Roe for men?

The National Center for Men filed suit to establish reproductive rights for men. Is a father's right to choose an idea worth debating, or just a distraction?

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Abortion, fatherhood, Rebecca Traister, Life

Photo by AP/Al Goldis

Plaintiff Matt Dubay, who says his reproductive rights were violated, at his home in Saginaw, Mich.

March 13, 2006 | It's the kind of news story that provokes an age-old parental impulse: to glare at the kids in the rearview mirror and announce, "I really don't need this today!"

Thursday, three days after Gov. Mike Rounds signed a sweeping bill that would ban almost all abortions in South Dakota, a men's rights organization called the National Center for Men announced it was filing a lawsuit nicknamed "Roe v. Wade for Men" in the U.S. District Court in Detroit.

With the suit, NCM hopes to establish that a man who unintentionally fathers a child has the right to decline financial responsibility for that child, a right based on the same principles laid out in the 1973 case that made abortion legal. According to the argument put forth by the team behind the suit, women are afforded more choices about reproduction than their male counterparts, which violates the 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law.

The NCM has been looking for an appropriate plaintiff for this case for more than 10 years. It finally found one in Matt Dubay, a 25-year-old computer technician from Saginaw, Mich., who claims he and his ex-girlfriend did not use birth control because of her assurances that she could not get pregnant due to a medical condition. But the couple, who Dubay told Salon were together for about three months, did conceive, and Dubay's ex elected to keep the child, for whom he now pays $500 a month in child support, despite his contention that he was always clear about not wanting the child.

Despite the national attention it has garnered, even the plaintiff's camp seems aware that the case is a little half-baked. Though NCM executive director Mel Feit said by phone that "there is no way to know" how the courts will rule in the case, many past child-support decisions have been decided on the basis that the need of a child to receive support from both parents outweighs any unfairness to a man who didn't want to be a father. CNN called the suit a long shot, and on Thursday's "Good Morning America," correspondent Dan Harris ruefully told anchor Diane Sawyer that while Dubay and his attorneys "do not hold out much hope of winning," they do want to start a discussion, and that "given the fact that I'm here, they've won on that point at least."

But is this really the moment to start a discussion about a case that looks like a non-starter designed to generate more publicity than legal traction? Now? Within weeks of the confirmation of Samuel Alito and days of the South Dakota abortion ban? It's hard not to see it as just a novelty act and maddening distraction tactic -- so we don't have to read and write and think about the 18 states about to enact further limitations on abortion, or about the rising insurance costs for the pill, or the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act that would allow insurance companies to get out of laws requiring them to pay for birth control, or about pharmacists who refuse to sell legal contraception to paying customers. Is this really the moment to be discussing whether paying child support is an injustice? Because we really don't need this now!

But maybe I'm the only one who feels that way. Since the NCM's announcement of its suit, the story has been featured on ABC's "World News Tonight," CNN and Fox, and in USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and twice, as of today, Salon. An item posted about the story in Broadsheet has garnered 20 pages of letters. Roy Barreca, publicist for the NCM, sounded almost shaken by the attention. "I didn't think we'd be so overwhelmed with press," he said Thursday. "It shows a real need for this to be discussed in this country. I have to go. I have two radio interviews to do right now." Meanwhile, South Dakota state Sen. Bill Napoli's televised assertion -- that only a religious virgin who got "sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it" might qualify for an abortion in his state -- has been reported only in blogs and by Molly Ivins in her syndicated column earlier this week.

"I didn't have control over the timing of this," said Feit, head of the NCM since its founding in 1987. "There was no attempt to pick a symbolic time. But I do think it adds an element, to the extent that Roe is front and center and in the news right now. [It] sort of works for us, but there was no thinking of that ahead of time." Feit said he'd been looking for an appropriate plaintiff for the case since the mid-1990s, and that it was pure coincidence that he found Dubay at this moment, when choice is as imperiled as it has been since 1973.

By phone, Dubay explained that he first approached the NCM with questions about his rights when his ex decided to have the child despite his objections. "I went to the National Center for Men looking for help," he said, adding that he is a supporter of abortion rights, though he feels men should have a bigger voice in the decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy. "I don't necessarily believe that men should be able to force women to do anything either way, but I believe their input should at least be taken into consideration," he said.

Feit too, said he supports Roe. "Like many Americans I feel that there can be some reasonable compromises made about viability, somewhere between nine months and nine minutes," he said. "But yes, the concept of reproductive choice is a concept I support." Asked whether he, like many other "father's rights" activists, also believed that men should have a role in making abortion decisions, he said, "For single people, no. It's a woman's choice. Nothing we're doing seeks to deny women control. It is her body."

He also made clear that his suit didn't aim to change the law so that fathers could jettison their financial or paternal obligations anytime they felt like it. Instead, he said, he has written up what he calls a "reproductive rights affidavit," which would allow a man to accept his responsibilities and rights to fatherhood or relinquish them for a one-month period after learning of his partner's pregnancy, giving the pregnant woman a chance to take his decision into account before she decides whether to carry the fetus, abort it, raise the child or give it up for adoption. But, Feit conceded, that monthlong window might even be a stretch. "Maybe a month is too long," he said. "Maybe it should be five days. A woman has to know his decision before she can make hers. It should be a very limited period of time. We should not give him much time at all."

Next page: "Is there a way to take advantage of the timing and say to pro-choice women: Are we in this thing together?"