In Limbo

Sitting here in limbo

Waiting for the tide to flow.  – Jimmy Cliff

Amid the furor of public discourse that seems to become more unhinged with each passing day, it’s good to see commentary that’s sensible, balanced and important.  Such is Emma Johnson’s op-ed in a recent edition of Newsweek.  In it, she goes to bat for what’s been called “abortion rights for men,” i.e., the legal right, on the part of a father, to sign an official document waiving all rights and obligations to his as-yet-unborn child.  Under such a law, a pregnant woman would be required to notify the father of the child about her pregnancy, at which point he’d have a 60-day window in which to opt out.  If he did so, he’d forever lose his parental rights.

The concept being that, since women can opt out of parental responsibilities via abortion, men should have a parallel right.

Johnson argues that women’s abortion rights would improve if men had opt-out rights:  post-Roe, women’s abortion rights have been restricted by legislatures in many states; abortion rights activists have failed to sufficiently recruit men to the cause, threatening its continuation in those states; by supporting “paper abortion” rights for men, more men will support abortion rights for women and abortion will become more readily available. In short, support for “abortion rights” for men will redound to the benefit of all.

It's a reasonable argument whose lynchpin is the idea of gender equality.  If women are to have control over their fertility, men should too.  What’s not to like?

Alas for Johnson and the rest of us, the very concept - simple as it is, fair as it is, obvious as it is - appears incomprehensible to many.  A glance at the comments to her article reveals perhaps half expressing some version of “if men don’t want to be fathers, they should just keep it in their pants” or have an irreversible vasectomy.  Anyone who said similar things about women – “they shouldn’t need abortions; all they have to do is keep their legs crossed or get their tubes tied” – would be stoned to death in the public square to widespread rejoicing.  Here, as is so often the case, the concept of gender equality vanishes when men stand to benefit.

Johnson believes in gender equality, but how many others do?  How often do we see articles like hers?  How many state legislatures discuss the many aspects of that fraught concept?  When it comes to men benefitting from gender equality or women giving something up to promote it, there’s essentially no discussion.  Ukraine is currently desperate for new soldiers to fight its war with Russia, but calls to conscript women are heard nowhere.  After decades of feminism pretending to care about equality while actually only promoting more rights, more privileges, more power, more money for women, there’s simply little or nothing about the actual kind in public debate.  Gender “equality” in practice, unlike actual equality, is a one-way street.

Johnson of course had only a few words with which to express herself, so her piece just scratches the surface of reproductive rights.  It would require a book-length essay to seriously address all the ways in which Western cultures talk blithely about gender equality while ignoring all the ways societies offer men the short end of the stick.

About reproductive rights alone, we could discuss the continuing inequality in custody outcomes following divorce, the absence of safe, effective, affordable and private contraceptive measures for men, the lack of a right to even know that a child, whether born or unborn, exists, the fact that state child welfare agencies routinely ignore fathers when children are taken from abusive or neglectful mothers, unequal child support practices, putative father registry laws whose sole purpose is to deprive fathers of their children in the adoptive process, the fact that paternity fraud is nowhere punished or even illegal, the fact that only one state out of 50 presumes that equal parenting post-divorce is best for kids.  And on and on.

And those are just matters relating to children.  What about equality in domestic violence laws, practices and services, or the fact that just 40% of college enrollees are men, or that women are privileged throughout the criminal justice process, or that countless campus programs, facilities, scholarships, etc. benefit women but not men in open violation of Title IX, or that only men are required to register with the Selective Service System, or that men are routinely portrayed in pop culture as either dunces or the next Jack the Ripper, or the common practice of affirmative action for women in the workplace, or the power given to women to ruin a man’s career, destroy his family, take his children, etc. with a single allegation of wrongdoing, whether true or false?  And on and on.

We could talk about all that and much, much more.  But we don’t.  Instead, we lie to ourselves pretending that inequality = equality.  And that’s more than simply anti-egalitarian, though it’s surely that.

Lying to ourselves distorts our culture and our thinking.  It puts stress on the mind and the social psyche to claim that we believe in gender equality when the obvious fact is that we don’t.  Among the countless bad consequences of the Jim Crow Era was its intellectual disconnect between what we said and what we did.  The Constitution says we’re equal, but blacks were far from equal and the type of mental and psychological gymnastics required of whites to convince ourselves that we acted in accord with our principles took an inevitable toll.  It was and remains a relief to no longer have to lie to ourselves.

Of course the type of discrimination inflicted on men today bears little resemblance to what blacks endured, but we still damage ourselves when we turn a blind eye to the many ways in which we privilege women and short-change men.  To daily tell ourselves we don’t see what’s before our very eyes is both dishonest and unhealthy.  Limbo is nowhere to be.