Abortion, men’s rights, and that asshole in New Mexico
Here's where all the troubles begin
As SallyStrange has pointed out in the comments here, quite a few MRAs seem to have a bad case of “womb envy” – or, more specifically, “abortion envy.” That is, they envy the ability of women to abort fetuses that they – the guys, as sperm providers — have had a part in creating. And since they don’t get final say in whether or not the woman in the equation gets an abortion, many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born.
But for every MRA demanding their own right to an abortion, there’s another MRA who thinks abortion is an unmitigated evil, which in essence means that they think pregnant women should be forced to give birth to babies they don’t want. The guy behind The Life Zone evidently thinks this way. And so does one New Mexican pro-lifer named Greg Fultz, who has launched a bizarre campaign designed to shame the woman who aborted what he thinks of as “his” baby – the highlight of which is a giant billboard depicting him holding what looks like the blackened carcass of a baby under the headline “This Would Have Been a Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To NOT KILL Our Child!”
I’ve been meaning to write about the Fultz thing for some time, but haven’t, because frankly the whole thing makes me depressed. Over the past day or so three separate Man Boobz readers have brought the subject up, so I figure it’s time to deal with the subject. My solution? I’m going to punt, and rather than post about it specifically I’m just going to point you to an excellent, and nicely sarcastic, post on the subject from Jill on Feministe.
Since Jill wrote that post, Fultz has been ordered by a judge to take the billboard down or face jail; he says he won’t. Details here.
NOTE: I originally ended this post with a 1200 word dissertation spelling out my take on abortion. But reading it back over again I realized that many of the points I made in it had already been made, in many cases more deftly, by various commenters in yesterday’s 800-plus comment thread (which actually stayed on the topic for the first several hundred comments, until more or less everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said). The tl;dr summary: her body, her choice. “Paper abortions” only work if the government is willing to step in to make up for the loss of child support, and that isn’t going to happen in the US any time soon. (And I don’t see many MRAs calling for increased support for single moms.)
So instead of abortion, let’s talk about Fultz. What a dick.
Posted on June 9, 2011, in creepy, men who should not ever be with women ever, MGTOW, misogyny, MRA, patriarchy, sex, vaginas. Bookmark the permalink. 355 Comments.
“Presently if a husband decides to exit he will be accountable if the mother decides to have the child. The law determines that. Presently there is no law in place the other way.”
If a woman has a child and then leaves it with the father for him to raise on his own, he can legally ask her for child support. Just as if a woman has a child and the man leaves her to raise it on her own. Both are legally financially accountable for the child.
Bee - no kidding. I know men in that situation. One of my cousins is raising his daughter from his first wife. She’s completely screwed up and would never be able to raise a kid. He managed to pull his life together, get a good paying job, and find a new wife who’s not screwed up and together they’re raising both his kid from the first marriage and one they had together. A friend of mine is a single dad whose girlfriend helps out with his kid when he travels for work (but isn’t full time raising the kid because they don’t live together). I don’t know if the mother has any custody at all - he barely talks about her, I think things ended very badly there. Another friend if mine had one child each by her first two husbands and in each of those cases the father has primary custody (she gets visitation on weekends). No court ordered this - it was by mutual agreement based on what was best for the kids (they get better school districts where their fathers live I think I don’t know all the details).
I don’t actually know what the mothers are providing in terms of child support in any of these cases because people don’t talk about that kind of thing. But I do seem to know a fair numbers of fathers with primary custody! I also know a couple of moms.
I didn’t say that the questions shouldn’t be asked, but was asking what you thought or think might be a viable solution (to that one particular question, or scenario), because the question doesn’t really make sense. If a husband decides to exit and the mother decides to have the child, he is accountable by law (i.e., has legal, financial responsibility to the child). Your question is, if the potential mother of the child decides to bow out (i.e., terminate the pregnancy), even though the husband’s wishes would be for her to have the child, then why does the law not hold her accountable (i.e., having legal, financial responsibility to….???)
As for fathers not having a say in the matter, when the potential mother decides to terminate the pregnancy when that is not what the father desires, that does not necessarily equate to the father not having had any say in the matter, it simply means that he did not make the final decision in the matter.
*I’d love to get Slave into the Machine Shop with me and work just one day with no air conditioning, in 120 degree temps, breathing metal dusts, literally wiping the blood off your machine from your cuts that nobody is enough of a pussy to put a band-aid on, and then see how hard-ass his “work attitude” is.*
Anyway…..fuck him.
And abortion is actually a much milder version of taking a person off of life support when they can no longer function/think/breathe/eat on their own and/or without the aid of machines and intervention. The main difference is that a person on life support is an actual human that’s already born and very much alive. Yet the family or spouse still has the right to end their life for them as they are not a fully functioning human at that point.
A mother’s womb is the same as a life support machine. Or a host to a parasite, if you prefer. The fetus cannot live, think, breathe, eat, or survive on it’s own. Therefore the family (the mother) has the right to “pull the plug”.
As long as removing a person from life support is legal and not considered “murder”, abortion of an unborn, possible human most certainly cannot be.
@Lady Raine, I don’t think a life support machine is a good analogy, as we would not remove a person from life support without their consent (or the consent of their family if they are incapacitated). Also, a life support machine has no interests of its own-it isn’t a person, unlike a woman, whose body would be being used.