Since June, Laurie Shrage has opened email after email from desperate men.
A few told of being forced to drop out of college to support a child they’d accidentally fathered, even as the children’s mothers pursued an education with help from child support payments.
One man said he believed the woman who filed a paternity suit against him secretly intended to get pregnant, to boost her lifestyle with child support payments. Some men say women told them they were on birth control, or were infertile.
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And then there were men who simply regretted how that one night stand unwittingly resulted in 18 years of child support.
“These men could be exaggerating,” Ms. Shrage, professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at Florida International University, said in an interview with the National Post. “But under our current law, it really could happen.”
In most of North America, women have the full reproductive choices they didn’t have 40 years ago. But now that non-committal sex has become a social norm, and technology has made paternity testing foolproof, a small but growing number of feminists are asking: Shouldn’t men, too, be allowed to opt out of parenthood?
“If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States,” Prof. Shrage argued in an op-ed published in The New York Times in June — the piece that began the wave of notes from worried men. “In consenting to sex,” she writes, “Neither a man nor a woman gives consent to become a parent.”
The current legal arrangement doesn’t represent the ideal of equality to which feminism strives, Prof. Shrage said. In fact, there is a double standard at play.
“If we don’t think women should pay this price for having sex and we think motherhood shouldn’t be forced on them … then a man, just because he had sex, shouldn’t be penalized in this way if an accidental pregnancy happens and for some reason the woman wants to keep it,” she said.
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In an essay on Salon.com this week, writer Anna March wrote that “in complete keeping with my deep-seated feminism, I believe that making fatherhood optional — as motherhood is — and revamping the child support system to stop requiring financial support from noncustodial parents (usually men) who want to opt out early is good for women, men, and the kids in question.” This could only happen in concert with improving access to abortion and adoption options, she argued. “It’s time to make parenthood a true choice, on every level.’’
Though based in fundamental fairness, their arguments don’t seem to be sitting well with mainstream feminists, many of whom have fired back in defence of compulsory legal paternity.
“While it may not be easy for most men to opt out of paying child support, it is incredibly easy for a non-custodial father to opt out of fatherhood. The burden of actually raising a child usually falls to the mother as the custodial parent,” Carolyn Edgar wrote on Salon.com Thursday in response to Ms. March’s piece. “If anything, it should be harder, not easier, for men to opt out of fatherhood.”
‘People do make mistakes, and they should of course take some responsibility for their mistakes. But the question is what degree of responsibility?’
Women bear the greater physical burden of pregnancy, critics say — the responsibility of growing a fetus into a baby and the social implications that come with that. There is also little sympathy for men who — if response to these arguments online is any indication — have a bad reputation for loving and leaving.
Perhaps true equality really is one of those unattainable goals.
“There’s always going to be a kind of tightrope or balancing act of trying to find ‘How do we achieve equality given that people’s bodies and reproductive systems work so differently?’” said Elizabeth Brake, an associate professor in philosophy at Arizona State University, who taught and researched at the University of Calgary from 2000-2011. “But I do think there is a much more common cause.” That’s in maintaining the best interests of the child, she said — a value to which Canadian laws speak. However, in the United States, “deadbeat dads” who cannot afford to pay child support are sent to jail — an unproductive approach if the man is ever going to find work to support his child again in the future, she said.
In a 2005 article published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy she wrote, “if women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.” They should, however, pay at least of half of any medical treatments related to the pregnancy they played their part in creating.
Andy DeLisle/Arizona State UniversityElizabeth Brake: “There’s always going to be a kind of tightrope or balancing act.”
Joyce Arthur is familiar with the debate over whether a man should be able to opt out of parenthood, and acknowledges it’s controversial.
“This is one of the issues within reproductive rights that’s always been a bone of contention, in the sense that [the rights issues] are all focused on women, not so much on men,” said the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.
She supports the “basic principle,” especially now that birth control has created a world in which sex is often not carried out with conception in mind.
“[But] before we expect men to be given that option of opting out, we need to make sure women do have really good access to abortion and we need to ensure the government can step in for men who opt out,” she said.
At the end of the day, Prof. Shrage argues, having a man in court constantly fighting to disestablish his paternity is not good for the child either. To the commonly held view that ‘‘if you play you pay,’’ she believes men, just as women in these unexpected situations, deserve to be cut a little slack.
“People do make mistakes, and they should of course take some responsibility for their mistakes,” she said. “But the question is what degree of responsibility? [Mandatory child support] obviously is way too punitive for the kind of mistake these men made and is not good either for the mother or the child.”
National Post
• Email: sboesveld@nationalpost.com | Twitter: sarahboesveld