×

As The Root reported, Frances Goldscheider, a sociologist at Brown, thinks that men should be able to, by law, explicitly tell a female partner that if she becomes pregnant, they do not want to be a father, and that this assertion should bar them from any financial responsibility should their partner have a baby. She calls it a "financial abortion" and notes how, in our legal system, fathers' responsibilities are accounted for only in terms of money. For many low-income men without the resources to get better jobs, she notes, child support is a burden they can't bear -- and one that makes them even poorer.

This seems like the wrong solution to a very real problem for low-income fathers. It assumes men should be able to decide not to be fathers but that they can't do anything to prevent it, i.e., using birth control regularly. That's an argument for male contraception -- a male pill, but also an argument for making condoms increasingly pervasive and expanding access to sex education. It's also an argument for helping low-income fathers provide the financial support they're required to by assisting them with services that would help move them out of poverty, or make poverty less devastating.

For those who would see a financial abortion as a way to give men the same option as women allegedly have, the difference is that a financial abortion would still allow men to separate themselves from parenthood in ways women still cannot. Should a woman get pregnant as a result of an encounter, she will have to pay some amount of money for having a child (or not having a child), whether she raises it or not. That doesn't count the amount of work which she will miss or the potential for health complications because of a pregnancy. Making men more considerate of their role in pregnancy is a good thing, but codifying the ability to abdicate their responsibility doesn't seem to do it.

It also overestimates how many births that we might assume are unplanned actually are planned. As a researcher points out later in the piece on The Root, many young, unmarried men want children. We know from a recent study that the number of young men who would be secretly happy about an unplanned pregnancy is actually higher than the number of young women. Maybe it's because those women know men can have already have a financial abortion, or a societal abortion, or a responsibility abortion anytime they want, even without a law.

-- Monica Potts