Alessandra Asteriti

Agreed 100%

That doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. We dont give men anything like the amount of privilege we give women when it comes to reproduction. Look at the panoply of contraception available to women, look at the dearth of rights for fathers, look at adoption law and abortion

It is tremendously difficult to produce hormonal contraception for males, because female hormonal contraception works by essentially exploiting (and expanding) the (significant) period of a woman’s cycle in which she is infertile. No such period exists for men. Prior attempts

to create synthetic infertility in males have very often perilously close (or worse) to permanently sterilising them. Re: abortion - gestation takes place in the body, and to the potential physical danger and detriment of - the female. Materially speaking, until a child is born,

the male’s bodily contribution ends when he ejaculates. There can be no compromise where one party wishes to abort and the other doesn’t. Unless you are proposing that a man can force his female partner to gestate against her will, then the imbalance in reproductive provision

between the sexes is unavoidable. Much like the greater physical strength and endurance exhibited by males, the fact that reproduction is manifestly controlled by females is unavoidable, if only by dint of nature.

Its not unavoidable at all. The state could simply give men a post-conception “right to choose”, just like women have through abortion and adoption. Equal parental rights could also be extended to fathers.

I’m sympathetic to this view in principle, although I’d argue that it doesn’t have much to do with abortion, inasmuch as the right to abort is arguably more - or at least as much - to do with not being pregnant as not being a parent. The difficulty with this, I think, is that

the financial abdication (since nobody can force physical presence, nor should they) of one parent after a child is born is realistically going to impact on the child negatively more than the other parent, so there would need to be provisions in place to ensure that the