsibility] before he brought six kids into the world?``
TIMOTHY: Well, the mother had a choice. She could have an abortion or she could have the child. She decided she wanted to have the child, so therefore, I guess it`s not sweating her.
MOYERS: So do you think it`s her fault she got pregnant?
TIMOTHY: Well, maybe, maybe not. I say, ``Mamma`s baby, Papa`s maybe.`` Ya know what I mean?
MOYERS: (later in the interview) Would you have had all these kids if you had thought about it?
TIMOTHY: No.
Empirical studies have also demonstrated that male coercion and pressure play a sizable role in many women`s abortion decisions. A survey from the Medical College of Ohio, for example, examined 150 women who ``identified themselves as having poorly assimilated the abortion experience.`` Of the 81 women who responded, more than one-third felt they had been coerced into having an abortion. Fewer than one-third initially considered the abortion themselves.
In cases where women initially chose to bear the child, their male partners were opposed to the decision by a margin of eight to one. In all of these cases, the man withdrew his support for his partner ``thereby eliminating that alternative.``
Even in Carol Gilligan`s famous study _In a Different Voice_, not all of the women`s abortion decisions she recounts were independent. Male coercion played an important role in about one-third of the cases cited. The men in the women`s lives were unwilling to provide their partners with the moral and material support for pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing. As one of Gilligan`s respondents noted, ``He made me feel I had once choice to make and that it was to have an abortion and I could always have children another time, and he made me feel if I didn`t it would drive us apart.``
In all these cases, the logic goes something like this: since the man was willing to pay for an abortion, and since the woman had a constitutional right to get one even if he wished to prevent it, by her failure to obtain an abortion she took sole responsibility for the child. Therefore, the reasoning concludes, the man should not be liable for any child support.
Permissive abortion policy has created a climate where men can enjoy sexual relations with little or no concern for their consequences. Abortion is often misrepresented as solely a women`s issue; clearly, however, it is a men`s issue as well as long as men are interested in protecting their sexual liberty.
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