From: The
Fatherhood Coalition [mailto:FATHERS-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM]
On Behalf Of George Mason
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006
8:08 AM
To: FATHERS-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM
Subject: Opinion by Jacoby
on Dubay and the old code
Columns
The obligation
of unwanted fatherhood
Real men -- good
men -- take responsibility for the
children they father. If they get
a woman pregnant, they do the right
thing: They stand by her. They support
their child. They don't try to weasel
out of a situation they co-authored.
They shoulder the obligations of fatherhood,
even if they hadn't planned on becoming
a father.
Once upon a time, men confronted with
news of an unintended pregnancy knew
what was expected of them. More often
than not, they married the woman who
was carrying their child; for those
tempted to behave irresponsibly, society
devised the shotgun wedding. Women,
too, knew what was expected of them.
They tended to be very careful about
sex. If they didn't always wait until
they were married, they waited for
a relationship that seemed to be marriage-bound.
It wasn't a perfect system and it
didn't guarantee perfect happiness,
but on the whole it was realistic:
It recognized that sex has consequences.
It bound men to the women they impregnated
and made sure that children had dads
as well as moms.
But the old code was swept away by
the Sexual Revolution. With the Pill
and easy abortion came the illusion
of sex without consequences.
Pregnancy could be avoided or readily
undone. Men didn't have to marry women
they impregnated; women didn't have
to reserve themselves for men who
were committed or whose intentions
were honorable. With the devaluation
of sex came the devaluation of fatherhood.
Men got used to the idea of sex without
strings. So did women, many of whom
also grew accustomed to the idea of
motherhood without husbands. Government
got involved, too, mandating welfare
benefits for unmarried moms, and child-support
checks from "deadbeat dads."
With the incentives for marriage weaker
than ever, more and more children
were born out of wedlock. In 1950,
just 4 percent of births were to unmarried
mothers. By 1980, the rate was more
than 18 percent. It stands today at
nearly 36 percent.
All this is bad enough. Comes now
Matt Dubay with a proposal to make
things worse.
A 25-year-old computer programmer
in Michigan, Dubay wants to know why
it is only women who have "reproductive
rights." He is upset about having
to pay child support for a baby he
never wanted. Not only did his former
girlfriend know he didn't want children,
says Dubay, she had told him she was
infertile. When she got pregnant nonetheless,
he asked her to get an abortion or
place the baby for adoption. She decided
instead to keep her child, and secured
a court order requiring him to pay
$500 a month in support.
Not fair, Dubay complains. His ex-girlfriend
chose to become a mother.
It was her choice not to have an abortion,
her choice to carry the baby to term,
her choice not to have the child adopted.
She even had the option, under the
"baby safe haven" laws most
states have enacted, to simply leave
her newborn at a hospital or police
station. Roe v. Wade gives her and
all women the right -- the Constitutional
right! -- to avoid parenthood and
its responsibilities. Dubay argues
that he should have the same right,
and has filed a federal lawsuit that
his supporters are calling "Roe
v. Wade for men." Drafted by
the National Center for Men, it contends
that as a matter of equal rights,
men who don't want a child should
be permitted, early in pregnancy,
to get "a financial abortion"
releasing them from any future responsibility
to the baby.
Does Dubay have a point? Sure. Contemporary
American society does send very mixed
messages about sex and the sexes.
For women, the decision to have sex
is the first of a series of choices,
including the choice to abort a pregnancy
-- or, if she prefers, to give birth
and then collect child support from
the father. For men, legal choices
end with the decision to have sex.
If conception takes place, a man can
be forced to accept the abortion of
a baby he wants -- or to spend at
least the next 18 years turning over
a chunk of his income to support a
child he didn't want.
All true. But it is also true that
predatory males have done enormous
damage to American society, and the
last thing our culture needs is one
more way for men to escape accountability
for the children they father. Dubay
wants more than the freedom to be
sexually reckless -- he wants that
freedom to be constitutionally guaranteed.
Truly he is a child of his time, passionate
on the subject of rights and eager
to duck responsibility.
The culture used to send a clear message
to men in Dubay's position: Marry
the mother and be a father to your
child. Today it tells him: Just write
a monthly check. Soon -- if this lawsuit
succeeds -- it won't say even that.
The result will not be a fairer, more
equal society. It will be a society
with even more abortion, even more
exploitation of women, even more of
the destructiveness and instability
caused by fatherlessness.
And, in some ways saddest of all,
even more people like Matt Dubay:
a boy who never learned how to be
a real man.
Jeff Jacoby
is an Op-Ed writer for the Boston
Globe, a radio political commentator,
and a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.
Copyright
© 2006 Boston Globe
|
By Drake Bennett |
March 26, 2006 EARLIER THIS MONTH,
a 25-year-old Michigan computer programmer
named Matthew Dubay sued in federal
court to avoid paying child support
for his 7-month-old daughter. The
girl's mother, he alleges, had claimed
to be both infertile and on birth
control, and he had made it clear
all along that he didn't want children.
The resulting pregnancy, as he saw
it, was simply not his fault, and
the child not in any way his responsibility.
It's a common enough
situation, but the National Center
for Men, a New York-based advocacy
group that is coordinating and paying
for the lawsuit, claims to have waited
years for a plaintiff as compelling
as Dubay. The Center has labeled (and,
incidentally, trademarked) the case
''Roe v. Wade for Men."
Around the same time,
the European Court of Human Rights
unanimously ruled that a woman could
not implant embryos created in a course
of in vitro fertilization if the man
involved did not want her to. The
painful particulars of the case have
made it front-page news in England,
where the couple is from. The plaintiff,
a young woman named Natallie Evans,
had undergone IVF with her fiance
before being rendered infertile by
treatment for ovarian cancer, and
if she isn't able to reverse the court's
decision by October, the embryos will
expire and she will lose her last
chance to have biological children.
Discussions of reproductive
rights tend to focus on the woman,
and in particular the availability
of abortion and contraception. While
it's too early to tell whether these
cases represent the first stirrings
of a movement, a few so-called men's
rights activists are trying to expand
the meaning of reproductive rights.
All of which raises the question of
what, exactly, those rights are. Is
a man's right to, in effect, disown
a biological child comparable to a
woman's right to have an abortion?
What does equality mean when it involves
pregnancy and childbirth, processes
in which the woman's role still outweighs
the man's? Most broadly, 33 years
after Roe v. Wade, is this a step
forward for gender equality, or a
step back?
According to John
Robertson, a University of Texas law
professor and reproductive rights
specialist, the idea that men have
certain rights is hardly controversial.
''Clearly," he says, ''a man
has reproductive rights. He can't
be forced to reproduce. He can't be
sterilized." But those rights
are limited, and sharply, by the fact
that most of the reproductive process
takes place in a woman's body.
When conception is
removed from the woman's body-as is
the case with in vitro fertilization-courts
have found that men and women have
equal status in reproductive decisions.
The Evans case in England is only
the most recent example. In the US,
according to Susan Crockin, a Newton-based
lawyer who specializes in reproductive
technology cases, courts dealing with
frozen embryo disputes ''have repeatedly
favored the right of the former partner
who does not want to procreate over
the other partner's right to procreate,"
siding with the parent-in most cases
the father-who doesn't want to implant
the embryo. The Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court provided one of the
country's more influential decisions
on this score. In a 2000 case called
AZ v. BZ, the court ruled that a man
who had signed seven agreements granting
his wife control over their frozen
embryos in the event of a divorce
could nonetheless change his mind
and prevent her from implanting them.
To decide otherwise, the court found,
would be ''forced procreation."
The ex-wife (referred
to in court papers as BZ) argued that,
since the stakes and cost to her in
creating an embryo, even an in vitro
embryo, were much higher than for
her ex-husband, her desires should
count for more. Providing sperm, her
lawyers pointed out, is one of the
more straightforward medical procedures
imaginable, while extracting an egg
is a difficult, occasionally painful
process involving extended hormone
and drug treatments. And more important,
she argued, women have a much shorter
reproductive life span than men: BZ
was 45, and in losing the case she,
like Natallie Evans, lost her last
chance at biological motherhood.
Nevertheless, the
court rejected these arguments and
decided that, as long as the embryo
is still outside the woman's body,
men's reproductive rights carry the
same weight as women's. The Dubay
lawsuit is after something similar
but far broader. ''Reproductive choice
should be a fundamental human right,
not just a woman's right," says
Mel Feit, executive director of the
National Center for Men. Right now,
he points out, a man who gets a woman
pregnant must not only accede to the
woman's choice, but subsidize it if
she wants the child. Men, as he sees
it, are reduced to reproductive beasts
of burden, helpless in the face of
feminine caprice. ''There's a huge
disparity," he says. ''All the
choices will be hers, and all the
responsibility will be his."
Of course, the Dubay
lawsuit deals with an actual pregnancy
(and an actual child) rather than
an in vitro embryo. As a result, the
man's right not to have children (or,
for that matter, his desire to have
them) runs up against a woman's constitutionally
protected right to determine what
happens in her body. Dubay, though,
is not arguing that he should have
been able to force his girlfriend
to get an abortion. The choice he
wants is primarily financial and semantic.
He wants, in effect, to pretend he
doesn't have a child, and live his
life accordingly.
The problem, most
legal experts respond-the reason that
Dubay is almost certain to lose his
case-is that the courts see disputes
like his as not between a mother and
father but between a father and his
child. As Leonard Glantz, a lawyer
and public health professor at Boston
University, puts it, Dubay ''may wish
to sue the mother, but she can't relieve
him of his paternal obligation to
the child." In abortion, women
have the legal option, which men lack,
of freeing themselves of the consequences
of sexual behavior. Family law experts
don't see any reasonable way of rectifying
that imbalance without giving men
veto power over a woman's right to
choose, or without threatening the
well-being of the child. Legal experts,
along with the courts, tend to see
the child's best interests being served
by having, in the words of University
of Wisconsin law professor Alta Charo,
''as many solvent adults [as possible]
available to help the child through
the world."
While the law may
encourage the involvement of two solvent
parents in child-rearing, it also,
however, maintains an important loophole:
Mothers are afforded a basic right
not to inform the father of a child's
existence at all. Again, it's an inequality
stemming from nature, since a woman
doesn't need to be informed that she
has become a parent. (It's not a universal
right, however: Single mothers who
apply for welfare are required to
identify the father and pursue child
support.)
No doubt it's a right
that Matthew Dubay wishes his ex-girlfriend
had exercised. But there are other
fathers who find this to be the most
problematic reproductive inequity
of all. The issue has been sharply
raised in the context of abortion
and the sort of spousal notification
laws the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional
in 1992. Today, though, similar questions
of how much a father is entitled to
know are arising around adoption.
In the most recent
of several cases nationwide, a Florida
man named Jeremiah Clayton Jones is
suing to block the adoption of his
son, claiming that he hadn't even
known about the child until the adoption
lawyer called him. Florida, like about
30 other states, has a ''putative
father registry" where fathers
can sign up to claim fatherhood rights,
but, according to the lawsuits, such
registries are often obscure and difficult
to find information about. And they
leave a father with no recourse if
his child is adopted in another state.
According to the
University of Texas's Robertson, the
adoption rights issue is ''the real
issue" for men's reproductive
rights. ''The Supreme Court has made
clear that an unwed father has a right
to rear his child," he says.
''There's a series of cases saying
that men who immediately after the
birth of a child show an interest
and try to be involved in the rearing
of a child have a right to be a custodial
parent as well." Senator Mary
Landrieu of Louisiana plans to introduce
a bill proposing a nationwide father
registry later this year.
In other words, it's
the fathers fighting to claim their
children, not to disavow them, who
may have hit on the most promising
idea of ''men's rights." Unlike
the right to avoid parental responsibilities,
the right to assert them may in fact
have the blessing of the Founding
Fathers.
Drake Bennett
is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail
drbennett@globe.com. |