Daily Blague

Dalton Conley's essay in yesterday's Times, "A Man's Right to Choose," makes me more impatient every minute. The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that even to speak of "rights" in the abortion situation is unintelligent. I suppose that it was necessary to do so at the time of Roe v. Wade, but that case is over a generation old.

Let's talk about realities. Mr Conley writes,

Nobody is arguing that we should let my friend who impregnated his girlfriend off the hook. If you play, you must pay.

Ah, good old "personal responsibility," applied to an aspect of human life that more or less demands a surrender, or loss of control, that fairly rules out responsible thinking. To believe that people who have irresponsible sex must pay for the consequences by supporting a child that one of them doesn't want is patriarchal moralizing at its most intoxicated. Let's consider the reality of the life that such a child is likely to have. We are grown-ups, not idealists; we understand and accept that even the best-intentioned parents may not be up to the task. Unwanting parents are unlikely to be "best-intentioned."

Another reality: there are circumstances in which an unwanted pregnancy may lead to the mother's beating or murder by a husband who could not have been the father. "Pay and Play"? Is that really a decent standard of judgment? If your daughter were caught in such a bind, would you admonish her sternly that she brought the situation upon herself? Or are you sure that no one you're connected to could be caught in such a bind. Just less-advantaged folk.

These realities don't matter much to the patriarchs, because Christianity and its offshoots set themselves in the teeth of reality. Reality - the material world in all its failings - is precisely what religious figures such as Augustine command us to reject and contemn. Since life in this mortal world doesn't matter in itself, because earthly life is no more than a test of worthiness of divine love (I am choking as I write this), there is really nothing wrong with punishing people for their "sins." Even innocent children; because, after all, thanks to Augustine's utterly lunatic but strangely-appealing doctrine of original sin, there are no innocent children.

Forget "rights" - we're not talking about property here - and focus instead on probability, which is, indeed, all that we know about the reality to come. For my part, I would require obstetricians to abort fetuses in the absence of affidavits from each parent in support of the pregnancy. That's undoubtedly going too far for most of us, and doubtless it would lead to injustices of its own. Better, perhaps, to have no rules on the subject. Better to accept the reality that, even though some of us are passionately opposed, on the most deeply-felt religious grounds, to abortion, there is no consensus among the all-of-us in whose name any government must act.

There is a lot of talk these days about the possibly corrosive effect of teaching little boys that daddies aren't necessary. Won't they grow up thinking the same thing? As I understand human nature, children are never stunted by genuinely loving care; they don't learn eccentric behavior from eccentric parents. Mr Conley seeks to tap into this debate toward the close of his piece.

The bottom line is that if we want to make fathers relevant, they need rights, too. 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.

Looked at from the vantage of "rights," this is arguable. From the standpoint of reality, it is obscene. It submits women to exactly the same pressure that existed prior to Roe: a forced pregnancy followed by adoption. As a child who was adopted in the good old postwar days when there was still thought to be a stigma about not being your parents' biological offspring - but no thought whatsoever was given to the possibility that you might never, ever think like one or both of your parents, something that, in my experience, does not occur in even the most dysfunctional biological families - I hardly know which I value less: the life that I wouldn't have had had Roe been decided a generation earlier, or the love that I lost because my mother was an unmarried woman who would have brought scandal upon herself and upon her family because she lived in an America still ruled by the patriarchs. Mr Conley does not, I assure him and you, know what he's talking about - he really doesn't.

Not that I expect him to care about that.