Every once in a while, someone – usually a man – will ask if men should “have a say” in a woman’s decisions about abortion. So sure, guys, yammer away all you want. It’s a free country.
But under no circumstances should men have any legal rights over women’s pregnancies.
Women aren’t children and don’t need permission slips from their husbands or male partners in order to exercise a legal right. Even the US supreme court says so.
(Not Alito, though – he thinks it would be perfectly constitutional to require that a married women inform her husband before getting an abortion.) There’s no spousal consent requirement in the UK, either. In fact, there are only a handful countries where and consent from the father is mandatory – including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea.
Plus, the potential for abuse should men have any sort of legal say over abortion would be overwhelming: men who want to control what women do with their bodies are generally not men who have much respect for women.
Forced pregnancy is one trademark strategy of an abusive partner - it’s so common that domestic violence experts call it “reproductive coercion”. Sabotaging women’s birth control methods, rape and controlling women’s ability to obtain an abortion are all ways that abusers try to control their victims. It’s a big enough problem that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists wrote up a memo outlining the issue and potential ways doctors could intervene while maintaining the safety of their patients.
But even in relationships that are not abusive, giving men anything more than an opinion on abortion is dangerous and diminishes women’s personhood and autonomy.
When spousal consent laws were still legal in the United States, men could file injunctions to keep women from having abortions and sue their wives who had abortions without telling them. In 1988, a New York orthodontist, David Ostreicher, filed a suit against his wife and her doctors after she obtained an abortion without telling him. He told reporters at the time, “It’s a case of an outrageous act that a wife did against a husband.” And in 2002 – after the supreme court put this issue to bed – a Pennsylvania man tried to force his girlfriend (who had a protective order against him) to carry her pregnancy to term. That all sounds a like less like solutions for would-be fathers who wanted a chance to parent children, and more like vindictive men using the legal system to punish women who somehow thwarted them.
The legal standard also haven’t stopped legislators from trying to insert men’s supposed rights into women’s private medical decisions. In 2009, for example, an Ohio lawmaker introduced legislation that would mandate the biological father’s consent before a woman could obtain an abortion. Republican Rep. John Adams not only wanted women to get men’s consent for the procedure, but also to actually criminalize women who gave the name of a “false biological father” – and if a woman wasn’t sure who the father was, she wouldn’t be legally allowed to have an abortion.
There hasn’t yet been any concerted push from anti-abortion groups to change the laws on spousal or paternal consent , though at least one anti-choice organization has been testing the waters. It’s too obvious a violation, and too explicitly paternalistic, to play well with the public or their allies in government.
But it’s important that we clearly set the terms of this debate way before some enterprising anti-choicer resurrects the idea. Yes, men can have an opinion about abortion. No, they cannot force, coerce, or legally stop a woman from obtaining one. Unless, I guess, you’re in Congress.