“Health of the Mother”?

I completely agree with the concept that males should not have the right to “let” women decide what they do to their bodies.

I am confused about the subject as a whole, though.

When a woman becomes pregnant, it is due to the actions both the male and female chose to do.

Males are told that they must be responsible for supporting the child if it is born, and they are completely responsible for their part in the original creation of that child.

However, in between the conception and the possible birth, the male does not have a say whether or not his potential child is born or aborted. The decision is completely out of his hands, whether he wants to raise the child (even alone), abort the child, or give it up for adoption.

In most American states if a child is born out of wedlock it automatically becomes the custody of the female parent, without any background checks, survey, interviews, or other forms of legal decision making. It is simply given that the male cannot be qualified to raise the child.

This would be the very definition of sexual discrimination. Most parents will tell you that nothing in their entire adult lives is as important to them as their children, so what is considered to be the most important thing in a father’s life is taken away from him for simply being male.

I believe in a woman’s right to choose what is done to her body, and that includes abortions, but I am confused by this subject as it seems far more complex than most people care to admit it is.

In many ways, males are given preferential treatment, and that needs to change. Gender should never be a consideration for any decision that doesn’t literally involve gender itself.

But in this most important way, men are left with multiple signals, telling them that they are just as responsible for the pregnancy, but they get no say in what happens with that pregnancy, and that in the end, they are just a second class citizen who has no given rights to be the primary care giver to the child. (This does not include situations involving divorce, as that has different rules.)

I am a former case worker for the Department of Children and Families, and I wonder about these things all the time.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope that none of it was offensive.

Jennifer, this has been around since the mid-70s at least. (Remember, I was raised a card-carrying theocon! And one handshake, multiple times, from Pat Buchana & Alan Keyes, too.)

What’s happening now is that all this old rhetoric that was nurtured in he hothouses of conservative Christian publications like “The Wanderer” and “National Catholic Register” and “Columbia” magazine and “New Oxford Review” and other publications that don’t exist any longer (plus lots of obscurer fringe publications) , as well as some that came into existence in the ’80s funded by right-wing think-tanks like “First Things” and Crisis,” has been mainstreamed as the generators of it gained power first under Reagan and now reinforced under Bush II.

Roe vs. Wade as the New Dred Scott Decision, Abortion Is The New Holocaust, The Pill is an Abortifacient, Condoms Lead To A Contraceptive Mentality that Causes More Abortions, Rejection Of A Culture of Life/Culture of Death – this was the household conversation among conservative Catholic families who were “social conservatives” rather than just fiscal conservatives (tho’ there was always more overlap than I realized back as a kid) in the 1970s.

It went right along with ZOMG! Contracepting Old Europe is Vanishing Under The Tide of Muslims! and Unions Are Destroying Our Economy and Liberals Will Force Christianity Underground and The War On Christmas – that last straight from the mind of Henry Ford, tho’ most of us didn’t know it at the time…

And no, the notion that pregnancy could *really* be dangerous was dismissed blithely, often by women who had never had a problem pregnancy themselves and so who sneered at the notion that it might be any more, with modern medicine. And if it DID happen somehow, one-in-a-millionth-chance, so what? Nobler to suffer wrong than do it, better to pray for a miracle and die as a saint!

It was gospel within the movement in the ’70s that “health of the mother” belonged in scare quotes (tho’ we didn’t use the phrase back then!) and you were supposed to simultaneously believe that a) all [other!] women were wicked beasts who would happily murder their helpless babies just to stay slim and good looking, and thus deserved to die in complications from abortion, b) all [other!] women were helpless fools manipulated into giving up their natural fertility to the wicked/greedy [male] doctors of the abortion mills of which PP was the chiefest, and thus shouldn’t be jailed (as Sarah Palin hastily shoehorned in the other day) because “they know not what they do” – somehow our heads didn’t explode. (Well, eventually mine did, which is why I am no longer a ‘single-issue prolife voter’…)

The big problem is, that having *stayed* in the hothouse for so long, all the while having told themselves that they were the Only Speakers For Real True Middle America, they have *no* idea how horrifying their rhetoric is to *actual* Middle America.

I think that the fatal moment for any conservative kid is the point when you start thinking “You people need to get OUT more” about your parents/elders/community authority figures, because what they’re talking about – be it The Gay Agenda, or Living Together Will Inevitably Result In Misery & Separation, or doctors handing out tubal ligations like they’re candy at the drive through, or ZOMG we’re being OUTBRED by the FURRINERS at our gates!!! – none of it matched up to what I saw/heard working downtown part-time at our small-town whitebread library…You start thinking that and no matter how fast you stuff down that disloyalty, the inevitable slide to rejection of the Worldview has begun.

(PS: I can provide links to all those magazines I mentioned if you want to play Sun Tzu and spy on the enemy via archive, I just didn’t want to trip the spam filter. But it shouldn’t be too hard to google them up.)

Oh wow, Firebird – your story sounds an AWFUL lot like mine! “You were wanted” was also used to guilt me when I was feeling suicidal from all the parental putdowns: it was my job to Exist (as well as to be perfect) to validate my mother’s choice…

(I’ve come to realize that my mother was a cat hoarder, only with humans instead of pets. As soon as we stopped being cute little kittens she got bored with us and wanted another and shoved us off to fend for ourselves, or onto older kids. This was very difficult, because for so long I believed and defended the myth of her Perfect Motherhood and Utter Selflessness – but she never spent any time *with* us after my (first of many) brother was born and out of diapers, just making doll^h^h^h cute kids clothes and toys and cookies and playing house when she felt like it. And when she *had* to deal with us when she didn’t feel like it – boy did she get angry and tetchy!)

@Bellatrys, your first comment here is a GEM. I’m pointing people to it from now on when I’m too tired to try to distill it all down to a few hundred words.

Gategrrl, I agree. I have known women whose husbands sabotaged their birth control and raped them because they wanted babies now whether she did or not. If even a small percentage of men are trying that now, with abortion readily available as the victim’s solution, how many might be encouraged to try it if abortion’s off the table?

While I suspect even the most staunch pro-lifers would share our unhappiness at a man being rewarded for his crime by getting the baby he wanted, I’m not sure they’re clear on the fact that this would not be a fatherhood of love. The personality capable of something like this is incapable of love, period. The chances are high that he wouldn’t be content knowing the baby existed. He would probably want to take an active role, which in his mind would be constructive, but in reality would be highly abusive. If you don’t have a way to keep such a child from a lifetime of abuse, you shouldn’t oppose abortion. It may truly be the more merciful option for the victim child, and/or for the eventual victims OF the child warped by that abuse. (Especially if the reincarnationist world majority is right – then that soul has a chance to be born into a happy family.)

… nowhere is it mentioned in those stark terms how the male manipulates the female into pregnancy, etc. - gategrrl

Women’s bodies are regarded as tools. And to acknowledge the idea of that “tool” being in a man’s hands is an admission of things MRA’s don’t want admitted.

Bellatrys, in no way do I deny that there are members of the female sex who have left their brains somewhere in Schenectady or worse; nor that there ARE women who are manipulative enough to bear a child solely for their own welfare (hook a [rich] man, get more welfare bennies, etc). My point was, there’s the other side of the coin, which is about men entrapping women into baby-bearing and servant-work.

I’m attempting to be inclusive in what is nongender stupidity and selfishness. And it does all come down to selfishness of one sort or another. However, to me, the selfishness of those who want to bind others into bearing children no one wants; keeping half the population subservient Just Because that’s the way it’s Always Been; and who want to restrict the civil liberties and rights of any other group simply because they don’t fit their personal template (ie, someone who looks/acts/thinks) just like themselves…the selfishness of that type of person is beyond hubris. I can only hope their personal views come back to bite them in the butt. Hard. By a rabid bat, no less.

As a child, from my earliest memories, I knew that a) my bio-dad left my mother because he didn’t want to be a father and b) that my mother’s doctor pressured her to have an abortion, supposedly because he would make more money that way. All of this was supposed to underline how lucky I was that my mother wanted me – and that she was strong-willed enough to resist the doctor’s intimidation and pressure.

It will never cease to amaze me how the same general facts can be told so differently, because other than the dad bit this isn’t that far off from what I was told. My parents weren’t married yet when I was born, but my mother knew there was a good chance she could wind up raising me alone because my father was already showing signs of the hereditary kidney disease that killed my grandfather when my dad was kid.* It even hits the “health of the mother” issue that started this post; the first OB she saw was apparently a whack job who was convinced that if she carried to term she would die and I would die. This was used for an important lesson — always get a second opinion. Just because someone has a white coat doesn’t mean they don’t need to taken away by other people in white coats.

But my parents didn’t tell me most of this until I asked or it came up, most of it came in dribs and drabs and I had to put together the facts that my parents are/were pro-choice, she knew she could wind up a single parent, and still had me on my own. During those teen years when we all occasionally hated each other, I have to admit it was rather reassuring. The only person who didn’t really want me around was my grandmother (she was “too young to be a grandma”) which frankly, should have been my first clue about a lot of things wrong with her treatment of me had anyone had the guts to tell me before I’d figured as much.

* Which brings up my other favorite soapbox: if you believe in it, please sign your donor cards and tell your family that’s what you want (that second part is very important, most hospitals won’t go against the wishes of the family). The only reason I got to know my father was because some teenager’s parents made a very generous decision on what had to be the worst day of their lives.

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. I have always respected McCain as a serviceman who went through something awful in the line of duty, and survived it, even though I disagreed with his politics.

But now I realize: John McCain is a terrorist committing hate crimes.

I know he doesn’t *think* he’s saying, “Let the bitches die”. He’s too stupid and/or senile to make ANY sense during this campaign. He probably thinks he’s making a valid point that people will claim “health of the mother” when it’s really not as risk, just to excuse the abortion. But the only way to prevent that is to deny abortions to women who are going to die from the pregnancy. So really, he is saying let the bitches die.

If you say online that hospitals shouldn’t try to save women’s lives because they’re just women (or replace “women” with any “minority” group), it is considered hate speech, and the owner of the site where you say it has a legal responsibility to remove your words, or else the whole site can be taken down, and I think legal prosecution or certainly a civil suit is possible. Why are people who argue the mother’s life isn’t worth as much as the baby’s NOT being treated as the hate crime terrorists they are? The only possible explanation for thinking that way is that either you consider women valueless if they have sex (with someone other than you, of course), or that you consider men superior to women, and while there’s no chance of the mother being a man, there is a chance the baby will have a cock.

John McCain is a terrorist.

Abortion is not a case of Christian morals versus no morals at all. There are a lot of legitimate viewpoints.

I would even contend that being pro-choice is not inconsistent with the foetus having a right to live. I do think a foetus has the right to live; but I do not also think it has a right for another person to be compelled to offer up their body as its life-support. Just as I have the right to a blood transfusion if I’m traumatically injured, but do not have the right to demand another’s blood to be forcibly taken for my sake (I use blood as my analogy rather than the more common one of organs, as blood donation is less necessarily harmful to the donor).

if you really believe in the sanctity of life, you would see this situation as unwinnable, with no right answer, because one life has to be lost.

However, to be anti-choice demands that the foetus be given more right to a woman’s body than she has herself – it inherently denies the sanctity of her life.

Why are people who argue the mother’s life isn’t worth as much as the baby’s NOT being treated as the hate crime terrorists they are?

An argument I frequently hear is the foetus’ supposed innocence, seen as even more ultimate than that accorded to children. But I regard that version of innocence as an illusion anyway; and I can’t help but be reminded that women are blamed for taking it from humanity as whole.

Stella, the argument for/against choice IS off-topic. This discussion is limited to McCain, and what he meant, and what is problematic about the way he expressed himself.

As I said above, McCain probably DOES mean simply that “health of the mother” will be/has been stretched to mean all sorts of things. But his intent doesn’t get him off the hook: listen to him, and you’ll see he is essentially saying “We can’t allow ‘health of the mother’ as an excuse, because they’ll twist it to mean anything.” Now just read the part of that sentence that comes BEFORE the comma, and you have the only logical solution to McCain’s conundrum: we must declare the fetus’ life more valuable than the mother’s and deny her and her family the right to decide which member they want to lose, even if there are already other children in the home who love their mom.

Was he thinking it through that far? Perhaps not. Maybe he’s not a hatemonger – maybe he’s just too daft to communicate. Either way, thank goodness he lost.

While freedom of choice is fundamentally important, life is the most vital, important right in the world. Without life there is no freedom, after all, and not a single choice.

I see it just the opposite: without freedom, there is no life – only living death. 1984. The most vital, important right in the world is a life worth living. I’ve experienced choicelessness deeply and personally, and I would rather die than go back into any of the situations that rendered me choiceless.

I’m not alone in my view, and my view is quite sound. Your view is sound, too. The only way to let the two views co-exist is to leave abortion legal, and thank goodness we all have the right to follow our consciences and air our views publicly in hopes of helping the undecided figure out what’s right for them as individuals.

In short, this issue should not be the purview of law, but no one’s saying you can’t try to influence culture. We all can. In the 90s, we lowered abortion rates in this country not by passing laws, but by educating people and letting the topic of condoms and birth control and abstinence be discussed openly on TV shows and so on.

I humbly submit that anyone who was ever a fetus can debate abortion.
But, no, that’s too flip. Men believe that human life is entitled to protection at all stages of development. And men believe that women have the right to direct and control their own body. These beliefs are based on reasons and morals and empathy and I think they are valid. Would you argue that whites in the sixties weren’t entitled to debate civil rights? Though many whites opposed civil rights, I think those who supported it out of a respect for their fellow beings had a right to their view.

Here’s my view on the whole “men’s opinions on abortion” thing–it is acceptable for them to be pro-choice. Unacceptable to be pro-life/anti-choice. Why? Because the choice will never be fully theirs. By being pro-choice, they are helping to give women, who will have the choice, the ability to make whichever choice they want to make, when and if they need to.
Which is the same way I feel about most things–the current debates over gay marriage and immigration have no direct affect on me. However, because they do effect the lives of others, the most humane and compassionate thing for me to do is to support measures which will give those who will be affected by laws on these matters the most rights possible.
Therefore, yes, white people who were pro-civil rights in the 1960s had every right to be so–and people who were not did not, not if they wanted to be decent human beings.

@ Mr. Visitor

However, in between the conception and the possible birth, the male does not have a say whether or not his potential child is born or aborted. The decision is completely out of his hands, whether he wants to raise the child (even alone), abort the child, or give it up for adoption.

I know you had other points/questions in your post, but this is the one I have the time to respond to. So, here goes.

You’re right. Between the conception and the birth, the man does NOT have a say. It’s the woman and her body that are actually pregnant.

Let’s try to look at this from a different perspective.

Let’s say you’ve got a committed heterosexual couple. They’ve been talking for a while about the man getting a vasectomy – they don’t want any (more) children. They’ve got the date for the surgery set, they’ve talked about it over and over, they’re ready. Or so they think. But the man has some misgivings. He can’t really think what they are, but they’re poking at the back of his thoughts. The day comes for the surgery and… The guy doesn’t get the vasectomy. He goes home and tells his partner. She’s upset and confused, but she knows she can’t tell him that he has to get his tubes clamped, so she says she understands and hopes they can talk about it more soon.

Now imagine your same committed couple, but now they’re talking about having a kid. They talk and talk and they plan and the conception takes and they’re good to go. But something is niggling at the back of the woman’s mind and she decides now isn’t the right time and she goes to have an abortion. Her partner is upset, but he understands he can’t force her to devote her body in a potentially-lifethreatening endeavor to support a pre-person.

I have no idea how likely either of these scenarios are, but the point is that when a woman is pregnant, it’s HER body. Just like the vasectomy is relevant to the man’s body. And ususally, if a couple decides to get pregnant and they plan for it and it’s all good and they’re ready, there isn’t an abortion, except in health cases. The situations where abortions DO occur – don’t have the finances to support another child or a first child, not in a committed, stable relationship, etc. just don’t even compare. Even if the guy wants the kid and wants to raise it, that’s not his deal. He can’t have his own, so he needs to accept that he is dependent on a woman being willing to share herself in such a way as to have a child (I’m using terrible feminist wording here but this is long and complicated enough. Sorry). Does that maybe suck for a guy who’s ready to have kids? Sure. But in a good society that doesn’t mean he just gets to force a pregnancy on someone.

Just like a woman who wants a kid would, in a good society, have to find a willing partner to help her out.

One last thing. It is important to remember the toll that a pregnancy takes on a body. You jump from conception to birth without a mention of the serious committment from a mother’s body that is required to actually go through 9 months carrying a fetus around, feeding it and growing it. You know those fake pregnancy belly+chests that they have so guys can try on a pregnant body? You have to get special medical permission to wear them for more than a few hours… Wearing it for multiple months is NOT something to be dismissed lightly.

The suggestion that abortions be made illegal is sometimes referred to as forced pregnancy for a reason.

And for the record, I appreciated the respectful sound of your comment and hope I don’t sound combative. I often come off that way via electronic communication and I’m still trying to figure out how to abate that.

If I haven’t addressed your concern, please do let me know. I’ve checked the option to be notified of follow-up comments so I’ll know if you respond to me. We can also continue this conversation elsewhere where it would be less off-topic, if you’d like.

And, as usual, someone said what I wanted to say much better and more succinctly. ^_^

Yay this blog!

To your points:

No one talks about how the creation of a lifelong responsibility or how the loss of a child will affect the male parent. We are not even in the conversation,

and

We have feelings, too. A close friend of mine has spent the last 4 Christmases buying gifts for a child he cannot stop mourning. (They were a close couple in the beginning of the pregnancy, but she left him and decided to let him know after the fact that she had aborted their child.)

Careful here. Fetuses are not children. If they were, they wouldn’t be in a uterus, living off of a woman’s body. I won’t deny that there are men out there who wish their partners hadn’t had abortions, but (and I don’t mean to cast any aspersions on your friend) have you ever considered that his partner left him due to her knowledge that he would not support her decision to have an abortion? That had he said he’d support her no matter what, she wouldn’t've had to let him know after the fact? That she might’ve been quite scared of his reaction, and rightly so? His actions of continually mourning and buying gifts for a ‘child’ who was never actually born does not suggest that he is a mentally stable person.

Is it not possible to give a woman absolute control over her body (as should always be her right!) without taking the male parent’s voice out of the picture?

No, it’s not possible. The minute the man (or any person) who is not that woman has a legal say over what she does is the moment the woman does not have absolute control.

And for those of you who have had horrible experiences with males forcing their opinions on you, this is not at all what I mean.
There are men who respect the rights of women, and who acknowledge that as equals both of our genders have an absolute right to self governing regarding our bodies.
I am one of them.

And I’ll take your word for it, but not every man is like you, and you need to remember that. If you say that the male partner should have a say in whether a woman has an abortion or not, then you are not only opening it up to people in caring relationships, but those in abusive ones as well. Setting up laws with the ‘strong’ in mind will hurt the weak. Would a woman need to prove her partner was abusive before having an abortion without his consent? (This is also why I say the rape/incest exception laws for abortion bans aren’t good enough–in order to protect the people with the fewest resources, you need to give the rights to everyone or they will be nearly inaccessible for those who need them the most.) We acknowledge that there are good men out there, and most of us aren’t stupid: if we’re in a good relationship with a good man who we know respects us, we will confide, discuss, all of that. But those in more precarious situations should not be forced to.

I feel that it would be a good idea to start teaching children at an early age (around sixth grade maybe) about the opposite gender. Not just in a way related to sexual interaction, but in a way that teaches them both better ways to communicate with each other, and respect each other’s needs.

And I think it would be a good idea to teach children from birth that there are no strict gender dichotomies, so that when they are older they will know how to communicate with every person as a rational human, not as ‘men’ or as ‘women.’

I never intended that the male parent have a legal say in the decision regarding the abortion. I don’t feel a third party (of any gender, for any reason) has any right to legal control over a person’s body. All I wanted was that he be allowed to participate in the decision verbally. I have no desire to change any legal rights of anyone. I simply feel that rational discussion is the only way for equals to behave in any important decision.

And currently, they are allowed to participate verbally, if their partner trusts them enough to tell them what’s going on. If she doesn’t, she probably has a valid reason. But they need to understand that while they can give their opinion, their word is not the final say, and in my mind their wish should not be anywhere near as important as what the woman thinks.

I find it disheartening that the first assumption that comes to mind when I talk about my friend’s wife leaving him is that he is some kind of villain. (A relative of mine made the same guess.)
The wife actually left him because he finally called the police on her for the physical abuse she was putting him through. She felt it was an unforgivable betrayal, and left him soon afterward.
I would like to make a very clear point here, to avoid any further assumptions on this subject: at no time during the two years she was physically (and emotionally) violent did he ever hit her. Not once. Not even a slap, or a push. Or any of the other displays of weakness males sometimes do in desperate attempts to gain dominance, for that matter. (And, I absolutely believe that acts of domestic violence are dramatic signs of weakness on the part of the abuser.)

I’m sorry for making an assumption about your friend that wasn’t true, but I volunteer for an abortion clinic and I have seen cases where what I assumed about your friend actually happened.
And I’m also sorry your friend was abused. No one should have to go through that. But if he left her, no matter how bad of a person she was, the fetus was still in her body and he had no legal right to it (though had she decided to give birth, he would’ve had a right to some form of custody.) Nor did she have to tell him anything she didn’t want to.