Should men have "financial abortions" rights? - YouTube

A few weeks ago on Ask Cristen I addressed the question should cisgender men have a say

in abortion to which a lot of guys commenting said yeah sure, have your abortions as long

as guys can have rights to financial abortions. I don't know why I put just financial in quotes.

In a nutshell, a financial abortion refers to this idea of being able to give up all

parental and financial responsibilities associated with raising a biological child. In other

words, if you want to have the baby, go ahead, but I will have nothing, not a penny or moment

of time, to do with that.

And the Ask Cristen commenters who expressed this desire for an opting out of fatherhood

or just paternity in general, usually placed it in straight relationship scenarios such

as a guy telling his girlfriend that he never ever wanted to be a dad and then she gets

pregnant and then she decides to have to child and then all of the sudden he's on the hook

for child support and being a father that he never ever wanted to be. And then there

were a few guys who said, 'And what about women who might poke holes in condoms or lie

about being on birth control thus tricking men into becoming fathers again that they

never ever wanted to be.

I also wanted to take a moment and lay a little bit of statistical groundwork when it comes

to child support and single-parenting in the US.

In the United States, around twenty-three million kids live in single-parent homes and

of those single-parent homes, around eighty-two percent of those are headed by a custodial

mom. And of those custodial single moms, only thirty-six percent have never been married.

So in a majority of child support cases, these kids are products of marriage and then divorce

not women secretly having babies without men being involved.

At least in 2011, only sixty-three percent of child support owed was actually paid. Which

usually amounts to seventeen percent of a parent's income. It's interesting to compare

that then to the annual overall cost of raising a kid in 2014 which comes up to just under

fourteen thousand dollars.

Unfortunately there is a statistical grain of truth to this background financial abortion

panic of what's referred to as reproductive coercion. Someone getting pregnant without

one or the other person's consent. According to the 2010 National Intimate Partner and

Sexual Violence Survey, eight point seven percent of men in the United States reported

ever having quote, 'an intimate partner trying to get pregnant when they did not want to

or tried to stop them from using birth control. And at the same time approximately eight point

six percent of women in the United States similarly reported having an intimate partner

who tried to get them pregnant when they did not want to or refused to use a condom.

Which leads to why financial abortions will probably never be codified into law. In 2007

the Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals dismissed a case involving a financial abortion specifically

a man who did not want to be legally obligated to pay child support under Michigan State

Law for a child that he had previously informed a girlfriend that he never wanted because

he said, 'Hey lady I never want to be a dad.'

In its decision to dismiss that case, the Court said, 'Dubay's claim that a man's right

to disclaim fatherhood would be analogous to a woman's right to abortion rests upon

a false analogy. In the case of a father seeking to opt out of fatherhood and thereby avoid

child support obligation, the child is already in existence and the state therefore had an

important interest in providing for his or her support.'

There's something called the UN Convention on the Child which explicitly states that

child support, both financial and emotional and even just providing basic things like

shelter and food are universal rights for children.