Men have a deep and equal stake in preserving reproductive choice

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Rather than urging men to stand down, abortion-rights advocates should reach out to convince men that they have a deep and equal stake in preserving reproductive choice.

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Those who favor abortion rights presumably share my belief that fetuses do not possess "personhood"--that they are not meaningfully human. That is very different from declaring that fetuses are fully-realized human beings, but women should be able to abort them anyway. Defining abortion as a "women's issue" all too easily enables opponents to characterize the struggle as one between the "rights of the mother" and the "rights of the child"--which, to pro-choice thinkers, it most certainly is not. Often, this leads abortion-rights advocates to be perceived as agents of identity politics, as part of a special interest group (ie. women) promoting its private agenda. Rather than "winning" the abortion debate, efforts to tag abortion opponents as bigotted against women merely cloud the underlying issues. For example, the proposition that it is sexist for states to pay for Viagra but not for abortion, which one hears all too often in liberal circles, sounds speciously appealing, but is actually rather reductive and shows a stunning inability to grapple with the ideology of abortion opponents. (If one believes abortion kills babies, as some folks sincerely do, of course the taxpayers shouldn't pay for it.) I can think of hundreds of powerful reasons why the government should pay for abortions--but the frequent claim that it's sexist to pay for ED drugs, but not pregnancy termination, or even women's contraceptives, is so deeply illogical and philosophically simplistic that it actually adds to the challenge of making the case for public funding.

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So why should abortion rights matter to men? The most obvious and dramatic reason, although likely not the most persuasive, is that the lives lost through illegal abortions will be of our sisters and daughters and partners. I have often heard that interest described as "secondary"--after all, some naysayers ask, how can one compare a woman's interest in her own life or health with a male relative's interest in her wellbeing? The reality is that many males do value of the lives of their loved ones, and particularly their daughters, as much as their own. Needless to say, so do women. To put the matter more bluntly: I know many men who would gladly suffer a slow death themselves if it could prevent their wives or girlfriends or daughters from succumbing to septic shock on a mattress in an underground abortion clinic. Anyone who argues that men don't merit an equal voice in the abortion debate does a grave disservice to these fathers and brothers and partners.

The second reason that abortion is a men's issue is that the entire sexual revolution, from which boys benefit as much as girls, relies heavily upon the right of pregnant women to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Couples, both single and married, would risk intimacy with considerably less frequency--and would deny themselves one of life's greatest pleasures--if they knew that the outcome might be a child that they had no desire to bear or raise. Personally, I would never have intercourse with a woman unless I were highly confident that she would terminate a pregnancy that we were not both ready for. If the law were ever changed to prohibit that option, I doubt that I would have sex with anyone until I was prepared to start a family. Recognizing that no form of birth control is ever foolproof, not even the rhythm method, I imagine most intelligent, responsible men and women, if denied an opportunity for legal termination, would make a similar decision to forgo certain forms of sex. In fact, many abortion opponents relish the prospect of rolling back the sexual progress of the 1960s and 1970s. Pro-choice women would do well to emphasize this to their lovers. These women could take a page from Aristophanes, whose play Lysistrata relates how the women of Greece deny their husbands sexual privileges until they agree to abstain from warfare. If pro-choice women consistently refused to sleep with anti-choice men, or even men who were indifferent or who voted for anti-choice candidates for non-abortion-related reasons, they might be stunned to discover how many new recruits entered the abortion rights movement. Incidentally, if you are single, looking, and reading this, I urge you to add "Pro-Choice Only" to your next personal ad....(more@link)