Equality Goes Both Ways

Aloha,

I was watching Dr. Phil last week and I saw a segment about a guy who was suing the court to be released from the obligation to pay child support because he was not given any choice as to whether or not to have the child. He had a lawyer who was claiming that his rights were being denied using the same argument used in Roe v. Wade.

The background is that this guy and his girlfriend (both pretty young-looking) had discussed children. He had said that he wasn't ready, she told him she couldn't get pregnant, but was on the pill for other medical reasons. So he had stopped using condoms. Lo and behold, she became pregnant and kept the child. He had been ordered by a Michigan court to pay over $500 per month in child support.

As Dr. Phil pointed out, the only way to be sure that you're protected is to use protection (and as Ross from Friends found out, even then you can't be sure). However, while I'm glad I'm not the guy in the hotseat, I'm also glad this has finally come up. I've often thought the law a little one-sided when it comes to this issue. Please don't get me wrong: I know that women predominantly bear most of the burden and all that stuff, however, thinking abstractly, we really do have more options than men do.

We choose what type of birth control we use (for the most part), and after the fact, if we get pregnant, we have the ultimate voice in determining what happens with the pregnancy. We choose whether or not to tell our partners we're pregnant, we choose whether or not to carry the pregnancy full term and we choose whether or not to keep the child if we decide to have it. If we're married or in a committed relationship, chances are, we're going to make that decision with our partner, but if we're not, then the man involved might not even find out that he was almost a father.

So when a woman gets pregnant and chooses not to have the child, we applaud that woman's right to choose and her right to self-determination. However, when a woman gets pregnant (in this case against the expressed wishes of the man) and decides to keep and raise the child, the man is reviled by the audience of the Dr. Phil show as a deadbeat for not wanting to have anything to do with the child. That seems awfully incongruous to me. This particular case is still before the courts, so we didn't get to hear all the details from the woman's side (she declined the invitation to the show), but she was apparently not denying that they had discussed the baby matter before she got pregnant and his position had been made clear.

I do not think that a man should be able to choose whether or not a woman should be able to have an abortion, or could be made to have an abortion, but I think that in a case where a pregnancy occurs and the woman proceeds against the wishes of the man, perhaps we should rethink our ideas about what that man is responsible for.

How can we ever consider ourselves equal if we don't start taking responsibility for our actions? If a woman chooses to have a child on her own, she should be prepared to raise the child without the support (emotional, financial or otherwise) of the man involved. In a perfect world, this wouldn't happen. All pregnancies would be welcomed with open arms and there would never be another abortion or deadbeat dad; but we don't live in a perfect world.

The moral of the day: always wear a condom, except when you're trying to get pregnant.

Later peeps,