This week of blogging continues to be brought to you by the fact that I’ve paid for a month of the New York Times, in order to read a lot of David French columns, as I said yesterday. But it would be boring to only read one writer, so I’ve been making the best of things but clicking a lot of other links. Today I discovered a column called The Ethicist where people get to write in and ask insane questions and then are, in the answer, plied with steaming heaps of moral bilge. In the spirit of peak 2024, I thought it would be fun to take a gander at a piece called “My Son’s Ex-Girlfriend Wants to Keep Her Pregnancy. Is That Unfair to Him?” Underneath is scrawled, “The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether a co-parent’s wishes should matter to a pregnant woman.” Here’s the question:
I’ve always supported a woman’s right to choose, not least because legal access to abortion once saved me from an untenable situation. I also believe that if a woman chooses to abort, her wish should supersede any opposition to it by the father. The physical, practical and emotional effects on a woman obliged to carry a child to term (and to care for it afterward) are, in my view, far more significant than they are for the father. But what about the reverse? What about a case in which the father (in this case, my son) is adamantly opposed to having a child, but the woman (his ex-girlfriend) wants to keep the pregnancy? While it’s not relevant to the moral question, the pregnancy is shockingly unexpected given a medical issue of the father’s. And the couple’s relationship has almost no chance of success, even without a pregnancy. Given that the woman has neither a willing partner nor a job and is already responsible for a child from a previous relationship, her decision to continue with the pregnancy is viewed by most in her circle as reckless and certain to risk her already precarious mental health. Here, her right to choose to carry the child will have a profound impact on three (soon to be four) people and is likely to be very difficult for all. Is it right to force someone to be a parent, even if in name only? Many people, me included, would say no if that person is a woman. Recent events have shown how fraught this issue is. And yet a man who does not wish to be, has never wanted to be and was told that his chances of ever being a parent were nil can find himself in a situation where his opposition carries no weight. While it’s evident that he will have financial obligations, what might his moral responsibility be? — Name Withheld
Ok so, just to recap, a man and a woman—two adult people, as it were—hooked up. That’s a colloquial way of saying “committed adultery.”* That’s when two people who are not married to each other decide to behave like married people only without the spiritual, legal, rational, moral, and sensible undergirding of vows said before a congregation and the God they ought to worship.
These two people decided to throw all sense to the wind and follow the lusts of the flesh because, after all, no one has ever seen God and so who is to know if it matters what anyone does? Also, as I’m sure you’ve heard, engaging in sexual relations with someone to whom you are not married never—and I repeat never—has any trouble associated with it, like pregnancy or heartbreak, or some kind of disease, or a gnawing sense of regret, or bitter jealousy. Getting naked with another person is not that big of a deal. You don’t need to worry about anything.
These two people didn’t. Worry, I mean. They decided to through all caution to the wind and then something that happens all the time to people who engage in this activity actually happened and now they are full of woe.
Fortunately, the person asking the question has “always” supported “a woman’s right to choose” not only because she herself was able to do away with a child which, apparently “saved her,” though, of course, not the child—can I just interrupt myself? You knew it was bound to happen, me interrupting myself.
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