Now that I’m raising a son, I take time every few months to worry about him getting someone pregnant accidentally. I’m more worried about him being a selfish dog with women, but pregnancy’s right up there. (I’m less worried about my daughter; if she’s like me, and like most affluent women, I’ll never know what she’s up to sexually hard as I’ll try to delude myself to the contrary). I’m going to try hard to teach them both to wait til they’re ready and then protect themselves, and their partners, to the max. But shit happens, right?
Big a deal as an unplanned pregnancy is for women, I know it’s no walk in the park for men, especially if the relationship was casual. I have little sympathy for men who play no, little, or an antagonistic role in birth control – you’re on your own. Abort, pay child support or maybe raise a kid; you made that bed. But if you did your part and still end up waiting to hear what the woman’s decided to do – major drama. But some things cross a line. Now we have men of long-ago aborted kids claiming center stage in the abortion debate. No big deal then, big deal now.
From the LA Times:
Baier, 36, still longs for the child who might have been, with an intensity that bewilders him: “How can I miss something I never even held?”
These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of “post-abortive men.” Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman’s issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement — both political and deeply personal in nature — contends that the pronoun is all wrong.
“We had abortions,” said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. “I’ve had abortions.”
And now you’d like a do-over? Goes without saying that this is religion-based (the traumatized men are instructed to visualize their aborted babies playing in a sun dappled meadow at Jesus’s feet) but most of all it’s political. And insofar as it’s politcal it’s cynical manipulation. Imagine some guy you had a misguided one nighter with two decades ago tracking you down to make you relive your abortion. I wonder if any of these guys realize that the abortions aren’t as painful as the memory of having been involved with them? This ‘activist’ sums it up:
If he could go back in time, he would try to save the babies.
But would his long-ago girlfriends agree? Or might they also consider the abortions a choice that set them on a better path?
Aubert looks startled. “I never really thought about it for the woman,” he says slowly.
Emphasis added, as if I needed to. I don’t even want to know what “trying to save the babies” might entail, given these guys’ sense of entitlement and self-pitying bullshit. If ever there was a time for aliens to come and show us the alternate reality where Aubert and Baier are in court fighting not to pay child support or ignoring their pre-marriage kids, this is it. There should be a summit between these guys and the ones who think they shouldn’t have to pay child support if they have no say in abortions. I guess it all depends where you are in the cycle.Sorry folks. Just too convenient, just like the women who abort, get their lives together, then want us to help them feel sorry for their abortions. Be a woman. Be a man. Make your choices and live with the consequences.
