KATIE ROIPHE: Preglimony and Pro-Choice Rhetoric: If we ask fathers to support a pregnancy, aren’t we admitting that the fetus is a child?

The interests of protecting expectant mothers do not necessarily coincide with the interest of protecting abortion rights. Once you admit that the father is responsible to a woman carrying his fetus, you are halfway, at least in an imaginative sphere, to admitting that the fetus is a “life.” You are, in theory, extending the idea of “paternity” and implicitly the idea of the child, to pregnancy. (Motro chooses her clunky word “preglimony” carefully to avoid any implications of “child support” but the intellectual connection, the implication that there is a child, and not just a cluster of cells, is there.)

Also, if a man has responsibilities during pregnancy, might he also have . . . dare I say it? . . . rights? Besides the right to cough up the cash, I mean, which most feminists seem happy enough to endorse.