They're called men.

It is widely assumed by activists on both sides of the debate that legal abortion puts women on equal footing with men, giving them the same freedom to enjoy sex without consequences. Actually, when sex results in conception, the man and the woman find themselves on very unequal footing.

If she does not want to be a mother, a woman can end the pregnancy, with or without her partner's knowledge. (It's hard to tell how RU-486 will affect a woman's ability to exclude the man from her decision; a drug-induced abortion at home may be more private and less invasive than surgery at a clinic, but it's not easy to hide from an intimate partner.)

If she wants to carry her baby to term, a woman can force the father to pay child support -- so, as lawyer Melanie McCulley points out in a 1998 article in the Journal of Law and Policy, he "does not have the luxury, after the fact of conception, to decide that he is not ready for fatherhood." A woman also can have a baby and not tell the father, making a unilateral decision to give the child up for adoption or raise it on her own.

To some extent, this inequality stems from the obvious fact that a woman's body is the vessel for gestation and the vehicle for birth. Once upon a time, biology colluded with cultural and legal male privilege to ensure that women generally paid the price for illicit sex. Scientific progress and the advancement of women changed that. Even as reliable contraception and legal abortion allowed women to control their reproductive fates, their ability to hold absentee fathers financially liable for their children was enhanced by new methods of establishing paternity enforced by friendlier courts.

"In the old days, a woman's biology was a woman's destiny," writes Warren Farrell, author and men's issues advocate, in the forthcoming book "Father and Child Reunion" (to be published in January). "[T]oday, a woman's biology is a man's destiny."

The rhetoric of pro-choice advocates rarely mentions men at all, except to celebrate women's freedom from male control over their reproductive lives. Anti-abortion rhetoric occasionally refers to bereaved fathers of aborted fetuses but more often invokes evil males for whom legal abortion makes it easy to seduce and abandon women, and who may even coerce women into having abortions.

Many men, and some women, see a very different situation -- one in which women have rights and choices while men have responsibilities and are expected to support any choice a woman makes. "If she wants an abortion, he's supposed to shut down all of his emotional bonding to the child," says Fred Hayward, founder of the Sacramento, Calif., group Men's Rights Inc. "Then, if she changes her mind and decides to have the baby, he's supposed to turn it all back on and be a father."

Hayward's opinion is shared by Ron Henry, a Washington attorney (married with three children) who works pro bono promoting shared parenting by divorced and unmarried parents: The expectation that men will "switch" to support the woman's change of heart, Henry says, is "a fundamental denial of men's humanity, as if they just exist to make the woman happy."

Activists aside, where do most men fit into the picture? Tellingly, very few studies have looked at the men implicated in unwanted pregnancies. The only book on the subject, apparently, is the 1984 volume "Men and Abortion: Lessons, Losses, and Love" by Drexel University sociologist Arthur Shostak and journalist Gary McLouth, based on a survey of 1,000 men in abortion-clinic waiting rooms and some in-depth interviews.

Most men in the survey reported that ending the pregnancy was a mutual decision, and only 5 percent didn't want the abortion -- though nearly half of the single and divorced men said that they had suggested getting married and having the baby. As for the roughly 50 percent of men who don't show up at the clinics, various estimates cited by Shostak and McLouth suggest that while some fit the stereotype of the feckless runaway male, a significant percentage oppose the abortion or are too upset about it to come along. As many as one in six men are never told about the pregnancy or the abortion.

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