Sex is Not the Same as Parenthood: The Abortion Debate Revisited

Whenever there's some young girl who gets knocked up after having "too much fun," a the pro-lifers say she should have thought about that before she had sex. They say it's unfair for her to have all her fun without a care in the world, but then act like she can't take responsibility for the child that is the natural product of all that fun.

I'm surprised that this argument isn't laughed out of the room more often. Since when does ANYONE, even the most orthodox of religious nuts, have sex for the procreation only? Clearly what's on you're mind when you decide to have sex is a very different set of thoughts from when you're picking the best preschool education for your child on your budget. They are apples and oranges. It would be like making someone take responsibility for, I don't know, stealing, by learning how to waterski.

To society's credit, we are at least consistent with this principle. When a man has sex for fun, we expect him to pay for the child that comes out of that fun. I guess the idea is that he was careless and if he had any presence of mind, he would have used a condom...

Aside: incidentally, it makes no sense that we expect the guy who's too irresponsible to care for a condom to care for a human being. That kind of logic would make sense only if we were PURELY INDIFFERENT to the kind of human beings who were being raised into our society.

But I digress. I was going to point out that the case for "taking responsibility" becomes much less clear when the man in good faith believed he was doing just that. We feel a lot more sympathy for the guy - let's say he's a rich and widely respected guy, like a politician or an athlete - if some no-good golddigger got him drunk and lied to him about being on the pill, only to get pregnant purposely so that she can milk child support from him for the next 18 years. Under the law, it's not much of an argument that the man was tricked. He still has to pay regardless, for the sake of the child, but we as a society are a lot more confused about we might feel about that obligation as a form of punishment for the man.

I mention this gray area because it seems like for men we're at least a little closer to understanding sex as something different from parenthood. For women, we're a lot farther away because we don't think of the obligation to raise a child as punishment or responsibility, but rather an affliction, a condition of helplessness and dependency. "If you can't raise the kid yourself, put it up for adoption." As Cephalopod pointed out in an earlier post, it's sort of unacceptable that women should expect to rely on alms and welfare when it's eminently practicable to make the choice to be in the driver's seat oneself. The logical response should be, "If you can't take responsibility for a child, don't have a child." It's an attitude pays due respect to the woman's ability to accept consequences for her actions and to be held accountable for her choices. I think once we come closer to thinking of sex as a genre of life choices for women, the closer we'll be to accepting that the choice to have sex is not the same thing as the choice to have a child.