REG: Furthermore, it is the birthright of every man–
STAN: Or woman.
REG: Why don’t you shut up about women, Stan. You’re putting us off.
STAN: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg.
FRANCIS: Why are you always on about women, Stan?
STAN: I want to be one.
REG: hat?
STAN: want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me ‘Loretta’.
REG: What?!
LORETTA: It’s my right as a man.
JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
LORETTA: I want to have babies.
REG: You want to have babies?!
LORETTA: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.
REG: But… you can’t have babies.
LORETTA: Don’t you oppress me.
REG: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb! Where’s the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!
LORETTA: [crying]
JUDITH: Here! I– I’ve got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’, but that he can have the right to have babies.
FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.
REG: What’s the point?
FRANCIS: What?
REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!
FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.
My “Squishy Smallholder and the Rights of Man” has generated some discussion. Go read the comments.
Seriously, go read the comments.
I’m serious you manky Scotch gits!
Read the comments.
I’m warning you…
There, that wasn’t hard was it?
So anyway,
With all due respect, Kevin, Brian and Ally miss the point.
It might be nice if men had a say. But the moral calculus means they get nothing.
Sorry.
If the fetus is human, no one can morally do it in, whtether that is what the man wants or not.
If the fetus is not human, a man has no claim over a woman’s body.
A man being forced to become a father and pay child support against his will isn’t the best situation in the world. But the harsness of this consequence is irrelevent in the face of the moral imperative.
This is an especially odd position for Ally or Brian to take since they believe that life does begin at conception. I suspect that both are arguing for a man’s moral right to intervene not because they want to help fathers dodge their fiduciary obligations, but because they hope to establish a precedent in which a man’s right to involvement allows him to veto a woman’s choice to have an abortion.
This is a tactical rather than a moral position and I doubt it will be very effective.
If abortion is murder, the father’s consent or lack of consent is irrelevent. ALL abortions should be banned, not just ones where the man wants to be a father.
Kevin is right when he concludes that my analysis deny men any voice in the discussion at all. He’s right. But by not dealing with the fetus’ “ontological or moral status,” he hasn’t addressed the most crucial piece of the equation.
Or at least I think so. I don’t really know what ontological means.
What? I’m a farmer. I never claimed to be literate.
I’ll conclude with a challenge to Kevin, Brian, and Ally. Aside from “Life of Brian” style symbolic resistance to univeral imperialist oppression, how does a man’s opinion fit into the moral equation?
