You ready for a piece that pinpoints the lunacy of our legal system when it comes to parenthood and abortion?
A column in Mens News Daily called “Time to Abort Fatherhood at Will” is an in-your-face read with some great points about the inequality of the law.
So many of the author Paul Elam’s points are so dead on I just had to share it with you. It begins:
Abortion is baby killing.
Only in the reality averse feminism-is-about-equality mindset is abortion anything but the termination of a human life.
Technically speaking it can’t accurately be called murder, since technically speaking, it’s legal. The baby is no less dead, though, for that paltry distinction. But since it is a lawful action in which men are completely voiceless, and looks to remain that way, there is only one appropriate response.
It’s time for men to be allowed to legally abort fatherhood during the same period of time a woman is allowed to do the same by visiting her local clinic.
It’s time for a man to have the unfettered social and legal backing to look at a woman whom he has just impregnated directly in the eye and say, “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya,” and to stroll off whistling a tune, to enjoy less inconvenient relationships, without his wallet being any lighter or his conscious any heavier.
If you are waiting for a punch line or some well placed literary device to put this into a different perspective…don’t. There isn’t one coming, nor should there be.
It’s impossible not to see what Elam is saying.
A constitutional right to evade all the responsibilities of parenthood currently only belongs to half the population, according to current law. Men have no rights over the unborn but are on the hook for all the responsibility should the woman give birth.
Elam points out that since there is a discrepancy, men should also be able to renounce parenthood as well, consequences be damned. I would argue that the discrepancy should call all of us to accept responsibility for the new life. Rather than mirror the woman’s bad behavior we should hope to change the culture so that less women find themselves in crisis pregnancies and less women abort their children.
But his point that as long as the “right” to abortion exists, is it fair to only have half the people able to access those rights?
Elam doesn’t think so:
In the spirit of calling abortion what it is, let us examine the motives behind the decision to get one with the same unblinking candor. Abortion, in most circumstances, is not a decision to avoid pregnancy, but to avoid motherhood. In fact, the term reproductive rights is a misnomer; a postmodern guise to cover the real issue. It isn’t “My body, my choice,” it’s “My lifestyle, my choice,” even if it means killing a baby because it gets in the way.
In many, many cases, it is about choosing personal freedom and a social life over life itself. But what the heck, it’s 2010 people, and grrls gots to have choices.
But with that in mind, you will have to excuse me if I yawn at any outrage over the idea of a man being given the same options, especially given that men have already been aborted from the decision making process. That suits a lot of people and any idea of changing things will anger some as well.
The traditional male, from atop his white stallion, will scoff at the very idea of men’s choice, of course. His indignation will be echoed by his twin sister, the gender feminist. Somewhere, in the midst of sorting out responsibilities, both will invoke the “your baby, you pay,” catch-all, one of many shared attitudes that make these ostensibly strange bedfellows more like two peas in a pod when all is said and done.
But in their rush to ensure that she is given the role of sole arbiter, they will both adamantly deny the major flaw in their position.
There is no reason at all to use the expression “your baby,” when talking to any man in western culture, any more. Because when push comes to shove, as it often does, it is not his baby, it is hers.
He is a father with her permission and approval only. His genes, in the form of another human being, have become her property, lending new meaning to wearing the pants in the family, phonetically speaking.
Elam points out that he understands that the ability to renounce fatherhood will lead to many problems for children throughout the country.
And at last some will be asking “Hey, what about the baby? What about what is best for the baby? Are we really supposed to support men for the right to walk away from the children they create and shun all responsibility?”
The answer is yes. First, equality, for those that can stomach it, is a cruel master. Second, if ‘What about the baby?’ isn’t allowed to be asked before one is cut out of a woman’s womb and thrown into a garbage bin, then anyone asking the question now should just shut up.
We don’t care about what is best for children in this culture, we care about what is best for women or whatever they happen to say is best for them at the moment. So more than anything else, it is about giving women their way. In pursuing that we regularly kill children or rip their lives to shreds in a hundred other ways. And people want to ignore all that and start drawing lines here?
Please.
Rather than both mother and father avoiding responsibility I’d hope that mothers and fathers would always be asking “What about the baby?” But clearly the current legal framework is simply patched up feminism and needs to be changed.
You can read the entire thing at Men’s News Daily.
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