Kamala Harris touted herself as a champion for abortion in Tuesday’s debate, framing this life-and-death issue as a basic freedom. She told viewers she would “be a president that will protect our fundamental rights and freedoms, including the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.”
This theme of abortion as “freedom” has run throughout her campaign, placing so-called abortion rights above the right to life and moving far beyond the former Democrat position of abortion being “safe, legal, and rare.” Tim Walz stands firmly with Harris, famously declaring: “We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves, because we know there’s a golden rule, mind your own damn business.”
But Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg raised an interesting question: What does “reproductive freedom” mean for men? Speaking at a “White Dudes for Harris” event, Buttigieg encouraged men to support Harris because he said abortion benefits them. He argued that “men are also more free in a country where we have a president who stands up for things like access to abortion care.”
Buttigieg is right that abortion is a men’s issue — but not for the reasons he thinks. In law, men today have no freedom of choice when a woman is pregnant with the unborn child they helped create. It may feel like freedom if a man agrees with a woman’s choice to end the life of her unborn child, but it’s entirely different if the man and woman have different views on their unborn child’s future. Hunter Biden’s ongoing parental fight demonstrates this well.
Lunden Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s child Navy Joan Roberts, shared her struggle to have her child recognized by the Biden family in her new book Out of the Shadows. Though Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection, the Biden family’s response to this child’s existence — and the deafening silence by Democrat Party leaders throughout the Biden administration — raises deep questions for Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party on just what they mean by “reproductive freedom.” If a woman has the right to kill her unborn child, then she inherently also has the right to protect that child’s life — but it seems that while Democrats claim to be “pro-choice,” what they really mean is “pro-abortion.”
Marking the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision in June 2023, Biden vowed that he would “fight to restore these protections of Roe v. Wade and make it the law of the land once again.” He added, “We will not let the most personal decisions fall in the hands of politicians instead of women and their doctors.”
But even as he campaigned to restore a woman’s so-called “right to choose,” President Biden and his family refused even to acknowledge the child that his son Hunter co-created. In fact, the White House twice honored each of the Biden grandchildren with Christmas stockings, except Navy Joan. Hunter himself did his best to ignore his child, only acknowledging her when an Arkansas judge forced him to as part of a court settlement last year.
The Bidens’ treatment of Navy Joan brings back memories of the days when women were whisked away from their families in shame, and their babies were deemed “illegitimate” on their birth certificates if they lived to see the light of day. Are we truly any better today, when social values and family structures have changed so profoundly?
Buttiegeg’s comment could also harm both women and children by encouraging men to pressure women into unwanted abortions. Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health reported in 2022 that homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States and said that “control over a woman’s reproductive choices often plays a role in intimate partner violence.”
Just last month, Kirsten Castle was killed in her home in San Mateo, California. She was eight months pregnant. Police arrested her boyfriend, Andrew Coleman, who, if convicted, could face the death penalty or life in prison without parole. In other recent cases, a man in Sweden allegedly strangled his pregnant girlfriend to death, after she reportedly refused to abort the baby, because he feared introducing her to his mother, and a man in England allegedly stabbed his pregnant mistress to death to avoid the “complication” of their unborn baby.
Americans need to be far clearer on what Democrats’ abortion euphemisms, such as “reproductive freedom” and the “right to choose,” really mean. As the Bidens’ case shows, men should have an equal stake in their children’s futures — not the “freedom” to take their lives in utero, as Buttigieg says, but the ability to choose life and the need to support both their offspring and their offspring’s mothers. As abortion debates heat up across the country, it’s clear we need laws that reflect the sanctity of life and the duties of both mothers and fathers in caring for their children.
Including men in the conversation also brings much-needed attention to the responsibilities associated with sex — not only to practice safe sex or to abstain from it if you aren’t ready to care for children but also to choose your sexual partners more carefully.
In short, the debate on abortion must go beyond pregnancy to improving parenthood so that children have the best chance at life. The answer is not necessarily “big government”; religious and volunteer organizations as well as strong families and communities should also step up to help men and women care for their children well inside and outside the womb. Americans must do more to make it easier for mothers and fathers to choose life.
True “reproductive freedom” would invite men to recognize their responsibilities as fathers, allow mothers to flourish with maximum support, and ensure the next generation gets to exercise their right to life and happiness. Getting parenthood right could not only build consensus on the abortion issue but also help future generations lead better, more fulfilling lives.
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