Bioethics in Faith and Practice, Volume 1, Number 1

10 Graham ⦁ What About Dad? currently required to pay child support. It is easy to imagine to a situation in which a man feels he could not economically support a child. In other words, a man may not feel he has rom in his life to be a father. If women have the option to refuse motherhood based on socioeconomic reasons, then men should also be allowed to do so. The critical difference between the male and female involvement in child bearing is gestation. People use pregnancy to give the mother ultimate moral responsibility over the fetus. 10 A woman has authority over her own body but abortion is not simply a mother’s decision about her health. Abortion intimately and significantly involves the life of another; the child. How then should the healthcare decisions of an unborn child be managed? Men and women have equal rights over a child after birth. Assuming that the fetus is a person possessing basic human rights, these rights should not change because of the child’s location. However, the mother does have significant moral authority in procedures affecting her health. Because abortion is becoming so safe, it should be considered primarily a procedure affecting the child’s existence and secondarily affecting the mother’s health. Abortion, then, is a decision involving the health of two individuals (mother and fetus) which two persons have legal and moral authority in the decision (mother and father).With this understanding of the health effects of abortion, it is easy to see that men and women should have equal decision making power because it primarily affects the child over which they usually have equal rights. A strong argument against abortion is that it can have negative psychological effects on the woman. Men have shown very similar emotional reactions to abortion, especially when it was performed against their wishes or without their knowledge. Men reported feelings of “anger, guilt, depression, helplessness, and grief” and reacted by denying the event and distancing themselves from it. 11 Like women, men “continue to think about the abortion years after it is over” but, unlike women, lack socially acceptable outlets to talk about their experience. 12 Under the current circumstances, men have no valid power to avoid a psychologically harmful event like women do. Women can chose or refuse abortion, men cannot. A significant pro-choice argument is that many women are coerced into sex or are raped and need a way to end the resulting pregnancy. This argument stands on the fact that women are not avoiding a consequence of their irresponsible decision, but rather are removing themselves from bearing the consequences of their rapists’ actions. George Harris argues that men need a morally legitimate interest in procreation in order to have a rightful voice in abortion decisions. 13 His argument implies that women are the only party who can be coerced or forced into having sex that result in a pregnancy. This is not so. It is not hard to imagine a situation in which a woman coerces a man to have sex with her under the false pretense that she uses oral contraceptives. This man has fatherhood thrust upon him just as a woman who is coerced to have sex has motherhood thrust upon her. Both men and women can be deceived or taken advantage of and forced into parenthood. It is an injustice if society allows one party a way out of parenthood but not the other. A final argument, made famous by Thomson, is that pregnancy is a violation of a woman’s autonomy. 14 As previously stated, men and women have equal rights over the resulting child and equal concerns as potential parents. By killing the fetus, having an abortion is to invade “the morally legitimate interest in procreation of both the father and the mother and thereby to interfere with the man’s as well as the woman’s autonomy”. 15 The nature of the violation of autonomy is slightly different for men and women