Recently I found out about a legal battle that just infuriates me. Most sensible people agree that a woman’s body is her property and she has the right to her body, that she can have an abortion or not if she so chooses. Few people ever think about a man’s right to his body and his half of the child equation. Yet that question is raging in a legal battle over IFV, or in-vitro fertilization.
Four years ago, Augusta Roman and her husband were going through with IFV in order to have a child. A short time before the embryos were to be implanted, Augusta’s husband, Randy felt that the marriage was not as stable as he would like in order to bring a child into the world. They agreed to halt the procedure and go through marriage counseling. After sixteen months of counseling, the couple got divorced, and according to the legal documents they both filled and signed with the IFV clinic, if they got divorced, the embryos were to be destroyed. Augusta disagreed.
In 2004, a district court judge agreed with Augusta and awarded her the embryos. Devastated that the courts took a part of him and told him that he had no rights to that part of his body, Randy appealed to the Texas Appellate court. After a short deliberation, the appeals judge sided with Randy, saying that the contract was quite clear and that the embryos were to be destroyed. Augusta then appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, which agreed with the appellate court. Now Augusta is appealing all the way to the United States Supreme court.
Augusta’s argument is that any embryo as soon as it becomes fertilized is automatically her property and she has a constitutional right to make all decisions regarding that property. If that embryo had been implanted inside her I would agree. In order to do anything with it if it was inside her against her will, would be a violation of her body. But right now the embryo is outside of her body, and it is not solely hers. It is her egg, fertilized by her ex-husband’s sperm. It is a part of his body as well and he should be allowed to make decisions about the things that affects his body.
Making Randy Roman a father against his will, is in my mind a form of rape, not as violent or equal to the sexual kind, but a violation all the same. It is a violation of his body, and his right to decide whether or not to become a father. To side with Augusta sends a clear message, men have no reproductive rights and that the woman has all the rights when it comes to reproduction.
There are several similar cases of this kind of exploitation and rape of a man. A woman who gave her boyfriend oral sex saved the sperm in vials after he left and impregnated herself without his knowledge and against his will. After the child was born, she hit him up for child support, and even though he never had sex with her was forced to pay child support to the woman. Even though she used and violated him, the woman in question was never charged with a crime or punished for her duplicitous and malicious actions.
Actions like these show the contempt shown to men about their reproductive rights, and a disturbing trend for the future. We should protect and enforce reproductive rights for women, but what about reproductive rights for men?
