A man's right to decide ...

... whether or not a woman can choose to end her pregnancy. That's what Dalton Conley thinks (New York Times, registration required) ought to be our male prerogative, should we have put forth enough effort to complete the act that initiates the pregnancy. He's been there.

About a decade ago, my girlfriend became pregnant. It wasn't planned, but it wasn't exactly unplanned either, in that we obviously knew how biology worked. I desperately wanted to keep the baby, but she wasn't ready, and there were some minor medical concerns about the fetus, so she decided to terminate the pregnancy against my wishes. What right did I have to stop her? As it turned out, none. It was, indeed, a woman's right to choose.

Exactly so. My intentional contribution to my wife's pregnancy took, well, less than an hour. My wife's contribution started there. I was a witness to my wife's pregnancy. This is not to say that I washed my hands of it; I did everything I could to be supportive. But the biological fact is that it was not (and could not be) my body in which the fertilized egg started and continued the process of becoming our daughter.

I was free to drink alcohol without concern for the physical effect it might have on the growing fetus. I was never nauseous. My body stayed pretty much the same shape through the entire process. My blood pressure didn't change. My blood sugar was normal. None of this was the case for my wife.

How does Mr. Conley describe pregnancy?

... those 40 weeks of pregnancy - as intense as they may be - are merely a small fraction of a lifetime commitment to that child.

Intense. The pregnancy was intense. The birth was more than intense. I witnessed my wife give birth to a healthy 10 pound 1 ounce baby girl; though it was only thanks to Dr. Rossi's training that the umbilical chord wrapped around Lily's neck did no damage. And I believe that it was only due to that modern medical training that my wife had a reasonable chance to survive the birth of such a large baby. It was not a C-section delivery. And it was only due to the epidural that she wasn't in screaming agony during the birth.

There were times that day that I thought I had lost both the baby and my wife. My heart would clinch up as a contraction started and I heard the beeps from the fetal heart monitor drop to one second per beep. Then two seconds. Then three. "Is it going to start again?" I'd think as the contraction subsided and the beeping sped up again. Wait. Repeat.

And it's time. The doctor is frustrated and yelling "Hold her leg up! Higher! Here! Like this!" And there's lots of blood. When the baby comes, she flops out. "They all do that, no muscle tone," I think. Another team takes the baby away immediately. "As long as my wife is OK," I say to myself, "then I'll be OK." I stay with my wife. The doctor is stitching away and there's so much blood and I'm really scared. I watch the doctor as he stitches for a very long time.

"Did they say it was a girl?" my wife asked for the second time.

"Huh? I didn't hear." I go over to look and there she is staring up at me with the deep blue infant eyes perfectly awake. Perfectly alert. And I burst into tears.

It was more than intense. And yet, aside from voluntary sleep and food deprivation, I had no physical problems that day.

I know exactly how much right I have to tell my wife that she can't choose not to go through that again, even if she has agreed to do so in advance. Exactly none.

The bottom line is that if we want to make fathers relevant, they need rights, too. If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create.

Bullshit. We don't need the "right" to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will in order for fatherhood to be relevant. And a promise of future commitment to a future child can not buy an unwilling woman's body as an incubator. The very idea is repugnant.

Consider a similar situation. Assume a child is ill and only an organ transplant from his father will let him live. Further, lets say that the father makes a public promise to be a donor for the son and later backs out. No promise of future support by the mother can buy the unwilling father's organ. We simply don't have the right to force other people to sacrifice their bodies. The idea is repugnant.