Time to convince my teenage daughter to move out of Ohio.

Option 2: pre-sex agreement (like a pre-nup, only for sex). "I, the potential father, give my permission for any fetus, viable or not, to be aborted should it show up"

so you're ok with forcing women who have consensual sex to bear children, but not rape victims? how very forward-thinking of you.

If a guy helped make the baby, then why can't he have a say in what happens to his son or daughter? To me it seems only fair. I don't agree on the written consent, why can't he just say "yes I want her to have an abortion"? Why does it have to be in writing?

100% law.
But a question: Does anyone think that a father SHOULD have some say over to abort or not? I mean, let's say HE wants to take the baby and raise it 100% custody, support, or whatever??

Yes. He should have a say....to the woman he got pregnant. And she can take that into consideration....or not. It's her choice.

If he wants her to take the baby to term and she doesn't....his only options are to find another host for whatever is growing inside of her.

Now I can see someone in OH making t-shirts that says, "Get a womb you two!"

OK, I am done being retarded....for now.

I totally agree with you 100%

I live in Ohio. I am so sad.

Wow, Dr. Bitch! You've turned what could've been an intelligent commentary on pro-choice into a misanthropic man-bashing piece of fluff. Way to go, Feminazi! You lose and this article sucks.

Um, didn't I just say that?

[Mugatu mode] I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! [/Mugatu mode]

I think that the idea of a lady being submissive comes from it being an old fashioned word that was used to describe a woman of high social standing (read upper class), with good morals and sense of decorum etc.

To be considered to have a good sense of decorum was of course linked to whether she played the gender role assigned to her. So a woman who asserted herself in a debate with a gentleman was not being ladylike, because she was behaving like a man, and not like a lady - she was still a woman, but not a lady.

The term had a respectful tone to it (ie it was not intended as a put down), but it was respect given for subservient behaviour.

It's much like a boss saying he/she's a hard worker (as opposed to a layabout) - the boss is showing that she/he respects the worker, but really the respect comes from the fact that the worker is a servent who fulfils his/her duties with the desired subservience.

I actually agree with you though - I think the word is much more complex with many more diverse definitions and connotations (not all of which are sexist) than the definition used by Bitch_PhD in this article

Of course kids are entitled to eat, but that's the responsibility of the government to provide a comprehensive welfare scheme.
I don't believe any person should have a decisive say in whether or not a woman takes a baby to term, other than the woman herself. I also don't believe other people should have a say in whether that woman gives the baby up for adoption. Hence, since other people have had no say in whether the baby was born, they shouldn't be held liable for child support. It wasn't their decision, and they shouldn't be held responsible for other people's decisions. However, the government has a duty of care to it's citizens, and they should be the ones to provide support for the child if no-one else will.

To be more on topic, though, this proposed law is abominable. Honestly, it's one of the most skin-crawlingly bad laws I've ever heard of (outside of Sharia law).

Whoops, pushed the edit button by accident. I was going to change it but now I forgot....

I'm confused by the connection being made between the law (which says that the father's consent shall be a necessary condition for abortion) and the idea of a "man's absolute right to determine where and when he incurs financial obligations." Let's grant that a man incurs financial obligations when a child of his is born. I don't see how we get from the "absolute right" to the law ... I mean, if the legislators were protecting "man's absolute right to determine where and when he incurs financial obligations," wouldn't they make a law that says that the father's consent is a *sufficient* condition for abortion (i.e. that if a man doesn't want to incur financial obligations, he doesn't have to, and can order an abortion)? But that's not the law they're proposing.

I don't know anything about the legislators' insidious motives (perhaps they just want to cut down the number of abortions, and they think this will do the trick, or perhaps they want to limit women's legal rights, for no reason at all). But I don't see how they could be motivated by a desire to preserve men's rights to avoid financial obligation.

(I guess I'm assuming that financial obligation is, by itself, a bad thing -- that no one would defend a man's right to *incur* financial obligations ... perhaps this is a mistake.)

The proposed law is stated in strong language, and I have no idea how the law ought to deal with such things, but isn't there a moral principle in the neighborhood that's correct? Here's an idea: the wishes of the father of a fetus are relevant to whether it's morally permissible to abort. Is it being suggested that this is false, because of a "woman's right to bodily autonomy"?

I don't understand the attraction of the idea that men's wishes are irrelevant to decisions about abortion because of a "woman's right to bodily autonomy." A woman's "right to bodily autonomy" doesn't make it morally (or legally) OK for her to slap her kids with her hands (which are part of her body), or for her to stomp on someone's face with her feet (which are part of her body), and so on. The "right to bodily autonomy" isn't absolute, whatever it is. So it seems like an open question whether a father's opinion is relevant, morally speaking, to the permissibility of a particular abortion.

(The tendency for us to think of abortion decisions as decisions *for women* and *not for men* is illustrated well by the early scenes in "Knocked Up" -- when it comes time to decide whether to abort, mother goes off to make her big decision, and father sits around wondering what's going to happen, hoping her decision lines up with his wishes. I found this disturbing -- and you don't have to be anti-choice to find it disturbing, either!)

fantastic article. really a lot of food for thought.

it sickens/worries me that there is all this debate over a man's rights when it comes to abortion that are more centered around his finances and whether or not he's willing to pay for a child he helped create, rather than a woman's health or rights to her own body.

it's so childish. it's really no different from a working husband with a stay-at-home wife who he lords over and says "i make the money, so i get to make all the rules!"