The rights and responsibilities of men in abortion situations

Abstract

In recent years, much controversy has surrounded the abortion issue. For the most part, this has centered on the question of women's rights-whether or not women should be allowed to have an abortion and, if so, under what conditions. Little attention has been focused on men's rights and responsibilities in an abortion situation. Past research on men and abortion has focused primarily on the emotional consequences of having a wife or girlfriend seek an abortion XGordon, 1978; Gordon & Kilpatrick, 1977), on demographic and personality characteristics of men who accompany women for abortions (LiehMak, Tam, & Ng, 1979; Rothstein, 1978), and on men's perception of how abortion affected their dyadic relationships with women (Smith,1980). Recently, interest and concern have been expressed regarding whether or not a man has legal rights and responsibilities in an abortion situation (Court TwoSteps Husband's Right, 1983), but there is little or no research in this area. A related research issue is how an abortion decision is made. Mirande and Hammer (1976) propose a model that incorporates the number of times a woman has been in love and her coital experiences with her acceptance of abortion. Others have related abortion attitudes to sex-role attitudes (Finlay, 1981; Rosen & Martindale, 1978), to moral reasoning (Smetana, 1981) and to religiosity (Jones & Westoff, 1978). However, all of these models involve only the woman. Should the abortion decision ever be a two-person process rather than a one-person decision? How should a man be involved in the decisionmaking process, and does this depend on the depth of his relationship with the woman? The two studies described here explored college students' attitudes toward men's rights, responsibilities, and involvement in the abortion decisionmaking process. The statements in the initial study were chosen simply to assess opinions regarding what rights a man should have in abortion decisions. The second study assessed opinions about the responsibilities as well as the rights of men in abortion situations that varied in intimacy of the relationship and the person-the man or woman-wanting the abortion. In this preliminary investigation, the opinions of college students on the following exploratory questions were considered: {a) Will a woman's opinion regarding an abortion carry more weight than a man's? (b) Will the mans opinion be considered more important in more intimate, versus less intimate,