wolas3214 said:
Is this change to our society really too much to ask?
Whats your opinion?
I see what you're getting at. I may not agree, but I
understand.
When two consenting adults have sex, and that sex ends in unwanted/unplanned pregnancy, the perception is that the woman has two choices she can freely make: Have the kid, or don't have the kid (abortion or adoption). And the perception is that the man has one choice--do whichever the woman says.
That means if the woman doesn't want/can't afford a child, she has an "out." If the woman wants it, but the man doesn't want/can't afford the child, he has no say, no "out." The common statement is that he "made his choice when he decided to have sex," but it seems this doesn't apply to the woman. I can understand the perception, and it certainly is an asymmetrical system. Both parties do not have the same options or the same level of say. However:
1. Many of those people
also think the woman made
her choice when she decided to have sex, and thus abortion is only for rape, incest, or cases of health crisis. In that sense, this view is more internally consistent with itself--the idea is that both parties waived their "right to choose" when they chose to have sex.
2. Forcing an abortion on a woman, if the man says, "No," is a fiercely dangerous thing. If you're going to push this angle, you should instead push for a system that allows a man to sue for
non-parental status--if she chooses to have the child, and he mounts a case against it, he could say, "Look, if I don't get a say, then it's all on you." At least with this idea, you're not on the edge of forcing abortion on a woman... though an idea like this is so full of pitfalls I don't see how you could make it work.
3. Yes, it's a double standard (in a sense). A hypothetical woman who says, "Oops! I had my fun, but now I don't want to pay for it!" can open the escape hatch and get away. A hypothetical man who does the same cannot, and he'll be on the financial hook for the next 18 years at the very least.
Similarly, a hypothetical couple who has a child on the way with a known severe birth defect (say, Down's syndrome) has a decision to make. If the mother decides, "We can't afford the care we'll need, and we don't want a lifetime of that kind of work," she can opt out. If the father thinks that, but the mother does not, he's up a creek.
So yeah, it can be a double standard. More accurately, it's an asymmetrical choice. They seem unfair, but often they can't really be called that. Fact of the matter is, the woman is the one that houses the baby for nine months and endures child birth. As a result, any procedure performed on the baby is also performed on her. That means she gets veto power, plain and simple.
The "unfortunate" part is that, once childbirth is done, both parents have
equal responsibility even though they didn't have equal choice. But that's just a feature of the way the biological system is designed, not an unfair social construct.
In principle, if the biology was symmetrical, I could agree with you. But that's not how the species is built, so it just doesn't work that way.
