Sultana

Emphasis mine.

But honestly, do you (or others here in this thread) feel that is a large contingent of men (those men who wish to raise the child who have no say in its abortion)?

I can't say as I've ever met or heard of this type of incident--although I am certainly not saying it doesn't happen, but it seems to be a theoretical position expounded on here more for the sake of arguement.

I would imagine that the larger percentage of men truely concerned with reproductive rights are those concerned that they'll have to support a child they never wanted, and would prefer their partner aborted.

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"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath.
At night, the ice weasels come." -

Matt Groening

My goal? To fulfill my potential.

FoolThemAll

To be honest, I don't think I considered the argument very carefully the first time around.

I'm against this notion of male "reproductive rights". Yes, it's a double standard, but I'd rather have it half-right than consistently wrong. Better that only women are allowed to "postpone" parenthood til birth. If this double standard is to be taken care of, it should be dealt with by removing these fraudulent "reproductive rights" from both sexes.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

roachboy

this whole category "male reproductive rights" is modelled on the (sadly) successful legal strategy that the far right empoloyed to stand affirmative action legislation on its head...which was rooted in the fucked up logic of the bakke decision.

the arguments are superficially kind of tricky.

think about its origin in the right's "arguments" in its anti-affirmative action campaign--they take earlier legal arguments about discrimination--which were rooted in the logic of equal protection--and repeat them in such a way as to stand the initial usage on its head.
there is a formally consistent core to the argument--that it, the claims are logical in themselves---the trick for conservatives is to make this type of argument and then try to limit debate to that particular claim, to the exclusion of all other considerations if it can be managed.
a cynical chap could say, with reference to the anti-affirmative action claims, that affirmative action, which was designed to extend the logic of equal protection to a group previously cut out as a function of racism, itself discriminates against racists.

but that does not fly politically.

rephrase then: aa discriminates against the primary beneficiaries of the previous racist order.

that doesnt work either---so extending the argument--broadening it out to include something of its political motivations (that is to speak the truth about motivations)--undermines the power (such as it is) of the kernel of logic at the core of the argument--that using equal access arguments to expand a given legal space to include folk who were previously excluded function (in theory) in a contradictory manner to generate new types of discrimination themselves.

so keep the debate as narrow as possible and go on at great and snippy length about the injustices that follow from this very narrowly defined logical problem. if you are backed with enough money, you can buy legal counsel that will find a judge politically amenable to hearing such an argument and then you are off to the races/-ist.

that way you can gut equal protection as an argument at all, in the longer run, but defunctionalizing it. and so it is obviously best not to admit anything of the political motives behind it. narrow narrow focus is your friend.

so here:

for the equal access argument to operate at all with reference to abortion law, there has to be a category called "male reproductive rights"--that the category is in itself problematic is secondary to its logical function--to float this designation is to posit--that is, in this case, create out of thin air----a class of people, defined by a particular interest, which are excluded by laws that enable abortions to be performed.

if you accept that category, then the equal protection argument would follow logically.

the attempts to generate and maintain a VERY narrow focus on this fake "principle" of equal protection in this context has been the dominant feature of the posts which have weighed in as objecting to abortion under the pretext of objecting to the "violations' existing abortion law inflict upon this fiction called "male reproductive rights."

the politics behind it are obvious: the folk who argued for such a violation of "male reproductive rights" would, in other contexts, be squarely anti-choice.

so it is that this category is yet another tactic--at once more shallow and more problematic than others--of the anti-choice movement, the goal of which is to effectively eliminate the legal protections afforded to the procedure of abortion. period.
there is nothing else behind this, nothing else to it, and nothing else of interest about it.

there is no such category "male reproductive rights"....so the arguments that are predicated on them are meaningless.

from which follows the claim that the whole manoever is a fraud.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pig

roach, i think i'm going to have to go ahead and kind of disagree with some of what you've said here. I think you're making a sweeping generalization about the motives of people who might have some concern about the lack of male involvement in the abortion/no abortion and/or mandatory father role. For instance, I'm staunchly pro-choice, and if it falls down one way or the other (legal abortion w/ women 100% in the driver's seat, or no legal abortion in the name of "male reproductive rights") i side with the ladies in control. However, I do think its a little bit skewed that men have no legal say in the matter. I just don't see a way to reconcile that, without all the pragmatic difficulties you and Gilda and others have outlined. I also don't think its the best argument to fall back on that pregnancy is 100% a female situation, because by claiming all the ownership of the pregnancy, it seems to me that the female must then claim 100% of the responsibility. Its either a shared phenomenon, or its exclusively female. If I impregnate my girlfriend, I don't loan her my junk for 9 months, after which I reclaim my 50% w/ interest for school books. I completely respect the difficult aspects of pregnancy for women; simultaneously I'm amazed at the process they take part in. I guess if the position is that the male is essentially superfluous to the issue after conception in terms of responsibility regarding pregnancy...then the male is superfluous for responsbility regarding pregnancy. I simply don't like the austerity of this position. To me, pregnancy should be a shared experience between the man and woman in question, with the unfortunate situation that the final straw has to come down to the woman on this issue, but not by the 100% - 0% proportion that some seem to be favoring.

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SirLance

I see two problems with "male reproductive rights."

1. What about pregnancy that occured as the result of involuntary sexual contact? Involuntary would mean rape, date rape, incest (abuse of authority), and statutory rape (minors can not give consent). If a man forces himself on a woman, and she conceives and gives birth, that man should be responsible for support but have no parental rights. No woman should have to put up with her rapist having rights to her child, even if he is the biological father.

2. Abortion can be a risky procedure with a long term impact on a woman's reproductive health. Should a man be able to force a woman to have an abortion she doesn't want because of a pregnancy he doesn't want? To be fair to the OP, I don't see how you can have the one and not the other, but I am very uncomfortable with the idea that it could work out that way.

No answers here, just questions...

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AngelicVampire

Roachboy you note that you basically feel that male reproductive rights don't/shouldn't exist (if I read that right). I am personally against AA, I think that everyone should be given a fair and equal chance for things. I don't know what kind of person this makes me but I dislike people getting an unfair advantage based on a non-relevant criteria, being female or black should not affect your engineering prospects (I do engineering at Uni, handy example) however both blacks and women have specific AA scholarships etc to help them, if they were given to poor people who could not afford to go to uni, or the best person I would have no qualms about them. A "Middle Class White Male only" scholarship would likely be seen as racist/sexist though.

Males do have an input into pregnancy (50%) and are expected to contribute after the birth a significant amount of funds/time (assuming non-custody here). Now assuming that the guy did not want a child in the first place (and neither did the GF/Wife/Partner/Long Time Lust Object) however the rules then changed on him that he suddenly becomes more responsible? Both partners can attempt to have safe sex in the first place (condoms, pills etc, bring on the male pill imo) however sex != children, I believe UsTwo noted that 20 years and only 1 child through safe sex. Accidents happen, to penalise one side without penalising the other is unfair (maybe if the guy wants to opt out we have a committee of 10 people who get to kick him in the nuts or something), giving one side total control is also unfair.

To make a corporate analogy (woot I suck at analogies so bear with me), you have a phone contract, the company suddenly decides that you are paying too little and decides to increase your bill to 20% of your salary irrespective of usage. If you want to leave the contract you have to continue paying or risk jail... is this fair?

docbungle

Very well-said. I agree with this completely.

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Bad Luck City

roachboy

pigglet: i agree with your post up to the point where you extend it into an equal protection types argument concerning the law itself.

so far as i can tell, nothing that you outline is either included or excluded by the present law--all of what you say can--and should (to my mind, but whatever)--take place in the context of the deliberations that (i would think necessarily) precede anyone availing themselves of the procedure.

it turns out that, in the last analysis, the decision belongs to the woman: i am not bothered by it. it is, after all, her that undergoes the procedure. i am not the only person to say this. and i see no scenario that changes it. do you?

you could always devise scenarios to correlate with an issue, fictional or not.
it is easy. whether you would indulge in that or not is a function of whether you find the issue behind the scenarios compelling. i do not.

but i do not think i am wrong in a scenario of my own: what the consequences of any adjustment to the existing law would be, based on this logic.

this is linked to the position i took, whcih is that i see the issue of "male reproductive rights" as a tactic. i outlined an analogy to aa solely as a way to justify my taking it as a tactic.

such motives as i imputed i read off previous posts in the thread--i have not been tracking this non-issue as it may or may not been tracking out there in 3-d land.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pig

roach, i guess i was looking at a difference in the people i've seen posting to this thread, and the people who are probably behind "male reproductive rights" as a national movement. My fault - I actually forgot this was a "politics" thread...I wandered in off "new posts," etc. I was thinking in terms of including many of the people discussing the underlying issue of theoretical men's reproductive rights, and not focusing on the practical politics of the situation. As I said, in the end-game analysis at present time, I agree with your position. I think.

Basically, I agree that as a national movement, given present circumstances, this is bound to be predominantly be used as an tool to prevent abortions in a de facto sense. I don't think that all the members or supporters of said movement will necesarily be of that persuassion, but I agree that that's how it would be used.

I find these issues interesting because I find the post-feminist reckoning to be interesting. As our society hopefully tries to adjust to a notion of respecting gender differences without forcing them into literal equality, I think these types of issues are bound to come up. In theory, I believe males and females should have equal say - but there's a practical barrier to that realization. I guess if we could figure out how to make erections last into our 90's, we should be able to perfect external pregnancy. Maybe if this issue, not the political side of it so much, but the masculine desire to have more reproductive choice, actually gains significant headway the $$$ will go into making that reality.

So, in temporary conclusion, if the woman ends up with the slightly shorter straw on this, I suppose one might view it as karmic turnabout-is-fair-play.

The only situation I could see where I might sway on that would be if there was some sort of written contract regarding children. Even then, I'm not sure I could give over given present circumstances.

I have a question for some of our less sexually traditional members: how does this work on the swinger scene. If you're having completely casual sex, and a girl becomes pregnant. What are the in-crowd ground rules on that sort of thing?

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roachboy

pigglet: if i could imagine this matter emerging outside a political framework, i would imagine a different discussion in which there would probably be little disagreement. i think these kinds of conversations important, no less--and it would be good if they happened--and they could within the present legal framework.

this is one of the few issues in which i find myself defending much of anything about the existing order in the states. it feels a bit strange to me sometimes.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pig

funny - but i can understand your position. i was just getting ready to post back. i had some further thoughts about practical situations. I'm kind of doing the old devil's advocate, but I honestly don't know what how I'd feel about them:

1. A couple who is very public about their shared views on pro-life position. Regardless of what anyone else, or scientific consensus on the ambiguity of the beginning of life, etc - but they are very obviously pro-life in their positions. They are sexually active, and use birth control...but it fails. Civil court case: can the guy sue for some sort of damages, as a shared value was changed in the face of a real situation.

2. Inverse situation: very obvious casual sex couple, we never want babies, we'll definately get an abortion if our contraception fails, etc. Get pregnant, girl doesn't want abortion.

I guess I'm wondering what would happen in situation where it isn't a simple matter of he said, she said - but where there is pretty overwhelming evidence that a position was adopted as a couple, that was violated. Do essential verbal contracts about these types of situations become null and void, or is there a leg to stand on?

Interesting to me, but scary at the same time.

/ps. don't worry. If South Dakota goes through, you may soon be back on the side of advocating change on this issue again.

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