quality raises many issues, not the least of these being who should pay for what.  Time was when it was understood that a man who took a woman out on a dinner date would pay for the restaurant meal.  Of course, it was also understood that he was taking her out, and not the other around—special occasions like his birthday or father’s day aside.  Equality, of course, has changed these rules.  Supposedly for the better, but that is another issue entirely.

Now suppose that after that one nice restaurant diner after another, which some how manages to get paid, the couple goes back to somebody’s place and have sex.  This they do regularly.  And as luck would have it, she gets pregnant. 

Carole announces this to Sebastian; and he immediately responds with “It is your choice, Carole”.  Of course, as we all know there really isn’t anything else he can say.  You know the argument about its being her body and she has a right to do with it as she pleases. 

At any rate, Carole announces that she is going to have the baby, to which Sebastian smiles demurely and says “It is your choice, Carole”. 

Oh let me mention at this point that Carole and Sebastian are not living together.  They are just having casual sex on a regular basis.  I mean commitment is so passé. 

At any rate, about 4 months into the pregnancy Carole has a miscarriage that has a few complications.  She is self-employed and had mistakenly let her health insurance lapse.  So she has to dip into her savings in order to pay for the medical bills.  Not surprisingly, Carole turns to Sebastian for some financial help.  After all, he is part of why this thing happened in the first place.  Or something like that. 

The surprise of surprises is that Sebastian thinks that this is not his problem at all.   They were having casual sex.  And his reasoning was very simple: If she became pregnant, then she abort the fetus if she felt like it, no matter what he thought or wanted.  Or, to go in the other direction, she could carry her pregnancy to term and bring a child into the world, no matter what he thought or wanted. 

Seeing that he had no say in the matter at all, he was unable to fathom how Carole’s having a miscarriage was his problem. 

Now, Sebastian is not a mean guy.  Not at all.  Had Carole been without means, he would certainly have helped her.  This was not her situation, though.  In fact, her savings far exceeded his.  More to the point, although she had to dip into her saving, she could do so without in anyway jeopardizing her well-being.  Under these circumstances, it made no sense to him that he was morally obligated, as Carole put the point, to help her with her medical expenses.  Sebastian did not see that for the life of him. 

She wanted sex.  And that is what she got.  Her getting pregnant or having a miscarriage was not part of the deal.  And how could that be a part of the deal when he had absolutely had no say in the matter?  And respecting a woman’s right to choose meant giving her carte blanche with respect to having a child or not, is not just one of the untoward consequences of that reality, in the context of casual sex, that miscarriages are solely the responsibility of the woman. 

I mean the argument most certainly cannot be: But he had sex with her; hence, this places him under an obligation of sorts, as he knew that this sort of thing could happen.  For when we set rape aside, it is also true that a woman has sex with a man, knowing full well that pregnancy is the sort of thing that happens.  But if she is under no moral obligation with respect to him when a conception occurs, how can it be that he is under any moral obligation to her in this matter? 

It all seemed so straightforward to him.  It is her body; and in the absence of some prior agreement, she is responsible for attending to it unless it can be shown that she has been wronged in some way. 

Needless to say, casual sex between Carole and Sebastian came to an abrupt halt.  She saw him as the very embodiment of a sexist pig; and whereas he saw her as yet another woman in the business of trying to manipulate a man with the charge of sexism. 

A year or so ago, Sebastian would completely accepted Carole’s point of view.  But not so long ago he had stumbled across Dalton Conley’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times entitled “A Man’s Right to Choose” (1 December 2005); and Sebastian found himself profoundly persuaded by it in spite of himself.  And Carole’s accusation that he was nothing but a vicious sexist for not helping her with the medical expenses for the miscarriage only fueled his sentiment that Conley more than had a point. 

He thought to himself that certainly he had not been using Carole.  Why, she wanted the sex as much as he did—if not more so on some occasions.  And she had made it clear to him that if she became pregnant, the choice to abort or not was her because, after all, it is her body.  So he understood that he was not entitled to a say in the matter and he accepted that point of view, lest the charge of sexism should result in his being sacrificed upon the altar of feminism. 

But there it is.  Sebastian now thinks that if a man is morally obligated to help a woman with respect to a miscarriage that she has that had its origins in sexual relations between her and that man, then a woman cannot be morally free as she thinks to dispose of the fetus that comes about as a result of sex between her and that man. 

Sebastian’s views on abortion have shifted to the right a bit; and he has no clue what to do with himself, since as a result of that shift he is now considered to be a sexist by a great many woman who once admired him.  Or who at least regarded him as a nice piece of ass to have sex with.