Choosing fatherhood. Choosing fathers. Now it is clear. The abortion debate wasn’t just about choosing babies, or choosing life, or choosing motherhood, or choosing our own futures. For so many who would never carry a baby, it was about choosing fathers.
Contrary to the media noise about the diminishing opinion of fathers, women take fatherhood very seriously. The stakes are so high that half the women ending a pregnancy choose to do so rather than face the hardship and heartbreak of raising a child with a man unsuited to the role, or raising the child alone.*
For decades anti-choice leaders, especially from religions led by men, have decried the uncoupling of sex from procreation. Now I understand why, but the reason isn’t moral consequences. The reason is evolution. The urge to have sex is strong, and it gets a lot of its oomph from the much deeper biological urge to propagate. The bar a man has to clear to get laid is fairly low, and is largely determined by physical characteristics. When women get to choose, the bar for becoming a father is higher, and different. It’s about character. Maybe it’s the wherewithal to get and keep a job. Maybe it’s the capacity for consideration, or the emotional intelligence to share an adult life. Maybe it’s the self-discipline to come home.
So many women who had abortions in their late teens or 20s went on to have children. Many of the happily married, happily momming women I know had abortions when they were younger.
The idea that women are cavalier about having babies couldn’t be less true. Legal abortion is important because women take parenthood deadly seriously; and if abortion becomes illegal, women will risk death if they need to make that choice. They always have.
Making abortion illegal isn’t going to end abortion or bring back some fantasy of the traditional family from t.v. shows. It’s going to result in more single mothers, more children raised in poverty, more dead women**, and an economy unprepared for the poisonous consequences of generations of women whose options were squashed.
This week I watched so many old white men gloat about the imminent end of legal abortion in America, and, I couldn’t understand why. Why do they care so much? It can’t be about life, or kindness, or the importance of family- these same men are perfectly happy to rip families apart at our border, or take healthcare from those who can least afford to lose it. It isn’t about the fetuses. It’s about the choice. It’s about women’s ability to say, “Not you.”
*Finer LB et al., Reasons U.S. women have abortions: quantitative and qualitative perspectives, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2005, 37(3):110–118, doi:10.1363/3711005.
**https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2709326/