Liberal Talk Radio

There’s Contrarian and there’s contrarian. The former pushes forward ideas in a constructive way, even at the risk of being a big pain in the ass. The latter is just a big pain in the ass. NYU’s Dalton Conley, with his apparently straight-up argument in favor of a man’s right to force a woman to have a baby falls into the latter category:

Many liberals who oppose Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s nomination to the Supreme Court focus on his (losing) position in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1991 case about a Pennsylvania law that would have required women seeking abortions to notify their husbands. “Pennsylvania has a legitimate interest in furthering the husband’s interest in the fate of the fetus,” is the most widely quoted part of his opinion in that case.

There may be many reasons to oppose Judge Alito’s nomination — including the possibility, as highlighted in documents released yesterday, that he would seek to nibble away at Roe v. Wade — but his Casey opinion is not one of them. Rather, Judge Alito’s thinking about the role of men in reproductive decision-making is in keeping with how legal thinking needs to evolve in this age of readily available DNA testing. Nor is his position contrary to national sentiment: a majority of Americans feel that the husband should be notified about an abortion.

His only problem was not going far enough, relying only on the marriage contract to legitimate men’s claims to a role in the reproductive decision-making process.

In some ways, this provocative op-ed — He’s from NYU! He’s writing in The New York Times! — seems Modest-Proposalish, except that I think he’s serious*:

If you play, you must pay. But if you pay, you should get some say. If a father is willing to legally commit to supporting and raising the child himself, why should a woman be able to end a pregnancy that she knew was a possibility of consensual sex? Why couldn’t I make the same claim — that I am going to keep the baby regardless of whether she wants it or not?

Well, you might argue that all the man provides is his seed in a moment of pleasure. The real work consists of carrying a child for nine months, with the attendant morning sickness, leg cramps, biological risks and so on.

But how many times have we heard that fatherhood is not about a moment, it is about being there for the lifetime of a child? If we extend that logic, those 40 weeks of pregnancy — as intense as they may be — are merely a small fraction of a lifetime commitment to that child.

The bottom line is that if we want to make fathers relevant, they need rights, too. If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create.

Now if you read closely, Conley’s op-ed actually illustrates something legitimately Contrarian — specifically that there are many things you just can’t legislate. A court injuction effectively consigning your partner to forty weeks of pregnancy, for example. It’s not so much “pro-family” as downright Ibsennical.

What’s more, what if “we” — as in “the government” — shouldn’t be seriously rethinking how much we can do to make fatherhood relevant? Tax credits are one thing. I don’t even mind Bush’s Healthy Marriage boondoggle. But there’s a limit to what a society should be able to do to reinforce its “legitimate state interest” in preserving the family structure. Should a wife be able to get an injuction to stop her husband from eating fatty foods on the grounds that he’s endangering the welfare of the family? To stop smoking? To wear a seatbelt? You get the idea.

All of us obviously believe it’s important for couples to make reproductive decisions together, but that doesn’t necessarily mean “there ought to be a law.” And when you think about it, that’s good advice to follow with a lot of issues.

*There’s always the possibility that the Times ran something provocative just to ramp up statistics for its newly overlooked op-ed pages. If so, it worked!