A successful young man explains why he supports a woman’s ‘right to choose.’
Earlier this week, a young man by the name of Kaivan Shroff published an article entitled, “Men like me benefit from safe abortion access.”
By “men like me,” Shroff clearly means successful men, men who are too busy doing important things to care about any aspect of their sexual activity other than enjoyment, let alone take responsibility for it. Thanks to abortion, neither the needs and desires of the woman involved nor the life of the child who might come into being must enter his calculation.
According to his lengthy bio, Shroff is very important. He’s a senior adviser to D.C. non-profit the Institute for Education, a self-described “political commentator,” and a former staffer for the Hillary Clinton campaign’s digital team. Not to mention he has an MBA from Yale and a BA from Brown — and, as he informs us in the first paragraph of his article, he is about to graduate from law school, after which point he’ll become a public-interest lawyer.
He certainly doesn’t need a child to complicate all of that success.
“In many ways,” Shroff tells us, “it feels like my life is just about to begin. It would be a terrible time to have a baby.”
He wants to have kids someday, of course — he’s not a monster. In fact, he “can’t imagine not getting to experience fatherhood.” But he’s not in a relationship, he has no nest egg prepared, and after suffering through the pandemic, he’s ready “to eke out and enjoy every last minute of my 20s.”
So while he’s busy sowing his wild oats, any children he happens to father will just have to meet their untimely end, at least until the time is right for him.
As it turns out, Shroff is hardly the first man to discover that he might benefit from legal abortion. In the telling of some feminists, abortion is in fact a boon to cowardly, irresponsible men, not a boon to women, for all the talk of women’s rights and women’s bodily autonomy.
“Abortion restrictions do not deny sexual and reproductive autonomy to women; reality does,” writes legal scholar Erika Bachiochi. “While pregnant, a woman is carrying a new and vulnerable human being within her. Unlike a biological father, a pregnant woman cannot just walk away; to approach the desired autonomy of the child-abandoning man, a pregnant woman must engage in a life-destroying act.”
Or, as radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon put it in the context of male sexual aggression, “So long as women do not control access to our sexuality, abortion facilitates women’s heterosexual availability. . . . Sex doesn’t look a whole lot like freedom when it appears normatively less costly for women to risk an undesired, often painful, traumatic, dangerous, sometimes illegal, and potentially life-threatening procedure than to protect themselves in advance [by resisting sex].”
Abortion, in other words, facilitates the sexual desires of men — and facilitates the desire of cowardly, irresponsible men to abandon their unborn child and their child’s mother — while encouraging women to “free” themselves from the tyranny of their biology by committing an act of violence against their unborn child.
Perhaps we should admire Shroff for being willing to admit that “men like him” benefit from abortion, that he favors abortion rights for some reason other than pure magnanimity toward the women around him. But what he doesn’t acknowledge is that abortion isn’t cost-free, that while it enables him to walk away from sex with nary a consequence, it requires much of women, much that doesn’t set them “free” at all.