What exactly is a financial abortion?

Think about it this way: if a medical abortion is a woman’s way to escape the burden of motherhood, then a financial abortion is a man’s way to escape the burden of fatherhood.

Advocates for financial abortion argue that a father should be able to decide whether or not to assume the legal rights and responsibilities to care for the child he fathered if the woman gives birth.

And, if the father decides to decline the opportunity in a timely manner, he is off the hook for paying child support.

Frances Goldscheider, a psychology professor at Brown University, was one of the first academics to advocate this idea. In a 1998 op-ed, she pointed out,

“Women, but not men, can decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term, making a decision about whether to become mothers and hence whether their partners should become fathers.”

According to her, this was unfair, because it applied the logic of choice to the woman but not to the man. So, she said, 

“[G]ender equality will have to be achieved in the family. . . . For such equality to be achieved, however, men need the right to a ‘financial abortion’ – to be notified by the mother as soon as she knows about the child’s existence, and to decide reasonably quickly whether they want to undertake the legal rights and responsibilities of parenthood – or not.”

This wasn’t all, according to Goldscheider.

She took this “gender equality” concept so seriously, she even argued,

“women who do not notify the father of their child should face penalties – perhaps for violating his civil rights.”

In other words, if the mother of a child doesn’t notify the father, she has possibly violated his civil rights by not providing him with an opportunity to opt-out of providing for his child.

With a concept this twisted, it’s hard to know where to start in response. But a few thoughts come to mind.

First, the idea of a financial abortion—so that men aren’t “forced” to become fathers—ignores the elephant in the room: whatever happened to abstinence? If you don’t want to become a father, how about this for a solution—simply don’t engage in the activity that can make you one.

Contraception fails sometimes. Your partner may be lying to you about whether she took it. It’s not that hard to predict that you might possibly become a father from what you’re choosing to do.

The real problem is that our culture insists on divorcing sexual activity from procreation.

We freely engage in activities that produce children, and then act confused when children are produced. Rather, we should introduce a new cultural understanding: any voluntary sexual encounter should be viewed as the decision to—at least potentially—become a parent.

Secondly, the idea of a financial abortion further illustrates just how deeply certain enemies of the biblical family idolize the value of “choice.”

Because they view this right as their fixed north star, the highest priority around which all other considerations must duly revolve, they end up making ghastly sacrifices to keep it in its place of preeminence. The most obvious is the sacrifice of life itself—the justification for medical abortion is that a woman ought to be able to decide when to become a parent.

But financial abortion is yet another misguided sacrifice: the justification for a father abandoning his child—and practically, legally disowning him—is that the man ought to be able to decide when to become a parent.

Even taken at face value—if these arguments did deal with genuine choices—they fatally blunder by lifting the parents’ choice over the child’s well-being. But we shouldn’t take these arguments at face value; both of them seem to forget that the child already exists, and thus the choice to become a parent has already been made.

Thirdly, this “man’s right to choose” runs against the fundamental responsibility of fatherhood: to protect and to provide for one’s children. At least when men are required to pay child support for the children they father, they are faced with a modicum of natural consequences of their actions.

According to Goldscheider, we need to move away from…

“our current obsession with tracking men down and punishing them for fathering a child with high support judgments.”

But to put it bluntly, if a man views his innate responsibility to care for another soul—even through the bare minimum of child support payments—as a “punishment,” then that is a deeply disturbing character flaw on his part that needs to be corrected, not accommodated by legal fiction.

But when the law endorses the fiction that a man can decide to—for all intents and purposes—”will his child out of existence” because he doesn’t want to provide for him, we’ve achieved absurdity on a whole new level.

Financial abortion allows a man to legally escape his most pressing obligation in life. And to justify it, the concept allows a man to “choose whether or not to be a father” to the child whose father he already is.

Men, the time to “choose whether or not to be a father” was nine months ago. And you chose.

Being a man is all about shouldering responsibility for the decisions you made in the past.

No legal fiction will bail you out when you stand before your Judge and He asks you why you refused to take responsibility for the child you fathered.