Fetus Daddy

Abortion, father's rights and technology

In my recent post, Pro-Choice Anti-Abortion, I noted that 72% of Americans who responded to a Pew Research survey said that the phrase “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman” described their view at least somewhat well. It also describes my view well. Women bear the entire cost of childbearing and generally most of the cost of child rearing, so the decision on whether to continue pregnancy has to be theirs. 

The best argument for legal, female-decided abortion, regardless of when you think life begins or whether or not you’re moved by utilitarian arguments, is based on bodily autonomy. We already have strong cultural norms around bodily autonomy: we don’t require our fellow citizens to harm or change their body for the benefit of another person, even if it would save that person’s life. The big exception to this is the draft, which think is very wrong. We should (and I assume we now do) make military jobs sufficiently attractive that we would never need to employ it. 

Since the potential mother (fetus mommy) is the one who has to sacrifice her body to incubate the child, she’s the one who gets to decide whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. So, there will surely be at least some potential fathers (fetus daddies) out there who want their fetus mommy to keep the baby and are saddened when she decides to abort. These are the “wannabe dads”. On the other hand, there are also surely fetus daddies (probably a lot more of them) in the opposite situation. They want no responsibility for the potential baby and are saddened when their fetus mommy decides not to abort. So, my question is: should the fetus daddies who wish she’d get an abortion have a chance to renounce fatherhood if she decides not to?

Maybe? I think if we’re ok with women saying “listen, I don’t want to sacrifice my body for a potential baby, so I’m going to abort the fetus” then we should probably also be ok with men saying “listen, I don’t want to sacrifice financially for a potential baby, so I’m going to opt out of child support along with all parental rights”. Any version of this would need strict parameters especially if you believe, like most people, that later in pregnancy abortions are more ethically problematic than early in pregnancy abortions. Allowing a woman to continue her pregnancy while thinking that her fetus daddy will happily take on the burden of fatherhood only to have him to opt out late in pregnancy is not acceptable. So let’s say the fetus daddy gets only one week from the time he’s informed about the pregnancy to opt out of his parental rights and responsibilities. Additionally, mothers who did not inform the father (we’d need some free service that fetus mommies could use to “serve” the fetus daddies) before the birth of the child would have no legal right to child support.

There are lots of downsides that could result from men having this option. We can all imagine situations where we’d be disgusted by a fetus daddy that chose to opt out. For instance…

Situation 1: A married couple has mutually decided that they’d like to have a baby. The couple has, for various reasons, fallen into relatively traditional gender roles. The wife works part time and takes care of the housework while the husband earns the majority of the family income. Once they have a baby the wife plans to stay at home, at least for a few years. They’ve also discussed abortion many times and both feel strongly that it is morally wrong. The husband knows that his wife expects an abortion, even very early in pregnancy, would be extremely traumatic for her. Anyways, they start trying for a baby and a few months later the wife is pregnant! Yay!! She informs her husband immediately and they call their parents and then celebrate with a nice dinner out. Then, two days later he presents her with documentation stating that he does not want to father the child and will forfeit his parental rights and responsibilities in the case that she decides to have the baby. What is this fetus mommy to do?

Of course, I would feel disgusted by the behavior of the husband in this situation and think he deserves social ruin. But, there are also cases that are similarly terrible for the fetus daddy under the status quo. Here’s one that I think is very uncommon (even laying it out makes me sound like a paranoid red-piller), but which does surely happen.

Situation 2: A wealthy man in his 40s is casually dating a middle class woman in her late-30s. The couple is not serious enough to warrant a conversation about the possibility of them having kids together but they’ve discussed it in the abstract and the man has clearly communicated that he doesn’t think he’ll ever want kids or even a long term partner while the woman has said she’d like to have kids and marriage “at some point, hopefully”. They also talk about abortion and both communicate that they don’t see it as that big of a deal, at least early on. The woman also says that of course, if they had an accidental pregnancy, she would terminate it. They go on like this for 6 months and the woman becomes increasingly cognizant of her closing fertility window, lack of near-term marriage prospects and the relative wealth of her casual partner. While continuing to tell him that she’s on birth control she stops taking it. She starts timing her ovulatory cycle, intentionally planning dates around her fertile window and eventually gets pregnant! She informs him that she’ll be keeping the baby and he’ll be on the hook for child support (which is generally a percentage of the combined income of both parents) for at least the next 18 years.

Again, we’re disgusted by the behavior of the woman here which could be disincentivized by a fetus daddy opt out policy. Of course, she might still choose to surreptitiously get pregnant just to get his great genes, or because she expects he’d feel too guilty to actually opt out. But it would certainly reduce the expected value of her scheme and would allow the man to decide whether he’d like to financially invest in the child he didn’t consent to create.

So far it’s a wash. We have one scenario where this policy could allow a terrible situation for the fetus mommy and one where it could prevent a terrible situation for the fetus daddy. But both situations involved unwilling fathers to be. What about the wannabe dads? Let’s flip Situation 1.

Situation 1B: Everything is the same as in situation 1, except now the wife wants to abort the baby while the husband wants to keep it. She informs her husband of this intention when the fetus is 14 weeks old. At this point her husband has gotten attached to the idea of the baby, he’s told all of his friends, family and colleagues about how excited he is for fatherhood. But his wife has changed her mind and she’s scheduled an abortion. There’s nothing he can do about it.

While I’m not excited about policy changes that would further disincentivize having children, which a fetus daddy opt out policy would do, I see such a policy as more consistent and fair than the status quo. Under the status quo both situations 2 and 1B are possible, and both are bad for the fetus daddy. With a fetus daddy opt out policy both situations 1 and 1B are possible, the first of which is bad for the fetus mommy and the second of which is bad for the fetus daddy. If one parent can opt out, the other ideally ought to be able to as well.

I’m emotionally inclined against a fetus daddy opt out policy, probably in part as a result of status quo bias, but also because I, and most people, find mothers much more sympathetic than fathers. Mothers are far less likely to be absent parents and they bear a majority of the costs related to children. They’re also quite vulnerable during pregnancy and while their baby is an infant and we instinctively want to protect them and their kids. People make a big deal of child support, but according to 2017 data¹ “Less than half (45.9 percent) of custodial parents who were supposed to receive child support received full child support payments.” The average amount received per custodial parent was only $3,431 for the year, and remember, child support payments are income adjusted, so poorer custodial parents (mostly mothers) are getting less than that if they’re getting anything at all. 

Still, I put consistency and liberty over my emotional response to the plight of single mothers. And, given how many women don’t get child support anyways, they might be better off knowing not to expect it in advance (although not all dads who are failing to pay child support would’ve opted out even if they could’ve).

Let’s go back to the case of a wannabe dad. How might our view of his situation change if we could remove the need for a fetus mommy to sacrifice her body to incubate the baby? To the degree that you’re relying on the bodily autonomy argument to support legal and female-decided abortion, you’d have to change your view. And a lot of pro-choice advocates do focus on the bodily autonomy argument when they complain that “conservatives just want to control women’s bodies!!” 

Let’s assume we’re in a future where fetuses of any age can be removed and incubated outside of the mother’s body. The procedure to extract the fetus is available in every area of the country, and because it’s easy and painless it is always the first step in pregnancy termination. When a pregnancy is being terminated, the doctor removes the fetus and kills it once it’s outside of the woman’s body. So unless she decides to bear the child naturally, which only a few crunchy moms continue to do in this future world, she will have to do this procedure either way. Also, every person's DNA is recorded and maintained in a central database, so once the fetus is extracted it’s trivial to determine who the father is.

In this world I think it’s obvious that the fetus daddy should have symmetrical rights to the fetus mommy. Both should have the option to opt out of parental rights and duties within a week (or whatever time period) of gaining knowledge of the pregnancy. And we can also allow conditional decisions such as “fetus mommy wants the baby, but opts out in the case that the fetus daddy opts out”. If both opt out then, depending on what we’ve culturally come to believe about the rights of a fetus as well as the demand for adoption and/or state resources available, the fetus will either be destroyed or incubated by the state.

We’re not yet close to such a situation, but we could be close to something like it eventually. And even we never are, I think the thought experiment helps us better understand our intuitions around abortion. At minimum there are two people who “deserve” rights in deciding what happens - the fetus mommy and the fetus daddy. There are very good practical reasons why the fetus mommy gets full control of the decision to terminate the fetus. But I don’t see good reasons that the fetus daddy shouldn’t have a (much shorter) window to terminate parental rights and duties. And if fetus incubation didn’t conflict with bodily autonomy, the fetus daddy would deserve rights that mirror those of the fetus mommy.

The rights an abandoned fetus deserves in this imagined world would depend on its stage of development at the time the parents opted out. Which rights would be appropriate at each stage would likely depend on future research into the characteristics most relevant to deciding when termination would conflict with human (or close-to-human) rights. So, while I agree that “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman” describes my view, this is the case only because of how pregnancy works, not because women have special rights to their babies.

1. Grall, Timothy S. Custodial mothers and fathers and their child support: 2017. Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, US Census Bureau, 2020.