The hilarity here is that men have no reproductive rights and Feminists have actively (and successfully) worked to block birth control for men. But sure, whatever.
I’d like the women who think this is funny and/or accurate in any way to really think about what a man’s reproductive rights look like compared to a woman’s, for a minute.
You’re a woman and you decide to have sex.
1. You have multiple options for birth control, and if those fail,
2. You have the option of abortion, and if you don’t believe in that but don’t want the child,
3. There are anonymous dropoff points at which you can deliver the child after birth, but if you do want the child,
4. The choice is entirely yours and the state will legally obligate the man to financially support the child for eighteen years under threat of prison,
5. And if you don’t want the father to see the child, the state spends very little enforcing visitation rights.
As a man who decides to have sex with a woman;
1. You have condoms, spermicidal lube, or a vasectomy as birth control.
2. If those fail, you have zero options. None. It should be noted that condoms tend to have a 10-20% chance of failure for people who have sex over the course of a year. And if your condom fails, the next two decades of your life are in the hands of whoever you happened to be sleeping with. So, ladies, whenever you sleep with a guy, keep in mind that he is taking a non-negligible chance that you could force him to have a child against his will and then compel support from him. But hey, even if your birth control doesn’t ACTUALLY fail, it doesn’t matter, because -
3. It doesn’t actually matter if you’re the one who got the woman pregnant, because once you are legally acknowledged as the father (which can be as simple as a verbal acknowledgement) then you can be legally obligated for child support. Even if, later on, you find out the child is not, in fact, yours, and even if the judge sympathizes with you, they are required by law to order you to pay child support.
Gosh, you might think to yourself, guys have it sort of shitty when it comes to reproductive rights! I better make sure, as a man, to only have sex with people I can really, really trust (Gee, doesn’t that sound like a subtle form of sexual policing, to you?)
Well guess what…
4. IT DOESN’T MATTER! If you are a guy and are raped by a woman, you can be held liable for child support if she gets pregnant, or if you have donated to a sperm bank and a woman just so happens to defraud it and get herself pregnant, then you are liable for child support. Both of these are legal situations that have actually occurred.
Basically, the state takes the legal stance that whoever provided the sperm, no matter how it happened, is responsible for the child and must pay child support. Which really, when it comes down to it, is about cold economics. The state doesn’t want to have to pay welfare to the woman, and did you know courts get a slice of child support payments? So basically we have a state that is financially incentivized to screw over men.
If women’s reproductive rights were on par with how men’s reproductive rights are today, abortion would be illegal, the man would have no legal obligation to take care of the child, and the woman would have to write a check to the government for having a child.
This needs more notes because if “social justice warriors” actually cared about “justice” then they’d be reblogging the crap out of this too.
