An opinion piece published by WBUR — Boston’s NPR news station — argues that abortion is beneficial to men who want to pursue their career goals while leading a promiscuous sex life.
The article — entitled “Men like me benefit from safe abortion access” — is written by political commentator and activist Kaivan Shroff. As he prepares to graduate law school, the 28-year-old argues that having a baby would derail his career:
It would be a terrible time to have a baby. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve always wanted to have kids. I love the relationship I have with my parents and can’t imagine not getting to experience fatherhood. I think I’d be good at it. That said, I’m not in a relationship. I haven’t built a nest egg. And, frankly, after two years of a global pandemic, I want to eke out and enjoy every last minute of my 20s. In too many ways, I’m unsettled.
Admitting to having sex with several women throughout the past decade, Shroff then pushes abortion as his “right” to preventing fatherhood in the case of unwanted pregnancy:
We often talk about the ways access to birth control and safe abortion empowers women. And it does: I believe that access to safe abortion is a basic human right. On a human and policy level, it’s infuriating to watch a partisan Supreme Court erode and threaten to eliminate that right. Women’s bodily autonomy should not be up for debate. But men like me have also long been the direct beneficiaries of safe abortion access. Giving women the choice not to carry unwanted pregnancies often means we, too, can delay parenthood until we are ready.
Since I’ve spent 10 of the past 11 years as a student, most of the women I’ve had sex with were also students, also progressive, and also not at a point in their lives where they were looking or ready to have children. I try to share responsibility for birth control and if a woman tells me she’s on it, I also trust that. If she still got pregnant, however, though entirely her decision, I assume we would both want the same thing: an abortion. In longer-term relationships, we’ve had explicit discussions about this.
Shroff acknowledges that he is “scared” by the prospect of losing access to legal abortion:
What if I got a woman pregnant? What if she didn’t want to continue the pregnancy, but could not get an abortion? Would we try to stay together, even if it wasn’t a fit? What kind of custody or visitation rights would I get if we weren’t together? How would I provide for the child? Would adoption really be a consideration, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently glibly suggested? If so, would the child face an abusive welfare system? The questions and worries abound.
In an interview with The Daily Wire, Dusty Deevers — a pastor at Grace Community Church in Elgin, Oklahoma, and a producer of the new anti-abortion documentary “A Storm Comes Rolling Down The Plain” — noted that Shroff is “willing to exchange his innocent child on the altar of abortion” for the sake of “idolatrous selfism.”
“Shroff claims he desires to be the best dad he can be someday, while also lauding the security that access to murdering his own children has afforded him in ‘sexual exploration’ … this is idolatrous selfism and why Christians call abortion ‘child sacrifice,’” explained Deevers.
“God says to those who sacrifice their children to a false god in exchange for something of greater value, ‘I myself will set my face against him and will cut him off’ (Leviticus 20:2-5). Why? Because God ‘hates hands that shed innocent blood’ (Proverbs 6:17). The problem is, access to or actually murdering his children will not assuage his conscience now or on the day of judgment when we all must stand before God and give account for our deeds,” Deevers said.
“Only believing on the Lord Jesus — who laid down His life as a sacrifice for our sin, and rose from the dead, and is now reigning from His heavenly throne — will satisfy God’s wrath against idolaters and afford us fullness of life now and evermore,” Deevers added.
Nevertheless, Deevers observed that the United States does not offer preborn children access to justice.
“Currently, our laws punish a man who sexually abuses a child, even if he did it for ‘sexual exploration.’ But our laws do not give equal protection and justice to all lives from conception, instead allowing exceptions for men like Scroff who, for the perpetuation of their sexual exploits, have the freedom to abuse children in the womb to death,” he explained. “God requires governing authorities to uphold justice by being a terror to evildoers who would murder their children (Psalm 82:3-4; Romans 13:1-3). It is their duty to pass equal protection laws for all lives from fertilization to natural death.”
“Abortion must be abolished, not regulated.”