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Greg Bruell and his girlfriend of a year and a half, Sandra Hedrick, had a pact. "We agreed that if we got pregnant, we'd terminate because we were not in a stable family unit," Hedrick says. Or as Bruell more starkly puts it, "I resumed sexual relations with her on the condition that were birth control to fail, she'd abort without waffling."

"Resumed," because nine months ear­lier Hedrick had conceived a child with Bruell and the couple decided to end that pregnancy. Or rather, he decided, and she went along. Their relationship was too rocky—a series of breakups followed by passionate reunions—for them to become parents together, Bruell argued. Plus, both were still in the process of finalizing di­vorces, and he was a newly single father struggling to balance his needs against those of his eight-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. Bruell wanted to steady their destabilized worlds before jumping into fatherhood anew.

A dead ringer for Woody Harrelson, with penetrating blue eyes, an athletic body splashed with freckles, and a diminishing crop of strawberry blond hair, Bruell wasn't one to take becoming a dad lightly. Perversely, considering his new situation, he'd waged a two-year campaign—complete with "charts and graphs"—to persuade his former wife, Pam, to have their daughter and son. "Pam wasn't sure she could balance her career with parenting," Bruell says of his biology-professor ex (who seconded his version of events), "so the agreement was that I'd be the stay-at-home dad." When their first child was born in 2001, Bruell quit his job as a software executive and, buttressed by a trust fund from his grandfather's fragrance company, dedicated himself to parenting full-time.

Hedrick, a petite 39-year-old whose lively blue eyes, long blond hair, and curvy figure recall something of the high school cheerleader she once was, also already had a child, a five-year-old girl, and was still untying the emotional knots of her seven-year marriage. Her reaction to the pregnancy, however, had been one of "love, hope, happiness, and an overwhelming feeling that the baby was meant to exist." But Greg's logic and unwavering certainty that the baby was not meant to be ultimately carried the day for her. Still, Hedrick admits, "If Greg wasn't beside me on the table, I don't think I would have gone through with it."

It was the night after the abortion, and on a number of occasions following, that Hedrick vowed to Greg that if she conceived again, she'd immediately terminate. But when she got pregnant in early 2009 (she was on birth control, she says, though its effectiveness may have been diluted by antibiotics she was taking), she balked. "I looked at the ultrasound," Hedrick says. "A bad move." She also realized that this might be her last chance to have another child. She broke the news to Bruell: She was keeping the baby.

Infuriated about the "miserable betrayal," Bruell told Hedrick it was over between them, for good. He believed she'd deliberately gotten pregnant. Then, two months later, as he was leaving a session with his personal trainer, he was served with a lawsuit demanding child support for his unborn child. That's when Bruell called Mel Feit, a founder of the National Center for Men (NCM), and volunteered to become the next poster boy for male reproductive rights.

Lately, it's Alec Baldwin who's been in the men's rights spotlight—thanks to his 2008 memoir railing against what he believes is a corrupt legal system that discriminates against men in custody arrangements (and, in his case, he says, served to alienate him from his daughter). But if you're over 30, you may remember Mel Feit. Defiantly sporting a kiltlike skirt (since "women can wear the pants"), he appeared on shows such as Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael in the '80s, battling bra-burning feminists with his own brand of tie-burning masculinist rage. His once fiery red hair is now a blondish white, but it's still long and pulled back into a ponytail—and Feit is still crusading on behalf of his brothers.

Feit's list of grievances range from sexist social standards—why should men still be expected to foot the bill on dates? Why is crying or showing weakness verboten for them?—to what he considers discrimination enforced by the state: men's lack of reproductive rights combined with unfair child support laws. "Reproductive choice isn't a fundamental right if it's only limited to people who have internal reproductive systems," Feit says. "If it only applies to women, it's a limited right and that weakens it." In his view, Planned Parenthood's motto—"Every child a wanted child"—should apply to both people who make the baby.

Several years ago, the NCM, based in Coram, New York, brought a lawsuit, dubbed Roe v. Wade for Men, in conjunction with a 25-year-old Michigan man named Matt Dubay. Dubay believed that his ex-girlfriend Lauren Wells duped him into getting her pregnant. Wells had assured him, he said, that she was on birth control and had a medical condition that prevented conception. Dubay's argument was that while his girlfriend was permitted by the Constitution to end her pregnancy for any reason, he had no comparable right, in violation of the Equal Protection clause. As a result, he contended, he shouldn't have to be financially responsible for the child.

As the public face of the case, Feit duked it out on CNN with then–National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy, who argued that once a child is born, the rights of the child supersede those of the parents. Since this was the law in all 50 states, men had to accept their financial obligations, Gandy said. Elsewhere on the airwaves, Dr. Phil chastised Dubay—he'd exercised choice, all right, a choice to practice condomless sex. And Fox's Bill O'Reilly bullied Feit with declarations about what it means to be a man and taking responsibil­ity for one's own actions.

As Feit points out, this reasoning is ironically similar to that often used against women's reproductive rights: Abortion encourages sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility; the right of the fetus should override a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy that could've been avoided with birth control; women should have to suffer the consequences of their sexual dalliances.

In 2007, a U.S. Appeals Court in Michigan ruled against Dubay, however, holding that the Equal Protection clause does not "deny to [the] State the power to treat different classes of persons in different ways." As Gandy explains the court's decision, "Men and women aren't equally situated; there is a biological difference. One of them has to carry the baby and in doing so risks losing her job if she's one of millions of workers who aren't entitled to any family and medical leave. Who's going to pay her mortgage? Who's going to protect her and the child?" Feit and his crowd, Gandy goes on, "would never take responsibility for children unless they just wanted to. It's have your cake and eat it too."

Undaunted by such reasoning, Feit asked Dubay to appeal his case to the Supreme Court, but the young man had had enough. Short of money and dubious about his prospects for prevailing, Dubay dropped out, which left Feit searching for a new plaintiff. Enter Greg Bruell, a gift from Zeus perhaps, that most ferocious of dads. Not only did Bruell have deep pockets and a sympathetic story as a stay-at-home father, but he was a Libertarian who passionately believed that the state should not meddle in personal affairs. He was determined, he told Feit, to finish what Dubay started. "The only recourse is a reasoned argument based on civil rights," Bruell says, one that highlights "the fact that a woman has choices—she can abort the fetus or have the baby—and a man has none. The only way to bring awareness to this is to actually have somebody put skin in the game."

When I arrive in San Diego in December 2009 to talk to Bruell, he's more downcast than combative. The child he conceived with Hedrick has been born, a girl named Ava, and is now seven months old. Bruell has been spending time with his new daughter and supporting her, voluntarily. He told Hedrick he'd take care of her as long as she "called off the dogs" and withdrew her lawsuit. Hedrick agreed, but what still rankles Bruell is that she could decide to refile at any time, and the California courts almost certainly would force him to pay up. "Look, I'm a stay-at-home dad. I'm perfectly willing to take the responsibility of raising a child if it is my choice," he says. "If it's compulsory, it becomes impossible. I especially don't want to be forced to take responsibility for something that I was deceived into becoming a part of."

Because there's still an important point to be made, Bruell says he doesn't want to drop his action with the National Center for Men. But then again, he says, Hedrick and he have been getting along better lately—they went to couples counseling so they could negotiate the financial arrangements without wringing each other's necks. "I want to show you a video that I call 11 Minutes of Chaos, " Bruell says, beckoning me to a massive computer screen. On the shaky homemade film, a skinny kid with a mess of deep orange hair races through the house alternating between laughing, singing, and shouting. One minute he's tackling his older brother, Gil; the next, he's leading his grandma across the funky velvet carpet in a dance, which morphs, seconds later, into Ring Around the Rosie when Gil and his sister, Dana, join in.

Courtesy of subjects

The boisterous boy is Greg 34 years ago. It's not clear from the footage, but of his three siblings—Gil, Dana, and two-year-old Phil—he's the only one who would emerge from childhood unscathed. Dana was born mentally disabled (due to a birth complication that deprived her brain of oxygen), her intellectual capacity never to exceed that of a child. His two brothers suffered from a rare disorder that destroyed their kidneys by the age of 12. Between them, they suffered through three unsuccessful transplants and spent the rest of their lives shuttling back and forth to dialysis treatments. Gil—whom Greg calls his "best friend, playmate, guide, mentor, and teacher"—died at 29, as did Phil. (Dana lives in a group home.)

"I was the only healthy kid in a family where all the other kids were sick," Greg says, clearing his throat to push back tears. "I was forced early to make a decision: Who am I going to put first? The answer wasn't clear-cut. But it was clear that you can't just put everybody else first, because in that situation I would've sunk to the bottom."

This unusual, not to mention tragic, past is the blueprint to Greg's personal philosophy, one that gave rise to a devotion to Libertarian politics and an "Ayn Randian" commitment to rugged individualism and independence, as well as a contradictory and profound desire for family. "Family." Bruell says the word often, like it's a mantra or an antidote for all the pain in his life. "I really wanted to have children. I felt this need to make up for all of the loss and suffering that happened in my family by having my own." The current circumstances, he says, are causing a "civil war between two conflicting parts of my soul."

For Hedrick's part, she grew up in Cupertino, California, 48 miles south of San Francisco, in a relatively happy family of "die-hard Democrats." She dropped out of a local college and worked in real estate, where she met her first husband, a devel­oper. They moved to San Diego for his job, and she quit working when she gave birth to their daughter.

What attracted her to Bruell, a music junkie and former aspiring actor, was his enthusiasm for culture—a rarity in San Diego, she says, with its "military town" ethos and "Stepford wife" beach-bronzed blonds. The couple went to concerts and the theater and patronized a local chamber music group. They also bonded over the outdoors and love for things physical: hiking, rock climbing, skiing.

Bruell has the same good memories about the early days of their relationship, and he says he finds his mind reeling back to a trip he took with Hedrick in 2008—"the best vacation of my life ever," he calls it. The couple stayed at a lodge in New York's picturesque Hudson River Valley, running and hiking the surrounding mountain trails. "We were just wrapped around each other the entire time," Bruell says. "I'd literally fantasized about the kind of intimacy we had my entire life."

While Hedrick also says the pair have "great sexual and emotional chemistry," that wasn't the main factor that drew her to Bruell. "It was seeing him with his kids—that softer side of him. He's very family oriented." Which is one reason, she says, she always figured that Bruell would come around.

While neither Bruell nor Feit believes a man should be able to compel a woman to abort or keep a pregnancy, they don't want the state to make men pay for children they've made explicit they don't want. Not all of their comrades in the father's rights movement have been so moderate.

In 2005, Dalton Conley, dean of social sciences at New York University, who specializes in family issues, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled "A Man's Right to Choose." In it, he recounted how angry he'd been in his twenties when a former girlfriend chose to abort a child he'd wanted. It's a passionate rumination on the value of making fathers and fatherhood more relevant by giving men greater reproductive rights.

Although Conley, who calls himself a "progressive Libertarian," pledged his allegiance to Roe v. Wade in the first few paragraphs of the piece, he concluded with this barnstormer of a recommendation, one that would gut Roe: "If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother, he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create."

The morning his article appeared, Conley says a colleague with more political savvy than he called to wish him luck. "Beware," his friend warned, "you've stepped into the biggest minefield in American politics.'' The guy laughed, then hung up.

It was 7:00 a.m. Conley was dropping his children off at school. At the end of the day, he came home to an inbox bursting with e-mails. "I was like, `Holy shit!' I had no idea I was going to get the response I got. I was blindly naive, thinking that everybody was interested in dialogue and debate and rationality." His article not only provoked protests from Times readers but infuriated his feminist colleagues at NYU. "Everybody in my department was so upset. They had a gender workshop, so I went and presented my argument and answered their questions. Women were shaking—they were extremely angry."

The irate women included Conley's own wife. "She'd barely speak to me for a good month after the piece came out." And as someone who considers himself an "enlightened feminist," Conley says he made some friends he wasn't sure he wanted: pro-lifers, the largely politically conservative leaders of the men's rights movement. He did get some supportive e-mails from "men on the Left," he says, "but no one came out publicly. I think they were afraid to."

Conley isn't the only one who's taken heat for breaking what Arthur Shostak, who wrote one of the first books on men and abortion 25 years ago, calls the "compulsory silence" on male reproductive rights. At a National Abortion Federation conference in the early 1990s, Claire Keyes, the former director of a Pittsburgh abortion clinic, says she tried to incorporate a male-inclusive agenda—one-on-one counseling for men, a public journal where they could express their thoughts and feelings, pamphlets tailored to their experiences—but was shot down. "There were people who were shouting at me, saying, `This is not about men; this is about women, and we have fought long and hard to get men's hands off our bodies.' "

Similarly, a friend of Bruell's who works at the San Diego branch of Planned Parenthood told him she found his case to have merit, but she declined to speak about it for this article. Her organization, she said, can't get distracted from its primary mission: protecting women's choice. (Vince Hall, the PR director at the San Diego office, also refused my requests to discuss male reproductive rights.)

Keyes, who runs a website with Shostak called Menandabortion.com, says that there were good reasons for de-emphasizing men in the early days of abortion research and debate: "Before Roe v. Wade, women who became pregnant and didn't want to be had few options—most of them illegal and life-threatening." The implication is that now that the stakes are lower, there's more room to talk about the subtler terrain of abortion, but as shaky as Roe has seemed in recent years, it's hard not to be sympathetic with pro-choice advocates who rank male reproductive rights low on the priority list.

Still, it seems dicey for women to argue that our distinct biology gives us special rights, considering our long history of being discriminated against based on that same biology. And I wonder about the practical costs of excluding men. The assertion that women have unquestioned dominion over reproductive decisions seems to help cement the notion that fathers are minor players in the life of a family. Yet women are crying out for men to assume a larger share of the burdens (and joys, hopefully) of parenthood.

"How would you accomplish that?" feminist activist Gandy asks incredulously.

And here's the rub. Conley's proposal—that women could be enjoined by the courts to continue (or end) a pregnancy—is both so frighteningly coercive and ridiculously impractical that he himself has backed away from it. The ever-inventive Feit, not surprisingly, has another idea: Couples should sign a "Reproductive Rights Affidavit" that spells out what to do in the event of an unplanned pregnancy. Alas, this too would face insurmountable legal hurdles. "There are some obligations you just can't contract away," says Alicia Crowe, author of Real Dads Stand Up! "Responsibility for a child is one of them." Dean Schreyer, an attorney at the Men's Legal Center in San Diego, affirms that "parents have parental responsibilities and the powers and authorities essential for discharging those responsibilities. These are not rights, in the conventional sense. Parents are not allowed to use these powers and authorities if and when they so choose. They are required to use them on behalf of their children, at all times, no exceptions."

Yeah, yeah, Feit says, he knows the contracts are unenforceable. They're simply another form of "symbolic protest against unfair and unjust paternity laws which deny men equal reproductive choice."

This spring, Bruell informed Feit that he didn't want to headline a lawsuit, after all. He could no longer countenance being pitted against Hedrick and his daughter, and he couldn't figure out a way to proceed in the courts that wasn't adversarial. There are any number of lessons that can be learned from Bruell's withdrawal, one of which is that Libertarians probably don't make the best activists. "[My lawsuit] would have been a speculative jab at the legal system with low probabilities of success that would have only helped others," he says. "And given that I'm not an altruist, that was not a sufficient motivation to throw myself on the sword."

Then, too, as Pascal had it, "the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." Bruell returned to the Hudson Valley recently, to the same lodge he and Hedrick had stayed in, but this time with his children and ex-wife. (The four still take an occasional family vacation.) Sitting in the resort's shop, while Pam and their children skied, he wrote in his journal: "I want to be married again, this time to the right person. I miss Sandra. She's one of the few people I actually feel comfortable with."

When the trip was over, after he dropped off Pam and the kids at her place, he says he felt despondent facing his empty home. "What I love is the family unit, and Sandra might be my last shot. At 42, I don't have the same choices I had before. I needed to be more accepting of everything, of the circumstances."

Hedrick says she came to have some sympathy for Bruell's point of view—"Nobody wants to be strong-armed into acting against their will"—and she's cautiously excited about the prospects for the couple making a life together with Ava. After all, he's already come this far.

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