I am 38 and accidentally pregnant. It turns out my boyfriend does not ever want children, never mind after just a few months of dating; he wants me to have an abortion. I am pro-choice and not attached to what has begun to grow inside me. I had hoped to fall in love with a man and have a child with him, but I am well aware that I’m running out of time. While I’m apparently quite fertile, as time goes on the odds of getting pregnant get tougher, and there are enormous costs in egg freezing and/or I.V.F. For these reasons, I’m leaning heavily toward having the baby. My boyfriend is disturbed, angry and upset that I would have his baby ‘‘against his will,’’ as he put it. The point being, I think, that I can find another guy or get inseminated, so it’s not fair to have his baby because of my biological-clock concerns. I’ve read a lot about the ethics of expecting him to be involved or pay for support if he doesn’t want the child but not about whether it’s O.K. to choose to have the child at all.

I told him he can, guilt-free, have no involvement, but that’s not the issue for him. Are there ethical implications to consider here, especially because it is technically half his — he’s not a sperm donor who chose to let someone have his baby and not be involved — and I’m not against abortion (and have seriously considered it)? If it matters, he thought I was on birth control (but never asked, and I had requested that he use a condom once before), so he didn’t think he was having unprotected sex. Name Withheld



Let’s start with your startling last sentence. It is, to put it mildly, unwise for a fertile heterosexual couple to have intercourse without discussing whether either is using contraceptives. (For that matter, it’s unwise to have unprotected sex under any circumstances, unless you are both sure of the health status of the other party and you are in a monogamous relationship.) That you never had this conversation is not your fault alone. Men have often left the management of birth control to women, but this habit is neither fair nor prudent. Although your boyfriend doesn’t want you to have this baby, he had it in his power to try to make sure the pregnancy didn’t happen. Part of his anger may derive from the notion that you deliberately misled him, in order to try to entrap him with the child. It is an uncharitable thought, yet not an unfamiliar one. And it matters that he shares responsibility for the current impasse.

There are practical and legal consequences to consider. I’m not a lawyer, but as a general rule, a father must help support a child even if he didn’t want it. Otherwise every deadbeat dad could claim to be an unwilling one. And of course, he cannot force you to have an abortion. (I am not going to consider the question of whether abortion is morally permissible: You think it is, and I respect that view.) It’s worth noting, however, that your boyfriend’s reasons for not wanting a child are probably more than financial. Therefore, promising not to ask for child support won’t really meet his objections. He may well recognize that once he has a biological child, he will be partly responsible for it, even if he agreed to neither the pregnancy nor the birth. And because you have no idea what your future life course will be, you can’t be certain you will never require his help: Suppose, for example, your child one day needs a bone-marrow transplant and your boyfriend is likely to be the best donor. Then, too, an ongoing relationship with you would involve a relationship with your child. In a variety of ways, having the baby entails conditions and obligations that he doesn’t want.