Equality

When it comes to women’s rights and equality there is bucket loads of literature and articles and numerous celebrities all speaking out on the issue. But where are the speakers for men’s rights and equality. Many would argue that there is an imbalance in favour of men but this is not a position I subscribe to. Yes there are issues around equal pay, although I have yet to see convincing evidence of this, but there is more to equality than pay. The lot of the man and woman in the UK are certainly different. Does that make them unequal? Should one size fit all?

I was discussing this with my wife over the weekend. There were discussions on the radio which triggered my wife to comment on the pro life campaigners. She made a good argument on abortion that the decision of whether to have or not to have a baby was down to the pregnant woman and not a group of 3rd party campaigners. I thought she made an excellent argument for this position especially around the timeframe for the decision. Rather than look at it from the perspective of the maturity of the embryo in the timing, she said the decision to abort should be limited, excluding health reasons, to a reasonable period of say 4 months as she felt that was enough time for the woman to make the decision. What she was proposing was different to what we have today which, for someone against the pro life campaigners, actually reduced the time for abortion from where it stands today. In reality she was proposing a different approach rather than a single deadline we have now. You have a period of time where the woman can make a decision about to keep or not keep the baby for non health reasons (without due cause) after which you would not be allowed to terminate except for health reasons and even then only up to the current limit.

So what has this got to do with equality? It’s simple. The decision to have or not have the baby is down to the woman (legally). But what about the father? Currently, a father cannot stop a woman from having an abortion or force her to have one. This is a gross inequality. A woman may make a decision that she is not ready to be a mother, that she is unable to look after it, it will have an adverse effect on her life or for financial reasons. However, the father has none of those rights and if the baby is born the CSA will ensure that the father pays for the rest of the child’s life.

I am not for one moment suggesting that the life of the baby should be in the hands of the father, but like the decision period my wife outlined above where the woman is allowed to have an abortion ‘without cause’ then should not the man have a similar period in which to opt out of fatherhood from a legal perspective. Why can’t the father have 3 months after conception to make a decision as to whether they want to be a father. If the answer is no and the mother still wants to have the baby then the father should not have any legal father status and the mother can then make the decision on whether she wants the baby with that knowledge.

As with many of the discussions on my blog, this is a difficult issue. Inequality goes both ways. We should not expect only the positive things to be equalised for women. Retirement age, maternity leave, combat in armed forces are just a few of the places where inequality exists where a level playing field may or may not be desired. I would imagine that most people agree women should have more maternity leave than a man, most would agree that women should not be in combat on the front line. Many though would not agree with women having earlier retirement age, not least of which because they live longer on average.

So inequality is a tricky subject. But what is clear is that the roles in society of men and women are different. What is needed is a balance on the whole rather than picking specifics and equalising them. It would make an interesting metric. Every pro and con is scored and provided the men and women on average have the same score then we have equality while accepting that we also have difference.