Forced Into Fatherhood?
Posted by Danielle Bean in Family on Thursday, May 27, 2010 10:00 AM
How much say should a man have in the decision to become a parent?
For Catholics, the answer is easy: A man who doesn’t want to be a parent should not be having sex. That’s where the “freedom of choice” comes in. But the immorality of our secular, pro-abortion culture makes the question significantly more complicated than that.
This month, Elle magazine publishes a story about Greg Bruell, a man who made a pact with his girlfriend that if she became pregnant, she would have an abortion. She had already done that once, but when she became pregnant a second time, she refused to have an abortion. She kept the baby and sought child support.
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 ...
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.
Undoubtedly, an argument in favor of paternal “freedom of choice” puts abortion proponents in a tricky spot. For example, the article highlights the work of Dalton Conley, the dean of social sciences at New York University, who in his zeal for fathers’ rights dares to argue that “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.”
Wow. I would guess that most advocates of “reproductive rights” would have difficulty embracing that idea.
If you read the whole sad story, you will find that ultimately Bruell dropped his lawsuit against his girlfriend. He appears to love his family and didn’t have it in him to pursue litigation against them to make a political point.
Let’s pray that human emotion and natural attachment might always score such a quiet victory over attempted perversion of the family unit.
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