Forced fatherhood

Photo by R/DV/RS [CC by 2.0], via flickr

Lauren Bana/Staff Writer

With the passing of Father’s Day, we come to recognize and appreciate our fathers a little bit more, but what about those children without fathers, those with distant fathers, or fathers who weren’t really present in their child’s life?

According to FIU’s Professor Laurie Shrage in The Opinion Pages of The New York Times, “Women’s rights advocates have long struggled for motherhood to be a voluntary condition, and not one imposed by nature or culture.” It is now becoming easier every day for women to choose whether or not they want to be a mother.

Men do not, however, have the same privileges. If their female partner accidentally becomes pregnant, the man is supposed to support her ultimate decision in whether or not she wants to keep the baby.

Shrage continues to explain the surprisingly few choices that men actually have in the realm of entering fatherhood. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but, in the end, that decision is entirely hers to make. If she decides to keep the child, and should she or the government set out to establish him as the legal father, then he will be forced to pay off child support for many years to come.

Being a woman, and being very fond of my rights as a woman, I was initially very annoyed when I came upon this article in The Opinion Pages. My primary thoughts were ones of anger and disappointment with the writer of the article for being so sexist, but then I saw that a woman had written it.

Of course, I’m not saying that just because she was a woman that I, all of a sudden, felt the need to alter my opinion, but it did make me realize the reality of what she was saying.

I suddenly realized that men really don’t have much of in input in whether or not they want to father a child.

Most women tend to just say that men deserve to have to pay child support for not having been more careful, but, in reality, women have to take just as much of the blame for their own unplanned pregnancies.

Senior Alejandro Gonzalez said, “I actually didn’t even think about it like that. That really doesn’t seem fair when it’s a two-person thing to get pregnant.”

When asked, other men agreed with Gonzalez, but women were less understanding.

Women have always had a hard time fighting for their rights as women to do what they wish with their own reproductive systems, and to initiate a similar rise in men for something that has been so difficult for us to do as women does initially perturb us.

But we must come to understand that becoming pregnant is a “two-person thing,”  and we must really try to respect men in the same way that we have been trying to have them respect us.

lauren.bana@fiusm.com

Source:

1. “Is Forced Fatherhood Fair?” via The Opinion Pages of The New York Times