The Complicated Place of Men in the Abortion Debates

As a man who once was in a difficult marriage where a pregnancy occurred and was aborted, I found this article had some interesting things to say about the male side of things.

Forget Abortion, Democrats Should be Messaging About Birth Control

For Democrats who are passionately pro-choice, here is a hard truth: You are not going to turn the scores of millions of voters who find the topic uncomfortable into militant pro-choice activists…

Pro-Choicer, Pro-Lifer Do Lunch

…among Americans 50 and older, women outnumber men among those who identify as pro-life. It’s hard to credit that all of those American women, most of whom came of age in a feminist, post-Roe era, are motivated by a desire to subjugate themselves.

In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, there has, predictably, been a lot of expressive reaction on social media, especially by women. One woman proclaimed it was the “boomers” fault. Another woman suggested that if men got angry as women do about this issue, this would never have happened.

The first accusation is barely worth dealing with because it is absurd. Let’s just say that my wife and I are boomers, have been pro choice the whole way, have voted in every election, local and national, have done our share of joining protests on women’s issues and were not outliers in our generation.

The second is a common complaint that women have about the men in their lives, who don’t get how important reproductive rights are to them, and men in general, who enjoy the privileges of being male and never have to suffer the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.

My wife replied to this woman’s post. She said she tried to explain it to me but I didn’t get it even though I am one of the “good ones.”

Subsequently my wife tried to engage me about whether men had “skin in the game” and why men were not as supportive of women as they should be on this issue. I told her I wasn’t ready to engage with her about this because, truthfully, I was parsing why I wasn’t angry and hadn’t come to a place where I was confident in my answer. This post is an attempt to understand myself on this question.

Let me begin by copping to my own anger baggage. Anger is hard for me. It is hard for me to express it. It is especially hard for me to experience it. I grew up in constant fear of the explosive, dominating and unforgiving anger of my father. Though he was never physically abusive, he certainly was emotionally abusive. I lived my whole life in fear of that anger whenever I was around him. It only ended when he died last summer. As a result, other people’s anger makes me very uncomfortable.

My first marriage was to a woman who used anger the way my father did. She became irrational and was willing to escalate any argument to whatever place it took to shut me up and shut me down. The reverberations with my father were extraordinary in retrospect.

So yes, anger is not my favorite emotion.

I was married to my first wife for about 11 years. Towards the end of our marriage we got pregnant and we chose to abort the pregnancy. It was a sad time in my life. I was glad that the option to abort was there, but sad that our relationship was in such a miserable state that the idea of introducing a child into the midst of it was inconceivable. It was the only time in my life that I fathered a child. Every now and again I wonder about the child that might have been. Yet I know we made the only choice that made sense.

So yes, I’ve had skin in the game.

My reaction to loosing the constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion is complicated by my belief that abortion is morally problematic. I don’t believe in any God. Still, I believe there is right and wrong (as well as many shades of grey between). Violence is almost never right. Certainly it’s not right when it is a choice one is not forced to make. But things get complicated when, regardless of the choice made, violence will be done.

A good friend once said to me, “I’m pretty sure abortion is violence.” My personal experience with abortion confirms that. Abortion is violence to the fetus, violence to the woman and, sometimes, violence to the man. I believe that abortion should be available as a family planning option, but I am most in tune with President Clinton’s formulation, it should be available, safe and rare.

Moving on to jurisprudence, I have read a lot of articles in the past year about the Roe v. Wade decision. I have landed on the side that it was not well founded jurisprudence. Ruth Bader Ginsberg made that point, repeatedly. She also felt it got decided too soon and in a way that cut off the national conversation that might have evolved into a more workable compromise. The abortion landscape in those days could be horrific, especially for women who lacked resources. I don’t fault the women who pushed it forward to a decision in the only way that seemed possible. But, it was a decision vulnerable to overturning because of flaws in its jurisprudence. The coming decades will be sad and unfortunate for many women in the position of wanting or needing an abortion. My hope is that we will pick up the conversation we didn’t finish having before and come out the other side with better jurisprudence all around. The current jurisprudence, founded on selective originalism as it appears to be, and issued by a court stacked with conservatives who are out of touch with what the majority of the country wants, is no less vulnerable to a future, less conservative, court.

My wife is angry with the conservative justices who maintained at their confirmation hearings that they believed in stare decisis and have turned out to be, in her opinion, liars. Committing to stare decisis as a general principle, which is what I believe they did, is not the same as committing to Roe V. Wade as law that should be viewed as settled. I was not at all surprised they overturned Roe V. Wade. I expected them to.

During the run up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a good friend confided to me that they despised Donald Trump, but didn’t know if they could bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton either. I looked him straight in the eye and said the only issue that should matter is the Supreme Court. The next president was likely going to replace more than one justice (who knew it would be three?). Not showing up, or making some kind of protest vote, failed to recognize the peril of the moment. To me, in that election, that was the issue worth thinking about. That was the issue that one had to vote on. It was, of course, bigger than Roe V. Wade. A conservative court could make all kinds of rulings that would undo the more liberal interpretations of the constitution that make room for the multicultural society I believe in. And that was the point of installing originalist judges on the court. I saw it then and I see it now. I tell everyone who cares to listen that the issue of gravest concern now is democracy itself. We must show up in the next two election cycles. We must vote for democracy. If we don’t, we will loose it.

So, what makes me angry to the extent I do get angry? I am angry with all the moderates and independents who failed to see that the Supreme Court was the central issue and either didn’t show up or made a protest vote in 2016. I am angry with people who allowed themselves to be deluded into voting for Donald Trump and the news outlets that deluded them or pandered to their ratings with false equivalency programming that suggested that 45 wouldn’t be so bad. I am angry with the mostly white Christian Patriarchy’s desire to push their minority viewpoint on the rest of the country. I am angry with Ruth Bader Ginsberg who wouldn’t step down during the Obama administration so that she could be replaced with a judge that would carry on her liberal jurisprudence.

And, in this moment, I am in despair, because I see the same thing lining up to happen again, only this time, democracy is at stake. The mostly white Christian Patriarchy and the wealthy white would-be-oligarchs are not interested in Democracy and are on the verge of successfully taking it down. That is what we are facing in the next two election cycles.

If anger over abortion rights is the issue that brings you to the table to fight for democracy, so be it. But please understand. It is not the central issue. The erosion of democracy is. We are in a determinative moment in history as we struggle to hold on to democracy, and with it, the multicultural rights so many fought so hard to acquire.