Via Overlawyered, I came across this article at The Y Files.
In a nutshell, a guy is suing to not be required to provide financial support for his child, on the grounds that the mother mislead him as to her fertility, and on the grounds that Roe v. Wade unfair in that the mother can choose to terminate a pregnancy, but the father has no post-coital choice on whether to separate himself from the child.
The article then does a good job of describing the issues, which are, indeed very thought-provoking. One provocative quote, as an example:
I’m struck by it, of course, because it reminds me so much of what right-to-lifers tell women — perhaps most pithily encapsulated in a photo I saw many years ago, in pre-Internet days, of an anti-abortion demonstrator (male) holding a placard that says, YOU HAVE A CHOICE: DON’T SCREW.
My thoughts on the matter tie back to an opinion I’ve expressed previously — I have a problem with the idea of abortion on demand, but I don’t have a problem with abortions that the mother and her chosen doctor deem necessary to protect her health (mental or physical).
It’s true that functionally “necessary to protect mental/physical health” may not be all that different from “on demand”, at least until a final reckoning in the afterlife. However, it does have the unintended benefit of addressing the (in)equality of fathers’ rights — there’s an inherently much higher hurdle to be crossed to demonstrate that a pregnancy is dangerous to the father’s health.
That still leaves open the claim of the father in the aforementioned suit that he shouldn’t be financially liable for the child because the mother misled him. Sounds like plausible logic to me at the surface, but without knowing the mother’s side of the story, or considering whether he should have known the risks….well, that’s why we have judges and juries.
