Posted on April 17, 2010.
When Oral Sex Results in pregnancy, and men can never evade their paternity? In a lawsuit against his ex-girlfriend, Richard O. Phillips said that about six years ago, he engaged in oral sex with her. Unbeknownst to Phillips, said he, his girlfriend, Sharon Irons, have saved the resulting semen and used it to inseminate. A pregnancy resulted, Irons gave birth to a baby, and DNA tests proved Phillips to be the genetic father.
While Phillips would not aware of either pregnancy or birth until some time later, a court nonetheless ordered to pay about $ 800 per month in child support.
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Irons disputes Phillips said she and her child conceived in the usual manner. For purposes of this column only, however, I will assume the truth of the allegations of Philips.
Phillips suit originally contained allegations of theft, fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress. A Court of Appeal of Illinois, however, dismissed the theft and fraud claims a few weeks ago, allowing only the action of emotional distress to go forward.
The facts of this case raises important questions about the contours of the human right - if any - to avoid paternity.
A Woman's right to control the paternity
When a woman becomes pregnant, the man who impregnated some legal rights in respect of that pregnancy. It can not, for example, require the woman to remain pregnant if she chooses to abort. However, it can not force her to abort if it wants to remain pregnant and give birth.
Whether the right to become a parent or to avoid becoming a parent, then outweighs the choice of the pregnant woman the father of the pregnancy. In addition, if the woman chooses to go forward with the pregnancy, the father is legally responsible for child support.
All this may seem quite unfair. If a man has no control over paternity, then why should he have to pay for the resulting child? Do not normally come with responsibilities rights and vice versa?
One reason for the inequality between women and men surrounding pregnancy are disparate physical circumstances in which a pregnant woman and the man who impregnated her, respectively, are located. To give a man a say in the incorporated or not a pregnant woman and left her door and her child is actually to give him dominion over his partner.
As the plurality opinion of Justice stated in three crucial Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey , where the Supreme Court has refused to cancel the Roe v. Wade and therefore annulled the provision of a husband-notification law in Pennsylvania, it is a fact of biological regulation by the state in relation to the child of a woman is in the process will have a far greater impact on freedom of the mother as the father. The effect of government regulation on protected freedom of a woman is doubly worthy of review in such cases, the State has touched not only on the private sphere of the family, but the limb most of the pregnant woman. "
Providing otherwise would give a man not just a voice whether or not it acquires the status of parent. It authorizes him to order the invasion of a woman's body, or destroy it wants to continue a pregnancy, or force it to support a pregnancy, she wants to end.
As the Justices also said Casey, "the Court now recognizes that, in the case of abortion, freedom of the woman who is involved in a unique sense of the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who ca.
