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Since June, Laurie Shrage has opened email after email from desperate men.

A few told of being forced to drop out of college to support a child they’d accidentally fathered, even as the children’s mothers pursued an education with help from child support payments.

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One man said he believed the woman who filed a paternity suit against him secretly intended to get pregnant, to boost her lifestyle with child support payments. Some men say women told them they were on birth control, or were infertile.

And then there were men who simply regretted how that one night stand unwittingly resulted in 18 years of child support.

“These men could be exaggerating,” Ms. Shrage, professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at Florida International University, said in an interview with the National Post. “But under our current law, it really could happen.”

In most of North America, women have the full reproductive choices they didn’t have 40 years ago. But now that non-committal sex has become a social norm, and technology has made paternity testing foolproof, a small but growing number of feminists are asking: Shouldn’t men, too, be allowed to opt out of parenthood?