Let’s hear it for the boys?

Male abortion rights?

That’s what an interesting court challenge is asking for — financial “abortion” rights, at least.

It’s a legal stunt, but as a way of calling attention to double standards and unintended consequences, the campaign makes sense. Matt Dubay, a 25 year old computer programmer in Michigan, was ordered to pay child support after his former girlfriend had a baby. He says he had made it clear when they were dating that he did not want to have children; she had said she couldn’t get pregnant anyway because of a medical condition. When she did get pregnant, he argues, she could have chosen to have an abortion. So shouldn’t he have a choice as well, about whether to support a child he never wanted to have?

Dubay and the center filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, which raises all kinds of confounding questions about rights and choice and what we really mean by equality, when we look at the social and biological roles played by men and women in the course of becoming parents. Feit argues that within a short window of time after discovering an unplanned pregnancy — he has proposed a month, but thinks a week might even be more appropriate — a man should have the right to terminate his legal and financial obligations to the child. “I’m not talking about fathers opting out of obligations that they’ve committed to,” Feit says. “I mean early in pregnancy, if contraception failed, men should have a choice, and women have a right to know what that choice is as they decide how to proceed.”

Hrm.

On the one hand, I can see where they’re coming from on this. The rights related to childbearing are granted disproportionately to women (in terms of having the final choice between carrying to term or having an abortion). A man could, under some circumstances, feel trapped and powerless by being faced with such a situation.

Join the club.

The reason the rights are so one-sided is because the burden is also one-sided, and that’s just basic biology. The woman faces the burden (and possible danger) of carrying around that fetus for 9 months and then giving birth to it. There are physical and emotional impacts that far outstrip, especially in the short term, the financial impacts on the male.

I have a very deep-seated sense of obligation to children, of responsibility for bringing them into the world. As old-fashioned and simplistic as it may sound, as a guy, if you aren’t willing to live with the risk, then don’t take it. And if “the worst” happens, suck it up and live up to your responsibility.

That all said, there may be some precedent for a legal challenge like this:

In a sense women already have a version of that right: Most states have laws permitting a woman to relinquish all her parental responsibilities if she leaves a baby at a hospital after giving birth. “No shame. No blame. No names” says the poster on the bus shelter. Naturally such laws are designed to offer an alternative to the heartbreaking stories we read of babies dumped in trash cans and abandoned by the side of the road.

The problem is, it seems to me, that’s seen as a last resort, for women in desperate straits. Whereas a legal right to drop parental obligations would be too easily simply a “get out of jail free” card for deadbeat fathers-to-be. The consequences — emotional and physical — faced by the male in such a case could be trivial. Just as too many fathers-to-be skip out on their partners already, this simply gives a legal out for doing so.

The result, ironically, is to place more economic (if not also emotional) pressure on women to abort. Which is probably not an outcome that anyone wants.

The “system” is inherently unfair, based on biological differences between genders. This proposed “right” doesn’t seem to help that unfairness, just skew it further.