Hypothetical: A man is raped by a woman (and no smart remarks. Strong women exist. So do drugs. Hell, so do weapons). This woman gets pregnant. Should the man be able to force her to get an abortion?
I think so. I’ll use food as a metaphor. If you take brownies over to someone’s house, and give them to someone, then you can’t complain when someone eats them. On the other hand, if someone breaks into your house, and steals your food, you have every right to complain, both for the break-in, and for the improper use of your brownies.
The question is, does a man’s right to say what is done with his sperm trump a women’s right to her body? Does it change things if a woman is a rapist, or if she just broke into your house and stole your sheets after a pleasant night’s dreaming?
Her right to an abortion stems from the fact that the damn thing’s growing inside her body, not from the fact that her genetic material was in the ovum.
No, unless we’re going to switch to some system of “eye for an eye” punishment where people who violate the bodies of others may legally have their own bodies violated. Otherwise forcing a woman to have an abortion against her will because she is a rapist would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. She should just go to jail like any other convicted rapist.
A man who is raped should not, however, be held legally responsible in any way for paying his rapist’s resulting medical bills or for making child support payments to her. Since the mother is a convicted rapist she should not be allowed to keep the child after it is born anyway. Unless the father is for some reason unfit I think he should be given the opportunity to take custody of the child if he likes, but otherwise it should be put up for adoption.
Another question, which is tangentially related. If the urban legend about the bath of ice and the stolen kidney came true, and the organ thief was tracked down, would the law not be justified in returning the kidney to its rightful place? Would that not be having your body violated? Wouldn’t a cavity search be a violation of one’s body? And if a woman can be said to have the right to exercise control over her own body, why can a man not exercise control over the chromosomes he contributed within said system? Does control stop at the cellular level?
Because he can’t do that without violating the woman’s right to control her body. He can’t even magically make his sperm fall back out of her vagina without doing her any harm, he’d have to force her to undergo a medical procedure that, while quite safe as medical procedures go, is painful and does carry the risk of some permanent physical harm. Permanent psychological harm seems unavoidable when abortion is forced. In the US it is illegal to torture criminals. There’s certainly nothing comparable to forced abortion legally done to male rapists (even chemical castration involves nothing more than taking a drug, is completely reversable, and AFAIK is only used on convicted sex offenders who consent to it), so what you’re asking for would make female rapists subject to harsher punishments than male rapists.
Alright, let’s drop the rape angle for a moment. Is your belief based soley on the practicalities of the issue? If there was a 100% safe way for a woman to have an abortion, should a guy whose sperm was stolen have the right to demand it, if not back, at least not be used in a manner he has not approved of?
If the man was not raped, your question becomes just the same old “If a man has sex with a woman, but then doesn’t want to be a father, should he be allowed to force her to have an abortion?” question that comes up around here all the time. It’s a question that has long since become boring, and it was always stupid.
He said what if the sperm was stolen. There are numerous ways of doing this. Raid the garbage can in his bedroom full of wadded Kleenexes, say. Or may a woman gave him a blowjob and kept the sperm.
It’s an interesting question, and is not in any way “boring” or “stupid”, IMHO.
Let’s imagine this senario: A woman and a man are both consentually engaging in oral sex. The woman gives the man a blowjob, and somehow saves the sperm that he ejaculated into her mouth. Later, she impregnates herself with that sperm.
Personally, I don’t believe he should be able to force the woman to have an abortion, even though she used his sperm in a manner he did not consent to. However, the man should not be in any way responsible for the child if he doesn’t wish to be. Also, I believe there should be some sort of punishment for the woman in this situation. Perhaps she could be sued for emotional trauma or some such? I don’t know exactly what sort of punishment would fit, but such an act is clearly wrong.
I’m not trying to hijack this thread, but look at it from a cloning angle. I think we can assume that human cloning will be possible in the not too distant future. A woman digs thru Tom Cruise’s trash and pulls out some of his hair (with follicle attached). That woman proceeds to clone Mr Cruise (she carries the fetus). Can he demand an abortion? If not, can he claim the child as his own? Keep in mind that the cell for cloning was NOT stolen. It was recovered from something that Tom Cruise discarded-- i.e., from his trash.
John Mace, as you’ll recall from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 2013, genetic material is now subject to intellectual property laws. The woman who cloned Mr. Cruise, as well as the woman raper in the OP, are both guilty of theft of intellectual property. At the very least, they would both need to obtain a license from the originating party, probably in exchange for a lump sum payment and/or royalty schedule.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges. Kidneys are functional organs, sperms are not. You don’t lose your kidneys on a day-to-day basis, which is exactly what happens to sperms. You are going to die without kidneys, which is not the case with sperms. Kidneys don’t grow, embryos do, which means the male’s contribution to an embryo goes down exponentially. Even when an embryo contains several million cells, the man’s contribution would be 1/2 of one cell.
Ok, so let us pose an alternate situation.
Say somone swipes one of your eggs, gets it fertilized and implants it in her body, what wold your response be to her?
If the man whos’ sperm is used didn’t know it was a stolen egg does he have as much right to keep the baby as you would?
No, you don’t hurt the innocent for the crimes of another. The man should have the option of taking total custody of the child and receive child support payments.
Then why are fetuses aborted when they are vialable outside the mother. What you say AHunter3 sounds like a good case but in real world applications falls apart.
The surrogate mother contract use to have a clause that, if the father wanted her to have an abortion and she didn’t, he would no longer be held responsible for the payment or the child. Even the original Baby M trial judge struck that down.
I do know of a case where a woman was raped, the rapist went to prison, she gave birth to the rapist’s child, the rapist took her to court and got visitation, and she was forced to take the child to prison and face her rapist every week.
Line from Gloria Steinman: If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrement.
I don’t believe it legally constitutes theft to take something that another person has voluntarily discarded. Unless the woman obtains the sperm through rape or assault, I don’t see how any crime has been committed. I wouldn’t consider myself robbed if someone took the hair out of my hairbrush.
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Why, I’d want her held down screaming on an operating table while my precious egg was sucked right back out of her!
No, actually, I wouldn’t. I’d probably want pain and suffering compensation, since eggs cannot be removed from a woman’s body as easily as sperm can be from a man’s but rather only through an invasive and extremely painful procedure (typically preceded by a lengthy series of hormone injections), but why on earth would I want to force the other woman to have an abortion? What good would that do me? To use the OP’s brownie analogy, that’s would be like asking the long arm of the law to stick its finger down the throat of the person who stole and ate your brownies to make her vomit them back up again.
Yes, he should have the right to take custody of the child unless he is for some other reason obviously unfit to be a parent. I said that already. What he should not have is the legal right to force another human being to do something to her body that she does not want to do. That is cruel and unusual punishment.
I’m sure that’s true but I would wag (having no fucking idea actually) that D&E partial birth abortions have to run a few bucks. Add to that the demand for adopted babies and you might find a crowd willing to pay the NICU bill if they get to keep the baby.
robertliguori
Should a man have a right to an abortion if he is raped?
Hypothetical: A man is raped by a woman (and no smart remarks. Strong women exist. So do drugs. Hell, so do weapons). This woman gets pregnant. Should the man be able to force her to get an abortion?
Not having been on line long, I find this quandry not at all boring, a little disturbing maybe, and going a long way in inciting my beautiful amazon rape fantasy…I would not be at all surprised if this has not happened somewhere on earth…possibibly in the hotel housing the Eastern European women’s shot put team,(wonder how one applies for towel boy?). It would be easy enough to consider if someone was to break into a spem bank, or by otherwise means pilfered a guys sperm (although the method described in Hannibal doesn’t exactly ring with romanticism). Restitution by insuring that any fufutre social or financial obligations would be considered null and void would be as far that could be taken. As I understand it (and only by watching a especially raunchy episode of CSI) that male erectile response is damn near outside the realm of self controll when proper stimulation is applied…and even in the case of a violent encounter, such as a rape. So I guess this could happen.
I don’t see how a judically decreeded abortion could ever be considered…even as I am fervently pro-choice, still the aspect of it being the body and decision of the woman in question outweighs any rights of the victim to seek anything more than what normal sentence the crime carries.
