[Image by Martín Alfonso Sierra Ospino from Pixabay]

Minimise has been around for a few years now, and by now we’ve done a lot conversations workshops – events where we help train people to have better conversations about abortion. At the Q&As at those events we get a lot of recurring questions, and one we’ve seen a few times is something along the lines of “if the mother gets a say in abortion, why shouldn’t the father?” It’s a question that often gets murmurs of approval and agreement, and people often come into our events pretty enthusiastic about using a line like this in a discussion with pro-choice people. It’s also a talking point that I’ve heard for years in other context.

I do not think this is a good pro-life argument, and in this post I’m going to give some reasons why.

1. The pro-life position is about protecting the rights of the child.

The obvious point here is really the key one. The pro-life position on abortion rests on the idea that it’s wrong to kill an innocent person. So we have to establish that unborn children are innocent people, and that their right not to be killed still applies even when they’re radically and invasively dependent on another person’s body.

In other situations where we’re trying to protect innocent people from being killed, we don’t try to argue that anyone has the authority to choose whether or not those innocent people die. It would be very strange if we did. Imagine that an opponent of using nuclear weapons on civilian populations said something like “the United States shouldn’t have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima unilaterally. They should have consulted carefully with the other allied nations first before doing something so drastic.” I think anyone listening to that argument would conclude that the person making it didn’t really think it was always wrong to intentionally bomb civilians (they’d probably think they were more concerned about foreign policy multilateralism). Similarly, if pro-lifers start making father’s rights arguments, people might reasonably think we care more about reproductive autonomy (as long as it’s for men) than we do about the lives of the unborn.

If killing innocent people is wrong in itself, then who gets an input into deciding whether or not to do it is a question of very little importance. Unless, that is, that giving some group of people more input into a given decision increases the chances of the right decision being made. But…

2. There’s very little reason to think that giving men more input would lead to fewer abortions

People making this kind of point usually seem to assume that for any given pregnancy, the father will be less likely to choose abortion than the mother. I don’t know why they think this! Trying to get good empirical evidence on this question is very difficult, because to really analyse it you’d have to get a survey group of people who did and did not have abortions, and then you’d have to isolate male support or opposition from various other factors highly correlated with it. If a woman chose not to have an abortion and cited her partner’s opposition as a reason, was it his opposition that was the key thing, or was it because he was a good partner and the prospect of raising a child with him was appealing? It would be very difficult to differentiate these from one another in the context of a survey.

In the absence of really comprehensive data we have to rely on more limited scraps of it, and on anecdotes. And these paint a decidedly mixed picture. Among women who do have abortions, many say that the encouragement of the men in their lives was a big factor in their decision to abort. Men whose partners aborted report the same thing. Men are only slightly more pro-life than women, and even this is a recent development: since opinion polling on abortion began, women tended in general to be more pro-life than men. On the anecdotal level, I’ve heard more stories of women pressured into an abortion they didn’t really want by their male partner than I have of women who were inclined to choose abortion but didn’t because of their partner’s opposition. 

Now I haven’t looked at those studies in any depth and there might well be flaws in all of them. But I’m not aware of any unambiguous evidence supporting the positive claim that more male influence on a decision about whether or not to abort leads to fewer abortions. So why think it would?

Also: how would this work, legally? What if one parent wants to abort and the other doesn’t? What would happen then? Would either parent have the right to opt for abortion unilaterally? That would definitely make things worse. Would each parent have a veto on the abortion? That might well improve matters, but it seems like it would be just as hard or harder to get implemented than, you know, general legal protections for the unborn. 

I find it very hard to imagine an actual policy that would give fathers more of a say over abortions in a way that a. Would make abortions less frequent and b. Are more likely to ever be implemented than abortion restrictions. Nor do I think there’s a good ethical argument for why fathers should have a say in whether or not their children get aborted (neither parent should have that say, any more than they do over whether their born children have their lives ended).

So as an actual proposal for policy, or a substantive ethical position, the “father’s rights” point seems like a non-starter. I suspect, though, that a lot of people making the point don’t intend to use it in either of these ways. They intend it instead as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the pro-choice position. They think pro-choice people are being hypocritical in allowing the mother, but not the father, to have a choice about ending the life of the unborn. It’s not a serious position in itself, but one that’s meant to heighten the contradictions of the pro-choice view. Unfortunately, I don’t think it really works as this either.

3. Pro-choice people aren’t being hypocritical when they argue that women should be the ones choosing

As we’re fond of saying here at Minimise, the abortion debate is really two debates. The first is a debate about the personhood, moral status, or dignity of unborn humans. It involves question like: do they count morally? Are they equal to us? Do they have the right to life? The second is a debate about the bodily rights of women. Do they have the right to eject other beings from their body, even if those beings are bearers of equal rights? Is abortion killing, or is it only refusing to save? Is abortion more like killing in self-defence, or like one conjoined twin ending the life of the other by unilaterally opting for separation surgery, or neither?

The second question is an important part of the debate because pregnancy is extremely physically demanding. It induces substantial changes in your body, it often makes you feel ill, it ends with one of life’s most painful experiences, and it involves carrying another living being inside you for months. These physical demands are made of pregnant women, not their partners. It’s this fact, not the fact that pregnant women are a parent (or, depending on how you think about it, prospective parent) of the fetus, that grounds pro-choice arguments about bodily rights. The slogan is not “her child, her choice”. It’s “her body, her choice”.

I don’t want to belabour the obvious, but this really is a very significant difference between the experience of mothers and fathers. Of course it is! Women are the ones who actually experience pregnancy first-hand.

If all human beings’ physical experience of reproduction was like men’s (if, for example, humans hatched from eggs rather than being gestated) then bodily rights arguments would play no role in the abortion debate. There would be nothing of this sort for pro-life arguments to have to address, because human reproduction wouldn’t make big demands on anyone’s body. But human reproduction does make big demands, and it makes them of only one sex. 

We of course firmly believe that pro-choice people are wrong to think that bodily rights arguments justify abortion. But if you think they do, it’s not even slightly inconsistent or hypocritical to think that the choice of whether or not to exercise those rights would belong to the rights-bearer: that bodily rights would belong to the person whose body is being affected.


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For these three reasons, I don’t think appealing to father’s rights is a good pro-life argument. I also think it’s an argument that tends to make the movement look very bad. The more we use it, the more we look like we’re living down to the worst pro-life cliches about us: that what we really care about is men’s ability to control women, that our supposed concern for the unborn is really a trojan horse for sexism. 

None of this means, by the way, that men shouldn’t be encouraged to be pro-life; to speak up for the lives of their own children and those of others’; to be the kind of partners that women can rely on to be involved, loving, inspiring and responsible fathers; to encourage other men to do the same; to raise their voices in solidarity with the unborn as they ought to with any other vulnerable people threatened with death. Men have so much important and necessary work to do to help protect unborn children. But we ought to do that work in defence of those children’s rights, not of our own.

Ben