If Fathers Had "Choice"

If women deserve “choice,” then why shouldn’t men enjoy comparable rights to order termination or continuance of the fetus in the womb of their sex partner. That’s what Meghan Daum argues.

Most people now accept that women, especially teenagers, often make decisions regarding abortion based on educational and career goals and whether the father of the unborn child is someone they want to hang around with for the next few decades. The "choice" in this equation is not only a matter of whether to carry an individual fetus to term but a question of what kind of life the woman wishes to lead.

But if we are talking about the mother, er, host of the fetus making this sort of “lifestyle” decision, why not extend the same rights to the father, er, sperm donor?

So off goes Ms. Daum for 800 words of mostly unmarried hypotheticals. She illustrates with remarkable clarity how once you step out of the moral and legal framework of a marriage you end up in a moral and legal snakepit.

Let’s look at this differently. Let’s say that your “educational and career goals” are a fine thing, and the “kind of life” you wish to lead is an even finer thing. Can anyone say that their lifestyle choices are finer than a man and a woman entering into marriage and making a vow to bear and rear the fruit of their union?

When you “choose” to assume less than full responsibility for the children you conceive, aren’t you making a rather unfortunate statement about the kind of life you wish to live?

We’ve had about a century now of talk about overpopulation and the unwanted child and lifestyles and choice and all the rest of the opt-out agenda. Expect the next generation but one to develop a rather judgmental attitude towards all this self-serving talk.

As a Hindu friend said: If you get married and don’t have children, what’s the point?

People want to have their cake and eat it. They want the freedom to make choices, but don’t want to deal with the moral consequence of their choices.

People forget that freedom is not a cloud-cuckoo land where everyone is freed from every restraint and consequence. Freedom is the right to make the wrong choice, and live with that wrong choice for the rest of your life.

Let’s stipulate that abortion should be legal. But legal doesn’t make it right. And nobody should imagine that the choice to abort doesn’t have consequences, consequences that will be whispering in your ear for the rest of your life.

More and more, I am coming to believe that conservatives should say: Go ahead liberals and feminists, make my day. Go ahead and abort every liberal and feminist baby in sight. That’s what you liberals want; that’s what you believe in and that’s what you should have.

But we are conservatives. We believe in rules. We believe in following rules not because they are the law but because they are right. We just think that aborting babies is wrong. And we won’t do it.

You can see where this leads. It leads to conservatives grabbing the moral high ground. Liberals would hate that even more than they hate President Bush.