A while ago, a reader sent me an article about this hilarious concept of “financial abortion” concocted by a bunch of grievously sexually unsuccessful men and supported by even more unsuccessful women who don’t mind looking like stupid clowns in order to have some loser somewhere approve of their sorry existences. I found the piece too ridiculous to write about at the time, but since it’s International Women’s Day, I want to use this opportunity to share a few laughs with my readers on the account of the miserable rejects who have come up with this silly idea.
It took me a while to figure out what the “financial abortion” was supposed to be all about because it’s too bizarre. Now I have worked it out, though. Men who hate their bodies and their biological sex and detest the idea that a pregnancy occurs inside a woman’s body want to have the option not to support their children financially after those children are born, if they informed the woman (not the child, mind you) early enough in the pregnancy that they don’t want to be fathers. Because a newborn should totally go without diapers because two people had this or that conversation before said newborn even arrived on this planet.
If you think I’m making this all up, here is a quote for you:
“Up until now, reproductive choice has been seen as a woman’s issue: you’re either pro-life or pro-choice… If we expect men to be responsible, isn’t it right to give them some choices too?” “I’m not talking about fathers opting out of obligations that they’ve committed to. 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.”
Of course, I’m all for reproductive choices and I think we should all start a petition addressed to Mother Nature, demanding that men get a capacity to become pregnant. Until our shared wish is granted, though, this entire discussion should be kept at the comedy clubs.
The funny article I quoted asks a series of hilarious questions to make its silly point:
While pro-choice legislation makes the rights of the mother clear, at what point is a father able to say, ‘I do not want this child’?
We all know that a father can say this at absolutely any point of a child’s life and sometimes, indeed, does. Obviously, any normal government protects the rights of the person who can’t assert them for him or herself because of being legally a minor. The decision of whether to terminate a pregnancy or carry it to term always lies with a person inside whom the pregnancy occurs. Both in case of the abortion or in case of giving birth, a woman puts her health at risk and transforms her life in a profound way. A man never risks anything at any point. Except for a few bucks, which is a very insignificant little factor when compared to the magnitude of the needs of a human being who was not even around when his or her parents had sex, made reproductive decisions, and held conversations about abortion or childbirth.
The unintelligent author of the article, however, proceeds with stupid questions:
As costs rise and opportunities disappear, shouldn’t men have the same rights as women to control their entrance into parenthood?
This is pretty much as asking whether a person without legs should have the same right to be hired for the Royal Ballet company as a ballet dancer with 10 years of experience, or whether a person who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish should have the same right to be hired to teach Spanish as I do. Unless you are physically capable of giving birth, you cannot possibly expect to have the same rights in the area of giving birth as people who do.
Of course, the article eventually comes up with a bugbear of a completely invented scary woman:
Adversely, what would one call the presumptuousness of women who assume that men should snap to attention after they’ve made the decision to bring — or not to bring — a life into this world without allowing them to play a pivotal role in the decision?
There is, of course, no explanation of who these presumptuous women are and what “snapping to attention” on the men’s part would even mean in this situation. The idiot who wrote the piece does not even realize what kind of a fool she is making of herself by suggesting that anybody else should be playing “pivotal roles” in decisions she makes about her own body. I have to wonder whether she manages to decide when to pee without holding a referendum among her male coworkers.
The conclusion to this bizarre piece nearly made me fall off my chair in laughter:
Do we believe in absolute freedom of choice — or merely our choice?
Erm, can you show me a single idiot on this planet who believes in “absolute freedom of choice”? There are tons of choices that we all frown on and sometimes even punish with prison sentences. The freedom of choice can only be respected when it’s exercised on one’s own behalf and does not infringe on the rights of any other human beings.
A reasonable government cannot afford to go into an investigation of who said what to whom at some point, who did or did not put on a condom and why they did not put it on right, why contraception malfunctioned, what anybody did or did not want in the process, before and after the process. A reasonable government most definitely cannot protect the right of a grown individual to be a cheap stupid prick who begrudges a few dimes to his own flesh and blood at the expense of a small person who does not yet have a voice and cannot even hire a lawyer.
I completely support the right of any man not to be a father to his child if he did not want that child to appear in this world. What I do not support, though, is the right of anybody to rob a small creature who is 50% them of financial means to existence for any reason whatsoever. I’m not a rich person but if I were to find out that somebody collected my DNA and created a child on the basis of that (say, this is scientifically possible), I would dedicate my existence to making sure that this little human being did not want for anything. You need to hate yourself a whole damn lot to refuse something so insignificant as money to somebody who is half you.