| Actually abortion is part of it (i.e,. no equivalent opt-out for economic reasons) but where the parents have never been married, you also have the fact that over half of never-married mothers never seek child support. This means that never-married fathers have few if any rights that are not contingent first on responsibilities, while never-married mothers control the legal process every step of the way. In fact, the mother is not (and cannot be) legally required even to inform the father that he is a father and can hence give up the child for adoption without the father being able to assert custody. There is no solution to this problem (of equality in parenting for never-married couples) that we as a society can live with, so it is then obvious that fathers cannot be legally or socially equal parents. Now among married couples this comes into play too but differently. If a woman has an affair and gets pregnant by another man and the husband doesn't find out about it for, say, 3 years, the child is legally his and even if they divorce he may have to support someone else's child. This means that for women, motherhood is both a biological and social fact, but for men fatherhood is purely a social/legal fact. BTW, this also raises interesting issues--- it means that because as men and women can never be equal parents in our society, the ways in which we enforce this also mean that same-sex couples can not be fully equal to opposite-sex couples--- they either end up legally favored or disfavored depending on how presumption of paternity works in a given state. |