An Agitator.com favorite seems to be back in the news again.

One of the Sunday morning shows this past week had a round table on the issue, with Will Saletan from Slate, Susan Page from USA Today, Carrie Lukas from IWF, and some guy from the Weekly Standard whose name escapes me.

Lukas was the only one on the panel who mentioned anything of the double standard when it comes to abortion, though she stopped far short of endorsing the so-called “male abortion.” She was more concerned, and rightly so, with “paycheck fatherhood,” or the way courts tend to treat divorced or unmarried fathers as cash machines. The rest basically took the position of “if you don’t want to be a father, don’t have sex. Or wear a condom.”

Well, that’s fine. And at least when folks on the right say such things, there’s no double standard. But it’s odd to hear abortion-rights proponents like Saletan and Paige say things like, “when you chose to have sex, you chose to accept responsibility for the possibility of parenthood.” But that only applies to men, I guess.

Saletan, a guy whose work I’ve admired for a long time, at least recognized the absurdity of his position, and rather uncomfortably attempted to justify it by pointing out all of the other inequities between men and women and concluding that because of those, he’s okay with some unfairness when it comes to reproductive rights. To Saletan’s credit, I think I saw him at least wince a little when he said it.

If we’re going to have legalized abortion in this country, a man ought to be able to renounce his parental rights and responsibilities early on, just as a woman does when she terminates a pregnancy. I realize that such a policy would probably lead to more abortion, and as someone who is very generally anti-abortion, I’m not comfortable with that.

But there’s a glaring inequity, here. Women are basically immune to the natural consequence of sex (parenthood). Men, meanwhile, are increasingly being forced by courts to accept responsibility even for children they haven’t fathered, much less children they have. Not to mention the fact that courts aren’t half as militant about enforcing a father’s parental rights as they are about enforcing the garnishing of his wages.

But for all practical purposes, the issue’s a non-starter. The left’s never going to allow biological fathers to opt out of sending single mothers child support. And the right’s never going to allow for the male abortion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 10:25 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.