Legal abortion is often portrayed as a way for parents—usually fathers—to evade responsibility. In reality, such legislation could instead provide children with protection from disengaged and unsuitable parents. Parents can already abandon their children today; legal abortion would simply mean losing the right to resume parenthood whenever it suits them.
A ridiculously low maintenance payment. That is often the only legal consequence when a parent relinquishes responsibility and disappears from a child’s life. Despite the fact that children’s rights frameworks emphasise a child’s right to a relationship with both parents, there is virtually nothing that regulates a parent’s obligation to remain present.
What does exist, however, is the right of an absent parent to return and demand access to the child. It makes little difference how long he has been absent (and it is most often a he, although the reverse certainly occurs), why he left, whether he has refused to pay maintenance, or whether he previously promised to forgo custody. Not even abuse directed at the mother or the child is necessarily decisive. A parent without custody retains the right to apply for custody, residence arrangements and contact rights, all of which confer rights—and, admittedly, obligations—in relation to the child.
Children’s Rights Also Include the Right to Be Free from an Indifferent Parent
Being abandoned by a parent is, of course, often painful for a child. Yet in many cases it is probably preferable to the alternative. If we are going to speak seriously about children’s rights, we must also speak about a child’s right to be free from an indifferent—or, in the worst cases, unsuitable—parent.
Spending time with a disengaged father can be distressing in the moment and damaging in the long term. It can undermine self-esteem and negatively affect wellbeing. That is a high price for a child to pay.
When discussing the parents themselves, people generally show a degree of understanding towards the woman and accept her right to choose—or reject—both the pregnancy and parenthood. The man, by contrast, is often told that he has only himself to blame. If he knew how pregnancy occurs, then he should simply accept the consequences.
Curiously, those making this argument rarely mention that the woman possessed the same information. If personal responsibility is the governing principle, it ought logically to apply to both parties.
Similarly, it is often claimed that men are the driving force behind sexual encounters and are therefore responsible if contraception is not used. As though women lacked sexual agency. As though women bore no responsibility for protecting themselves against an unwanted pregnancy. The idea is as patronising as it is sexist.
With legal abortion, however, the father would lose the privilege of re-entering the child’s life simply because he decides he wants to.
It Takes Two to Create a Pregnancy
It is entirely reasonable to expect those involved in creating a pregnancy to take responsibility for it. But that is not the same thing as placing the entire burden of responsibility on the man while offering him no meaningful choices beyond the admonition that he should have abstained from sex if he did not wish to become a father.
Nor is it a proportionate consequence that a few minutes of sexual activity, driven by a basic biological impulse, should be permitted to determine a substantial portion of a man’s future life.
The fact that the woman’s perspective necessarily carries greater weight because she carries the pregnancy does not give us licence to dismiss the man’s perspective altogether. Least of all when young people are involved, and especially not when there are practical ways of addressing the issue.
Legal Abortion Protects the Child
One way to strengthen the rights of both the child and the father is through so-called legal abortion. Under such a system, a man would be given the right to renounce legal fatherhood during the early stages of pregnancy, thereby relinquishing both parental rights and parental obligations.
In practice, men already possess the most significant right that legal abortion would formalise: the ability to leave. Fathers can already abandon their children. What legal abortion would change is their ability to return later and reclaim the role of father whenever they choose.
The principal benefit would therefore be greater stability and predictability for both the child and the mother in cases where the man does not wish to become a parent. The unsuitable or disengaged father would no longer be able to exploit his current ability to change his mind.
Every child deserves active and loving parents who genuinely want them. Legal abortion would increase the likelihood of children receiving precisely that.
First published in Smedjan (Timbro) on 28 August 2019.
