An interesting view on the abortion debate

Writing last week in the Church of England Newspaper, Alan Storkey suggests that men who are responsible for pregnancies should be charged either half their annual salary or £10,000 (whichever is the greater) in recompense to the women they've impregnated, if they have no intention of being a father to the child. As Alan says, it's pretty easy to determine paternity, and work out who needs to cough up the dough.

Alan goes on to predict the consequence of such a demand:

The suggestion would promote an outcry from men talking about women who were "on the make", but the remedy for this problem lies in their own pants. Really the outcry would be about a loss of male sexual autonomy, the right many men believe they have to have sex and ignore the consequences, and it would provoke strong male opposition. Yet, abortions are consequences, and men should pay recompense for the consequence of a difficult operation they have in part caused women to have.

The move needs more careful formulation than it can be given here, and it does not directly address the sanctity of life, but it does address the self-pleasing male, sowing social problems in a still male-dominated world.

What I like about this is that it's a bit out of the box. As Alan points out - one of the problems with unwanted preganancies is the attitude of feminist campaigners who know "abortions or single parenthood deeply compromise women's lives, but then they back off on the understanding that boys will be boys."

"But," says Alan, "of course, suprememly here, boys must be men. This is one of the prime responsibilities of life and it is unaddressed at law."

Of all the stuff flying around at the moment regarding the HFE bill and a lower limit on abortion, this is one of the few things I've read which I think is both clever and addresses a root cause of abortion instead of throwing a judgmentall strop once it's too late to prevent some kind of tragedy - an abortion, or the birth of an unwanted child - taking place.