Almost all recent philosophical writing on parental obligations is only comprehensible if you understand that it is written from the starting premise that abortion must be valid. The legitimacy of abortion is taken as a given, and all arguments concerning parental obligations or children's rights are made to conform with this assumption.
The fact that most people who write about the philosophy of the family hold the validity of abortion as a core value and starting premise explains the appeal of the theory of voluntary parental obligations. This theory has a big advantage for pro-choice advocates: it is the only theory which is compatible both with abortion and also with parental obligations. This seems to offer the promise of justifying two incompatible positions together.
If you accept the premise that abortion is valid, logically you cannot accept parental obligations, since the two positions are contradictory. Some pro-choice thinkers straightforwardly accept this inference and therefore deny that parents have any obligations. This was the position that Murray Rothbard and Williamson Evers took. Although I believe they were incorrect, at least their position was logically consistent.
However, many pro-choice thinkers do not want to accept the logical implications of denying parental obligations. Rothbard was honest enough to acknowledge that if you deny parental obligations, it logically follows that parents may legitimately starve their children to death. Although many pro-choice thinkers want a theory that justifies abortion, they do not want that theory to also justify abandonment or neglect.
But the theory of voluntary parental obligations seems to offer pro-choice thinkers a way to have their cake and eat it too. If parental obligations are acquired by voluntary acceptance, then it follows that abortion is valid. A woman can choose not to accept parental obligations, therefore she can legitimately abort a child. However, once a parent has volunteered for obligations, then they cannot later abandon or starve their children. So the theory promises compatibility with abortion but not with abandonment or negligence. This pair of positions is what most pro-choice thinkers want to hold.
However, there are many problems with the theory of voluntary parental obligations. One of the biggest problems is this: If parental obligations only come from voluntary acceptance, then there is no way to hold men responsible for any children that they father. Any man who becomes a father can simply declare that he did not intend to or does not want to have children, and the theory of voluntary obligations would imply that he is free of any enforceable claim on him for parental care.
The advocates of the theory of voluntary obligations are reluctant to accept this clear consequence of their theory. Elizabeth Brake is notable as the only advocate who accepts the logical consequence that men do not acquire obligations to a child by fathering the child. She tries to find a workaround to hold men liable towards the women they impregnate. Her argument is that since pregnancy creates costs to a woman, a man can have some liability for his role in causing her to be pregnant. This argument only relates to the mother and still leaves the child without any claim against the father for parental obligations.
Other advocates of the theory adopt contradictory arguments to maintain that obligations are always voluntary but nonetheless argue that reluctant fathers have obligations even if they do not volunteer for them.
Roderick Long has put forward a mess of double standards in an attempt to provide a theory of parental obligations that would somehow achieve three conflicting aims. On the one hand, he wants reluctant fathers to be on the hook for parental obligations as a result of having sex. On the other hand, he wants reluctant mothers not to be on the hook for parental obligations as a result of having sex (because he wants abortion to be a legitimate choice). And to complicate things further for him, he also doesn't want to legitimise abandonment after birth.
These conflicting aims led Roderick Long to a bizarrely inconsistent theory of parental obligations. He argues that whether a father has any obligation to his child is entirely the choice of the mother, but if the mother does wish it, then the father is positively obligated to provide care based on the father's tacit acceptance of obligations via his action of having had sex. On the other hand, a mother has no positive obligations to her child based on her action of having had sex, but rather if the mother chooses not to have an abortion then this is tantamount to voluntarily accepting the positive obligation not to abandon the child once born. Go figure.
Joseph Millum is another advocate of the theory of voluntary parental obligations who nonetheless tries to argue the contradictory point that reluctant fathers are still obligated even if they don't volunteer. His argument is that social conventions dictate what constitutes tacit voluntary acceptance. In his view, abortion is socially accepted but being a deadbeat dad is not. Similarly to Roderick Long, Millium argues that women can decline parental obligations via abortion but men always tacitly accept the potential of parental obligations by the act of having sex. So men have obligations even if they didn't want a child but women do not. Millum thinks that an explicitly double standard like this is fine as long as it is in line with social conventions, since that is what counts for him.
Why Fathers Have Obligations
There is a theory of parental obligations that has no problem explaining why fathers are accountable to their children. According to the causal theory of parental obligations, this is why parents have obligations:
- Parents are those who voluntarily make their gametes available for fusion, usually through consensual sex or sometimes through artificial means.
- A forseeable outcome of making your gametes available for fusion is the creation of a child.
- A consequence of the act of creating a child is that the child is in a state of peril.
- Therefore parents are responsible for the state of peril of their child. This creates a positive obligation as a tort to get the child out of peril. This means raising the child to the self-sufficiency of adulthood.
- Since the obligation results from the consequences of the parents' voluntary actions and not their intentions or agreement, parents still have obligations even if they didn't intend to create a child or do not want to be parents (with some exceptions).
- Since both parents made their gametes available, both are jointly and severally liable for parental obligations.
Parents have obligations to their children as a result of their actions, not their declared intent. This account of parental obligations is entirely consistent and non-contradictory. It obliges both mothers and fathers. It presents a challenge for most writers on this topic though, because accepting the logic of the argument would force them to reassess one of their most deeply held premises: the assumption that abortion is justified.