The Right to Support But Not to Life?
Your argument cannot be sustained if you’re really pro-choice, as you claim to be. Abortion is legal during gestation because a fetus has no intrinsic worth that negates the mother’s right to choose. A future event, the birth of a child, in no way allows another individual or the state to interfere with her reproductive choice via the argument that abortion is unfair to the (future) child. To claim that a (future) child imposes an obligation on the father is to fall victim to the absurd notion that the fetus is entitled to financial support (on the father’s part, through court-ordered paternity judgment) but not to life itself (the mother’s continued pregnancy).
There exists a legal requirement for one parent to seek the welfare of the fetus, the party who is burdened with this sole responsibility with no corresponding, approximate right of refusal. There exists no similar legal requirement for the other parent to continue the welfare of the fetus, the parent who holds the sole right to determine the being and future of the fetus.
There exists no legal requirement to seek the fetus’s welfare for the one party possessing reproductive choice that by a minimum standard of logic and jurisprudence must exist in order to establish the legal requirement of the father, who currently has no measure of reproductive right of refusal during the gestation period.
In other words, there is no primary legal requirement on the part of the expectant mother to seek and continue the fetus’s welfare that would logically give rise to the legal requirement for the expectant father. If the expectant father’s current legal condition cannot accurately be called reproductive slavery then the term holds absolutely no meaning for an intelligent person.
The fetus has a right to support but not to life.
Again, your position cannot be sustained from a pro-choice stance. Yours is the pro-life argument.
"If, as Roe v. Wade instructs, a fetus lacks constitutional protection to assure it an opportunity to be born, we see no basis for according it constitutional protection to assure it enhanced prospects of good health after birth," (Lewis v Grinker,
US Second Circuit Court, 2001)
If “fairness" to the (future) child entered the picture in any way then abortion would certainly be severely restricted. The absurd claim that any legal standard exists for a prospective father (obligation to support the fetus) in the absence of a non-existent primary, logical standard for the mother (the obligation to secure life which requires corresponding paternal support) completely fails intellectually as well as morally. The primary standard for the prospective mother must exist contemporaneously with any secondary standard for the father. The fetus’s right to life by necessity must be guaranteed in order to secure any secondary “enhanced prospects”; but because the right to life does not exist for the fetus no other “rights” can logically follow and the US Second Circuit Court has it exactly right in this respect. All who argue otherwise are arguing the pro-life position.
Reproductive rights, as they pertain to abortion and the right to refuse responsibility for a (future) child, and the issue of child support are two separate and distinct matters. Those who try to conflate the two have failed to grasp the essential findings of Roe.