I was plan­ning to post a lit­tle bit later today and call the post “Time to Start Blog­ging Again,” because I have been miss­ing it a lot, and I prob­a­bly will put that post up, but I have been so frus­trated by one aspect of the dis­cus­sion going on at Alas on the Choice for Men (C4M) thread that I’ve decided to turn my com­ment #291 into a new post. I have edited it slightly so that it makes sense out of the con­text of the orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion – which you can read by fol­low­ing the pre­vi­ous link – but the point remains the same. I have a great deal of empa­thy for how it feels as a man sud­denly to real­ize that a woman with whom you have con­ceived a child can, with­out your con­sent, make you the father of that child, with all the attend­ing oblig­a­tions (finan­cial and oth­er­wise), “sim­ply” by choos­ing to give birth to it – and I hope I don’t need to explain why I chose to put the word sim­ply in scare quotes. Nonethe­less, it has seemed to me that every­one advo­cat­ing C4M in the dis­cus­sion on Alas has stu­diously avoided the ques­tion of how male het­ero­sex­ual respon­si­bil­ity – by which I mean het­ero­sex­ual men tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for our own sex­ual bound­aries – fig­ures into the ques­tion of male repro­duc­tive rights, which is another, per­haps more hon­est, name for what we are talk­ing about.

In the Alas dis­cus­sion, Mythago and Ching­ona have already pointed out – and in many more places than the two very late com­ments to which I have just linked – ways in which the C4M argu­ment does not take into account the speci­ficity of women’s expe­ri­ence in terms of preg­nancy and actu­ally attempts to cre­ate a par­al­lel between the male and female posi­tions vis-à-vis preg­nancy where none is pos­si­ble, and so I am not going to touch on that ques­tion here. Instead, I want to talk about the fact that the peo­ple argu­ing for C4M have con­sis­tently side­stepped deal­ing with the fact that if a man does not under any cir­cum­stances want to become a father, there is only one, 100% reli­able way to avoid that hap­pen­ing: don’t engage in sex­ual activ­ity that might result in the con­cep­tion of a child. Is it hard to fol­low that prin­ci­ple? Sure. Can it cause dif­fi­cul­ties if you make that deci­sion with a woman with whom you are already in a rela­tion­ship? Sure. But if not becom­ing a father is that impor­tant to you, then it ought to be more impor­tant than whether or not you get to fuck the woman you want to fuck and who may very well want with all her heart, soul and body to fuck you. But if you are will­ing to gam­ble that con­cep­tion might take place – and every­one here knows that even dou­ble and triple meth­ods of birth con­trol can fail, so even that is a gam­ble – then try­ing to fig­ure out a way to get out of pay­ing for the con­se­quences should you lose that gam­ble seems to me not only pro­foundly irre­spon­si­ble, both down­right cowardly.

(I am, hon­estly, a lit­tle uncom­fort­able with the gam­bling metaphor, because we are after all talk­ing about human lives here, but it just seems to me that the way C4M advo­cates tend to shy away from the impli­ca­tions of tak­ing the sex­ual side of the respon­si­bil­ity ques­tion as seri­ously as they should sug­gests that they under­stand on some level that this gam­bling metaphor is not so far off and that what they are try­ing to do is find a way of not hav­ing to pay up when they “lose.”)

We eas­ily for­get that the con­cep­tion of a child is not some­thing that hap­pens because of anyone’s con­scious voli­tion. PIV sex between two fer­tile peo­ple cre­ates an envi­ron­ment in which con­cep­tion is pos­si­ble. Cou­ples can do things to increase or decrease that pos­si­bil­ity based on what they decide at the time, but the moment of con­cep­tion through PIV sex is some­thing beyond anyone’s imme­di­ate con­trol. In other words, no mat­ter what a man and woman agree on before they have sex, no mat­ter what and how many kinds of birth con­trol they use, nei­ther of them can do any­thing to pre­vent con­cep­tion at the moment it hap­pens; more, once it hap­pens, the fact that it has hap­pened is such a pro­found thing – because we are, after all, talk­ing about a human life – that it seems to me unre­al­is­tic to expect either part­ner to be legally bound by what they thought they would do before con­cep­tion took place. (A man who thought he didn’t want a child could change his mind and decide he wants one just as “eas­ily” as a woman who thought she would have an abor­tion could decide she wants to keep the child.)

Regard­less of what she felt before the child was con­ceived, the fact that con­cep­tion hap­pens in a woman’s body gives her cer­tain rights, oblig­a­tions and respon­si­bil­i­ties towards the fetus grow­ing in her body and the child that fetus will become if she gives birth to it; and while the man involved might not have wanted to con­ceive a child, once con­cep­tion hap­pens, he also has rights, oblig­a­tions and respon­si­bil­i­ties towards the fetus that is grow­ing in his partner’s body and towards the child it will become. The fact that those rights, oblig­a­tions and respon­si­bil­i­ties don’t always “line up” in a per­fectly fair way might indeed suck for the per­son caught on the wrong side of that line – which could be either the man or the woman, or per­haps even both, but I am think­ing here specif­i­cally about the man. In that case, I return to my point above about try­ing to get out of pay­ing when you have “lost” the “gam­ble” with preg­nancy, and if you weren’t really ready to gam­ble in the first place, if you were 100% sure you did want sex that you engaged in to result in the con­cep­tion of a child, then I raise again the issue of male het­ero­sex­ual respon­si­bil­ity that I posed above. There are plenty of ways to have a sat­is­fy­ing sex­ual rela­tion­ship with­out PIV inter­course; and if a woman you are with is unwill­ing to respect the fact that you are unwill­ing to gam­ble with father­hood, then that is an issue in your rela­tion­ship with her (and this applies to one night stands as much as to long-term rela­tion­ships) and that issue, to me, ought to raise ques­tions about whether you should be hav­ing sex with her in the first place.