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Your characterization is highly uncharitable. When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.
For a young woman that has any sex life, the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant loom large. If the woman doesn't want to have children (yet), abortion is the safety net of last resort. The most commonly available birth control methods--condoms and pills--have a typical-use failure rate of 13% and 7%, respectively. That's the proportion of women who become pregnant within the first 12 months after initiating the use of that birth control method. Even with perfect use, those rates are 2% and 0.3%, and every woman should ask herself how sure she is that she is using them perfectly. IUD's have much better rates (1%), and 10% of US women of reproductive age have them installed, and hopefully that number keeps going up; nevertheless, that rate is not 0.
Every young woman who is having any sex with a man has to ask herself what will she do if she gets pregnant. It's no surprise that so many want to keep abortion as an option.
Plenty of pro-life advocates understand this perspective, and are taking a constructive approach. Around where I live, I see bill-boards advertising support services for any woman who is pregnant and is willing to carry the baby to term. They arrange health services and adoption (if the woman wants to give the child away), or connect to support services for mothers with infants.
I don't know how good any of these services are, but I like the principal of this approach. There is a huge penalty for a young woman to complete the pregnancy (financial, physical, and mental), and this supportive approach reduces some of that penalty.
I remember reading for years that men that wanted financial abortions should just not have sex if they couldn’t deal with the possible consequences.
The thing I really can't stand is that I've had hours long debates with feminists about legal paternal surrender, and they'll continue to employee the exact mirror-image rhetoric of "women should keep their legs shut", and they just don't get it (in my experiences). It just feels wrong to them to allow financial abortion, and they won't budge no matter how much one points out how much they sound like the traditionalists on the other side that they decry so much.
Because as a man, to me, a 'financial abortion' is still a fundamentally irresponsible act.
Getting an abortion if you get pregnant and don't want a child, putting aside morality, is a responsible act.
Walking away from a child you've created and that will be born is an irresponsible act.
Pardon, but the consensus is that it isn't a child, which is why we allow routinely allow doctors to cut such entities to pieces with surgical implements and then sell the resulting offal as pharmaceutical raw ingredients, an entirely normal and unobjectionable practice that social consensus strongly resists critiquing.
Likewise, whether or not it will be born is entirely the mother's decision. Financial hardship is a generally-approved motive for termination. Why would it be irresponsible for to allow the man to be absolved of financial responsibility for the potential child before they are born? If the mother does not wish to finance the child's rearing on her own, she is still free to choose to terminate. Why should she be allowed to compel the father to finance her unilateral choices?
Because there are differences between cis-men and cis-women, the responsibility differs - with women, the responsibility continues through the pregnancy with the option for termination, but the man, because he's not carrying the child, the responsibility begins the moment he chooses to have sex with a woman.
Also, a truly financially destitute man won't really be on the hook for more than a meager amount of child support.
...And ends the moment he makes it clear that he doesn't want to raise or support a child, and has offered compensation for the remaining medical risk inherint in terminating the pregnancy, minus that covered by the doctor's malpractice insurance. The fact that biological reality makes perfect symmetry impossible does not salvage even a fraction of the asymmetry you are endorsing. The woman still has all the choice, and there is no principled reason to finance her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support.
What relevance does this have? Rich women are still allowed abortions. Whether the man can pay for a child's rearing has zero bearing on whether he should have to, any more than it does for whether women should have to carry a potential child they do not wish for. The established standard here is not hardship, but mere perception of inconvenience.
It seems to me that your arguments would work a whole lot better on a 90s-era Evangelical social conservative; maybe if that was the sort of person you could reason with, you should have made some effort to preserve their continued existence.
If the choice is between the father financing her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support and me and you financing her unilateral choices... I say the father.
Legal paternity surrender would increase the number of abortions (great!), but also increase the cost to the taxpayer (bad!) There's no principled reason either that someone should be able to get an abortion or that someone should be free from financial obligations: the government should just do whatever makes for a better society.
Aren’t you just saying choices have consequences but are willing to remediate those consequences for women?
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