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Abortion is a procedure with a dark past. For a very long time, secret abortions performed without the necessary medical competence was the norm, and as a consequence women died or were maimed for life. An absence of safe, legal abortions is still the case in many countries around the world, which is something I vehemently oppose.

I believe that every country that hasn’t already done so should have their abortion laws reformed, so that abortions can be done legally and with complete medical support. I fully support legislation that allows for free abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, with a possibility of granting an extension as long as the fetus isn’t old enough to be able to survive outside the womb.

However, I do not support the view that once free and legal abortion is in place we have reached the goal of reproductive freedom. It’s true that free and legal abortion bestows reproductive freedom, but only upon half the population. We’ve liberated women by making available abortions that are safe, legal and in many cases included in medical insurances or government funded health care. Men however, have no rights and no freedoms  whatsoever vis-à-vis abortions.

Men and Abortions

If a woman becomes pregnant, then the woman can choose to have an abortion, even if she and her partner had agreed beforehand to have the baby. Similarly, if a couple has agreed to get an abortion in case of an accidental pregnancy, the woman can decide to keep the child and make the man pay child support for the next 18 years! No method of contraception is 100 percent safe, so accidental pregnancies do happen regularly.

These facts lead to a scenario where the woman has all the power, all the rights and all of the freedom. The woman’s decisions are the reproductive destiny of the man, in a very real sense. Every man is expected to trust a woman 100 percent, whether they are carefully planning to have a child, or if the couple is instead trying to avoid a pregnancy. 

How can we motivate men to be responsible fathers under these circumstances?

Here’s a breakdown of what pregnancy means for a man nowadays:

1. Prenatally, the mother has all the rights. She can keep the child or have an abortion, even if that goes against what the couple had decided beforehand.
2. Once the child is born, fathers are expected to take on 50% of the responsibility, and even if the man never wanted the child he will be forced to pay child support.
3. In case of divorce, the woman is usually favored by the courts and women win the majority of custody battles.

This is a very confusing situation for men, to say the least. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand; you cannot expect men to be responsible if men are not awarded any rights, yet this is exactly what we expect of men in relation to pregnancy.

What’s the Solution?

In my mind abortion is actually one of the “hard” problems of the gender field, i.e. a problem where there is no obvious solution and no obvious way to improve the current situation. I don’t believe in removing the woman’s legal right to decide when and if to get an abortion, since I cannot conceive of how that could be done in a satisfactory way.

Instead, I think we need to focus on cultural values, and how we discuss abortion in society. Instead of saying things like “my body, my choice”, I think we need to propagate the idea that men and women should make conscious agreements on how to handle accidental pregnancies, and then respect those agreements. If no agreement has been made, the potential mother and the potential father should sit down and discuss what needs to be done, from the perspective of all the affected parties.

Abortion is not about the woman having rights and simply doing whatever she feels like doing, even if she’s legally entitled to do so. It’s about taking all the affected parties into account, which include the fetus, the potential mother and the potential father.

We’ve all heard jokes where the punch-line informs us that the mailman is the biological father, instead of the husband of the mother. “Mailman jokes” are harmless for the most part, and often give us a good laugh. However, it is no coincidence that these jokes exist to the extent that they do.

Women have always known for sure that the children they raise are their own; maternity never needs to be doubted, even in the most primitive of societies. Paternity, on the other hand, has always been something that men have doubted, consciously or unconsciously. In the absence of reliable scientific testing, how is a man to know for sure whether he is really the father of a certain child?

How Legal Paternity Arose

When human beings started to become more civilized, and traditional societies replaced the chaos of warring tribes, marriage became a cornerstone of society. A key reason for promoting marriage and monogamy was to ensure that each child had a father who would be legally bound to support that child no matter what the circumstances.

In most Western countries, legislators went as far as proclaiming that the father of the child was the husband of the mother, regardless of whether the husband was actually the biological father. These laws stay with us until the present day, meaning that it can be very difficult for a married man to challenge paternity, even when you have a DNA test that proves you cannot possibly be the father!

In my opinion these paternity laws, though valid and needed at one point in time, are quickly becoming outdated in modern and postmodern societies. Far from all couples get married these days, and both sexes enjoy the kind of sexual freedom that easily leads to “the wrong man” becoming the father of a child. Being married is no longer a sufficient criterion to determine who the father is, or who should be assigned the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood.

An Active Father Is a Good Thing

We have always known who the mother of a child is, this is considered normal and natural for obvious biological reasons. Throughout history however, it has been impossible for men to have the same kind of certainty around fatherhood, for purely biological reasons. However, the seeming destiny of men to always be uncertain about whether they are really the father changed more than a decade ago, with the advent of DNA testing.

DNA testing is a cheap and readily available tool that can be used to quickly, and with pretty much complete certainty, establish who the father of a child is. Now that such a method exists, wouldn’t it be great to have all uncertainty around paternity be removed?

If we want men to be good fathers, do not men deserve to be 100 percent sure that they are pouring out their hearts and souls to raise their own child, and not another man’s child? I’m not saying that you cannot love a non-biological child just as much (I believe you can!), but I do think that every individual deserves to know the truth, before deciding whether to help raise a child or not.

Children would benefit substantially from having maternity and paternity be established from the start. It would increase the likelihood of the man stepping into the role of father, and should he choose to avoid this, it will be easier to enforce child support.

Caring About Men’s Rights

DNA testing all children would also do away with a system where many men unknowingly raise children that aren’t their own, and where men are forced to pay child support for children that other men have fathered.

1 in 30 children don’t have the father they think they do. Even for men who are very confident that the child is theirs, 1 out of 50 children have a different biological father. For men who have their doubts about paternity, the false paternity rate soars to almost one third of the cases! (source)

Sexual Accountability

Knowing that all newborns undergo DNA testing would force both men and women to act more responsibly when having sex. A man having an affair would have to consider whether he wants to risk being named as the father of a child outside of his family. A woman having an affair would risk becoming pregnant with another man’s child, and having her husband find out about this once the DNA testing is done.

I’m all for people’s sexual freedom, and people having the kinds of sex lives that they desire. But every right and every freedom comes with a responsibility too, and DNA testing all children would indirectly force every adult to be accountable and accept the consequences of his or her actions.

The primary reason I advocate DNA testing is not to enforce sexual accountability; the reason I want to see this happen is that I think it would change parenting at a fundamental level, by giving men the peace of mind that women have always had.

Discrimination is a word that is used extensively in discussions about gender issues and gender inequality. However, the word discrimination is often used indiscriminately these days, so there is a real need to reclaim the correct definition of the word.

How is discrimination defined? Discrimination simply means judging someone by their race, gender, religion, sexuality, age, etc - instead of judging them for their competence. If you apply for a job where you are the most qualified candidate, but you do not get the job because you are gay, then you are being discriminated against. This kind of discrimination, which we can call authentic discrimination, is something that has no place in an evolved society and legislation should make sure that this kind of action is illegal.

Nowadays we sometimes hear the claim that women are being discriminated against because they don’t have as many positions of power in the public sphere as men do. As we all know, women are generally underrepresented in corporate management, political positions and leadership positions in general. However, we cannot automatically draw the conclusion that women are being discriminated against simply because there are more men in these domains! Doing so represents an incorrect use of the word discrimination.

If we want to determine whether women are being discriminated against, we need to investigate how the positions we’re interested in were filled. Was the most competent and suitable candidate for the job hired? If this is the case, then there has been no discrimination, period. We can have 70 percent men in a certain workplace, or 80 percent women in another workplace, without having discriminated against either gender. As long as the most competent and suitable people are being hired, we’re rewarding excellence and dedication, and those factors are gender neutral.

In many countries, feminist lobbying is influencing policy makers to support affirmative action for women. One example is Norway, where recent legislation has enforced that 40 percent of board members in corporations should be women. Spain has passed a similar law, forcing companies with more than 250 employees to appoint women to 40 percent of board seats within six years. While these kinds of actions may be seen as efforts to promote gender equality, they are actually a form of discrimination.

If a company that needs to recruit a new board member already has 60 percent men on the board, it will have no choice but to hire a woman, regardless of whether it’s a woman who’s the most qualified candidate. This means that the laws that are now in place in Norway and Spain, and that may spread elsewhere, can actually discriminate against men. Furthermore, the women on those boards will not know whether they got the job because of their qualifications or because the company simply needed another woman to avoid breaking the law. If I were a woman I’d detest being in that situation, I would much prefer knowing that I got the job (or not) based on my qualifications alone.

The rationale for having affirmative action for women is the claim that women have a hard time being taken seriously in competitive careers. Regardless of whether this claim is true or not in a certain country at a certain point in time, the answer is not affirmative action. The solution to a gender problem can never be to make discrimination legal, and affirmative action means legalizing a subtle form of discrimination. If stereotypes are hindering women from succeeding in the workplace, or if stereotypes are preventing men from developing close connections to their children, then the solution is to transcend those stereotypes, and promote a worldview where each individual is allowed to make his or her own choices, regardless of gender.

We need to create a society where every child and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the career or family life of his or her dreams. This means transcending stereotypes that expect every man to be a certain way, and every woman to be a certain way. But it does not mean making discrimination legal, however alluring that option might seem.