Easy listening continues to haunt us

   In all the debates that have blown up lately over abortion rights, one thing has really surprised me--how many men are neither pro-choice nor pro-life but more strictly anti-women's rights.  I was under the impression that the pro-life movement had wooed most of the men who had a problem with women's rights over to their side, since they offer the ready-made excuse:  No, we're not against women's rights, this is about saving babies!  (Anti-feminists that are fighting wage equality have the same type of excuse--claim you're all for equal pay for equal work and then fight to keep women out of higher-paying jobs.)
   But the inherent problem with the pro-life stance is that if abortion is made illegal, men cannot take advantage of it as easily.  After all, if a woman wants an abortion and her boyfriend wants one too, then he's getting punished for having sex too!  I've always wondered how men who were "pro-life" dealt with that problem.  Some really are pro-life and they figure they'll just suck it up and take care of babies they didn't want.  And of course, there are the hypocrites that are well-represented in leadership positions in the right who decry abortion in public knowing that even if it's illegal they will be able to pay for it if need be. 
   For everyone else, there is a hole.  And I've learned what's filling it up these past few days--a hazy concept of men's rights.  The idea is that if a man impregnates a woman, he has a right to tell her what to do with it.  You can see examples here and here.  The logic is that since any child born is half the father's responsibility, he has 50% ownership rights to the pregnancy, which only seems to mean that men have total veto power over a woman's right to an abortion.  It's not really more complex than that; the legalistic crap is all to obscure the question of what to do when a woman wants one thing and her man wants another.

   Thinking about all this, I've decided to blame Paul Anka.  Not only is "Having My Baby" probably the worst song ever written, it reinforced the most unscientific belief that men make babies and women just carry them.  We can only be grateful that he didn't decide to make the song part of a series explicating the number of situations where, out of sheer feminine love of men, women do the work that men will be laying claim to.  Think of the horror if he had--"Making My Dinner", "Cleaning My House", "Raising My Children".  Well, for one thing, karaoke sure as hell would not be nearly as fun.