I know a lot of folks around these parts aren’t big Dan Savage fans, but I personally am, and I think his general take on sexual ethics is pretty spot-on (even while I quibble with a lot of the details). But his column this week has me a little… hmmm. Basically, woman and man have unprotected sex, and while woman doesn’t actually get pregnant, if she had gotten pregnant she would have had an abortion. And she wants to know if Dan thinks she would have been under an obligation to tell the dude. Dan says:
A woman who is pregnant and has decided to have an abortion should tell the guy who knocked her up about the pregnancy and her decision to abort… unless she sincerely believes—or even legitimately suspects—that the guy is gonna bully, badger, and/or do violence to her in an attempt to prevent her from choosing abortion.
Guys need to know when they’ve dodged a bullet, CL. Being made aware that he came this close to 18 years’ worth of child support payments can lead a guy to be more cautious with his spunk—and, in some cases, more likely to support choice.
Take the guy you fucked: He needs to know that not all birth control methods are foolproof and not every woman who claims to be on birth control is telling the truth and/or being diligent about taking those pills every day. Hearing that almost-a-daddy bullet whiz past his head may convince him to put on that condom the next time he’s fucking a woman he isn’t serious about, even if she is (or claims to be) on birth control.
And… um… gee. This bit is going to get me scratched off NARAL’s Christmas card list, which will be a real bummer (last year’s card was great: “The Crusades, the Inquisition, clerical sex-abuse scandals—all of this could have been prevented. Happy holidays from your friends at NARAL”), but I gotta be me. A guy—a good, decent, nonabusive guy—should be told about an impending abortion so he can, if he feels the abortion is a mistake, make a case for keeping the baby. It’s still the woman’s choice in the end—there should be absolutely no question about that—but the fetus, if not the uterus, is his, too. It’s only fair that the same guy who would be on the hook for child support payments if you decide to go through with the pregnancy be heard out before you follow through on your decision to end it.
So I actually kind of agree with the first paragraph, in a general sense (not at all in a legal one). As a general rule, if you get pregnant, is it a good idea to tell the person who was involved in your pregnancy? Sure. Are general rules typically pretty crappy when you apply them to the breadth of human experience? You betcha.
Yes, it’s great for dudes to know that they dodged a bullet. It’s also good for dudes to know that women they care about (or at least women they know exist) have abortions — abortion isn’t often talked about in first-person narratives, which is part of why it’s so easy to politically demonize it. I’m personally of the mind that a dude who got you pregnant should also be there to support you — whether that’s holding your hand through child birth and supporting his child, or sitting with you in the abortion clinic waiting room.
But then. Not all dudes are good dudes. In fact, a lot of dudes are actively bad dudes; a lot more dudes are somewhere in between good and bad. And while Dan says that you don’t have to tell a dude if you think he’ll bully or badger you out of an abortion, he also says that you should tell the dude so that the dude can make the argument for you going through nine months of pregnancy and giving birth to a child that will ultimately be your responsibility for the rest of your life. The line between “making the argument” and “badgering” or “bullying” can be quite a fine one when we’re talking about a potential child.
Also, abortion is incredibly stigmatized. My friends who have had abortions — and I think this is true for most women who have abortions — tend not to speak publicly about it. If the dude in question isn’t your serious partner — and if he is your serious partner, you’re probably going to tell him that you’re undergoing surgery unless he’s abusive or your relationship is otherwise unhealthy — there are real reasons not to take on the stigma of abortion just so that he can make a case you aren’t going to accept anyway. You tell that dude and he tells his friends? Especially in smaller communities, that can really harm your reputation. It can impact your job and your relationships. It’s fucked that that’s the case — that one of the most common surgical procedures in the United States is so stigmatized — but that’s reality. I only write about abortion and I’ve gotten death threats and enraged emails sent to my employers trying to get me fired. Is it really up to a woman to take on the possibility of back-channel reputation or career destruction just so a dude can know that his sperm swam into an egg?
Don’t get me totally wrong: I am sympathetic to Dan’s position, and I think that under good circumstances, you should tell the man who got you pregnant. But the thing about circumstances is that “good” is a sliding scale, and there are a lot of factors to consider beyond just “is the person being told abusive?”