Your faithful correspondent is very reluctant to get into this topic because he really doesn't like controversy outside of whether Dickens or Trollope was the better writer, or whether the Brontes were foolish in dismissing Jane Austen.
But, here's the deal. Ireland and Argentina have both been campaigning for abortion on demand. In Ireland the law has been passed and in Argentina the matter is undergoing public argument. And there are women who seem to think that having an abortion is a good thing. They almost make is a sacrament i.e., if a woman has not had an abortion she is not a real woman. And they often make the silly argument that if men became pregnant abortion would be smiled upon by society because men are in power and blah, blah, blah, when, in fact, if men became pregnant there would probably be fewer abortions because men see their kids as the fruit of their loins while a lot of women see their kids as weights holding them back. We could go on with the argument forever and a day. But there is an argument.
A lot of pro-abortion women (and it's always women and men who want a bit of leg without the responsibility of putting on a rubber) often bitch a bitch about the Catholic Church or the Old Puritans or the Evangelicals using anti-abortion laws to keep the women back from realizing their dreams of becoming breath-taking architects, full professors of Women's Studies at Yale or the next Myrna Loy. It's all stuff and nonsense intended to mask the fact that the women who "need" abortions were irresponsible when they decided to bed down with the "greatest guy in the world" while the woman was off her birth control pills or her lover refused to wear a condom. And then, once she finds out that her guy likes straight coffee and not a mocha-loca-caramel do-dad and she's pregnant and decides that he's not the guy for her she heads to the local Planned Parenthood and pretty much flushes the kid away.
But what is never mentioned is that the man, the father, of the aborted child has no legal right to prevent the abortion. If the woman decides to give birth the "father" is legally obligated to pay child support for the child until the child is eighteen. If he wants the woman to have the child and makes a promise to raise the child himself he really has no say in the matter. A father has no rights in the case of abortion despite the fact that he is half of the equation.
Women will argue that they have to carry the child for nine months. So what? It was not all that long ago when young men of many nations were regularly drafted into the military for a period of two years and they got nothing out of it besides rotten pay and being held back for two years in a trade or a college.
Why is it all about the women regarding abortion and not the potential fathers? Your friend hates to say it, but it might be all about stretch marks.
