Give a Man a Baby

If you give a woman a child, the paradigm changes to being about nurturing and growth. 

The focus for the man, no matter how much training he has received on teamwork, is ultimately on his personal survival. 

For the woman, it’s all about the child and its future. And by extrapolation, the future of the planet. 

Yes, these may be oversimplified assumptions and there exist many permutations but, who can deny the gut truth of such generalizations? 

The question then becomes how much is cooked into the X and Y chromosomes from before the mists of recorded history, and how much is culturally cultivated and has been grafted onto successive generations. 

Long gone are the decades when the need to physically protect gestating females in the bush, where infant mortality required child-bearers to be kept pregnant to perpetuate tribal continuity, and required men to be constantly aggressive individuals. 

Can men be reprogrammed to focus on survival of the species instead of the individual? 

This is a peculiarly pertinent question in the United States of America where individual rights have been enshrined in law and Constitution, too often to the detriment of the general good.

Just how could men be reprogrammed to strengthen their tender and caring muscles? Or at least shift the pointer on the self-interest scale to include basic rights for the health of growing children from pre-natal nurture through the university years. 

Perhaps inject men in their late teens with fetuses and make them grow them, nurse them, clean up after them and pay for them. This would be a graduate program in humanitarian ethos, preparing them for a care-oriented future and providing the child with a host in peak physical condition. 

Concurrently, the women would go to work and, almost certainly, make significantly different decisions than are made in today’s male-dominated environment. 

Decisions that would enshrine healthcare as a human right, provide strong public schools for everybody, and ensure living wage jobs for all Americans so that parents could spend quality time with their families while contributing to their communities. 

But let’s leave out parental leave for the first few years so men can really appreciate the joy of being alone and eight months pregnant with screaming toddler twins underfoot while trying to prepare dinner. 

At the same time women could be reimagining both agriculture and supply chains to provide an abundance of fresh nourishing food for all while reducing global warming. 

They could focus on making governments work for the people not for profiteers, defunding wars and corporate welfare. 

Afterwards, women could decide if having a child would be the right choice for her, or if her needs for validation had already been met by what she had already accomplished. 

Don’t point at obstructions. This is the era of anything is possible. 

Red tape is just an excuse politicians and companies use to game the system and earn more money individually at the expense of public good. 

And if people’s needs are being met, demagogues will have no targets to vilify and everyone, of every color, creed and sexual identity, will be free to live their lives to the fullest. 

Revisiting men bearing babies: if a fetus dies – whether deliberately, due to neglect, or just Mother Nature spontaneously cutting off the development of a flawed egg – that man would then be charged with murder and convicted. Remember that in some states, as a felon he would be denied the right to ever vote again. 

Furthermore, if that man is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer when the fetus was in its first trimester, when only chemotherapy could save the man’s life but would damage the fetus, in many jurisdictions the choice is now clear. 

In the United States, those metastasizing cells that could eventually develop into a baby legally have a higher priority on the host body than the man himself. If he dies from cancer before the fetus is viable, the state can just hook him up to life-sustaining machinery to ensure the best chance for fetal survival and discard the carcass of the host after the child is born. 

The current “personhood” argument also brings up the issue of embryos in IVF and other fertility treatments. Do these zygote-gamete pairings also have a right to life? 

Who would pay to ensure labs don’t commit murder when flushing fetal matter? 

Who would pay to bring them to term artificially? And what would their quality of life be in society since they would not have parent-advocates to curtail any abuse and neglect? Could their status be the next generation of slaves? 

In the wake of Dobbs and the imposition of some pretty draconian state laws, old and new, elected officials and anti-abortion activists are celebrating their new power by looking to expand it further into more personal parts of people’s private lives, including overturning Griswold and Eisenstadt which guarantee access to contraception. 

Others are looking forward to banning emergency contraception outright which would force rape and incest victims to carry their rapist’s child from the moment it was conceived for nine long months before giving birth in pain and misery. 

Chad Meredith, once rumored to be Biden’s anti-abortion pick for a Kentucky judgeship to curry favor with his nemesis Mitch McConnell, defended a state law requiring doctors to perform an ultrasound and describe the image to the patient before providing abortion care claiming “a number of patients… don’t understand the nature of the fetus within them.” 

Oh, we do. 

But is mandating a frightened woman submit to ultrasonic waves to illuminate the contents of her uterus any more caring than aliens using anal probes on other innocent Americans? 

Why do these people get off on torturing women who have already suffered trauma? 

Guys! No woman ever goes out and says “I feel like an abortion today, I really love doctors sticking metal implements up my vagina, feels so good when I stand up and fall over from the anesthesia, or get a secondary infection. 

“Whee!! What fun! My body feels so alive, I want to start dancing and tell everyone on TikTok to join me in aborting as the best form of contraception.”

(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)