Abortion: why aren"t men allowed to have a say?

Where the woman says that the pregnancy is the result of rape, she would have to provide a police report as evidence before she could have the abortion.

Heavy sanctions would back up these provisions. A woman who forges the signature of an alleged father and a man who falsely claims to be the father in order to help a woman in getting an abortion would both be subject to criminal prosecution – as would the doctor who performs an abortions without the written consent of the father.

Wow! The Ohio bill is, apparently, very unlikely to pass into state law; but even if it is not going to shake our earth it looks, at least, as if it might be a straw in the wind. In its unequivocal radicalism, it eclipses all previous attempts to assert any rights of men in abortion.

I thought I was being daring in my 1992 book No More Sex War when I wrote:

“Women who choose to have an abortion might be a good deal better off if their men were required to endorse and support their decision. If the man agrees, the burden of the decision will be shared. If the man does not agree, he ought to be provided with a means to say so. His opinion ought, at least, to be registered and recorded. I’m not saying it ought to have any restraining force in law. I’m not saying a woman should be prevented from having an abortion if the father disapproves. I’m just saying he has a right to be heard.”

These tame suggestions got me hauled over the coals of the feminist orthodoxy on my way to a pelting in the stocks. Not for the first time. When, in 1989, The Times published a column of mine in which I mourned the absence of two aborted children whom I might have fathered, the paper received so many letters in response that they had to be run on full half-pages on consecutive days. Nineteen out of 20 of those correspondents furiously told me that, as a man, I had no right to express any opinion on abortion and I could keep my feelings of loss to myself.

When my book was published, I was summoned to the cellars of Broadcasting House for an inquisition at the hands of that Torquemada of Woman’s Hour, Jenni Murray. “A woman’s rights over her own body must be indisputable,” she thundered. “OK,” I answered. “But they are not the only rights at issue in a pregnancy” – a proposition which, to my surprise, she seemed to accept without demur.

That’s the bottom line. The woman’s right to choose is, obviously, not the only concern – despite the fury with which feminists have been insisting on that position for 50 years.

On top of the highly contentious question whether the foetus in the womb has philosophical, moral and legal rights which place a duty of care on the wider society, the inseminating man must clearly, undeniably have an active interest which ought to be established and recognised with legal rights. And then, too, the wider society which pays for the operation under the NHS in Britain should also save a say. Is it in the interests of taxpayers that 150,000+ abortions should be performed every year? Is it in the interests of the wider society that those lives – more or less equal to the annual figure for net migration in the UK – should be stilled?

Or are those questions only allowed in Ohio?

Abortion: why aren"t men allowed to have a say?