A few weeks ago on Ask Cristen I addressed the question should cisgender men have a say
in abortion to which a lot of guys commenting said yeah sure, have your abortions as long
as guys can have rights to financial abortions. I don't know why I put just financial in quotes.
In a nutshell, a financial abortion refers to this idea of being able to give up all
parental and financial responsibilities associated with raising a biological child. In other
words, if you want to have the baby, go ahead, but I will have nothing, not a penny or moment
of time, to do with that.
And the Ask Cristen commenters who expressed this desire for an opting out of fatherhood
or just paternity in general, usually placed it in straight relationship scenarios such
as a guy telling his girlfriend that he never ever wanted to be a dad and then she gets
pregnant and then she decides to have to child and then all of the sudden he's on the hook
for child support and being a father that he never ever wanted to be. And then there
were a few guys who said, 'And what about women who might poke holes in condoms or lie
about being on birth control thus tricking men into becoming fathers again that they
never ever wanted to be.
I also wanted to take a moment and lay a little bit of statistical groundwork when it comes
to child support and single-parenting in the US.
In the United States, around twenty-three million kids live in single-parent homes and
of those single-parent homes, around eighty-two percent of those are headed by a custodial
mom. And of those custodial single moms, only thirty-six percent have never been married.
So in a majority of child support cases, these kids are products of marriage and then divorce
not women secretly having babies without men being involved.
At least in 2011, only sixty-three percent of child support owed was actually paid. Which
usually amounts to seventeen percent of a parent's income. It's interesting to compare
that then to the annual overall cost of raising a kid in 2014 which comes up to just under
fourteen thousand dollars.
Unfortunately there is a statistical grain of truth to this background financial abortion
panic of what's referred to as reproductive coercion. Someone getting pregnant without
one or the other person's consent. According to the 2010 National Intimate Partner and
Sexual Violence Survey, eight point seven percent of men in the United States reported
ever having quote, 'an intimate partner trying to get pregnant when they did not want to
or tried to stop them from using birth control. And at the same time approximately eight point
six percent of women in the United States similarly reported having an intimate partner
who tried to get them pregnant when they did not want to or refused to use a condom.
Which leads to why financial abortions will probably never be codified into law. In 2007
the Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals dismissed a case involving a financial abortion specifically
a man who did not want to be legally obligated to pay child support under Michigan State
Law for a child that he had previously informed a girlfriend that he never wanted because
he said, 'Hey lady I never want to be a dad.'
In its decision to dismiss that case, the Court said, 'Dubay's claim that a man's right
to disclaim fatherhood would be analogous to a woman's right to abortion rests upon
a false analogy. In the case of a father seeking to opt out of fatherhood and thereby avoid
child support obligation, the child is already in existence and the state therefore had an
important interest in providing for his or her support.'
There's something called the UN Convention on the Child which explicitly states that
child support, both financial and emotional and even just providing basic things like
shelter and food are universal rights for children.