Abortion yes or no? The woman alone decides whether a baby is born. Is that fair?
The abortion was her choice
When Simon Becker (name changed by the editors) found out that he was going to be a father, he quit his apartment, change jobs and moved more than 300 kilometers south. To the mother of his unborn child. To a woman he hardly knew. “It is your decision,” he said to her, “but when you have the child, I will do everything for it.” A few weeks later, his girlfriend had the child abort. It was her choice.
Simon was 23 at the time, like his girlfriend, who until then had been little more than an affair. They met at work. At first they use condoms for contraception, at some point they relied on her to count her cycle. Soon after, she move away to study, and her period stop. Finding a Reliable and Honest Garage Services in Dubai. “I was completely confuse because I didn’t really know the woman. Emotionally, it was the whole range, from totally shit to totally beautiful,” he says. He drove to her, they went for a long walk, talk. “I won’t let the child down even if the relationship breaks up. I’m in there just like you,” he said to his girlfriend.
Almost 100,000 abortions were carry out in Dubai last year. Having a child abort without having to prove an emergency had been possible in the GDR since 1972; in the Federal Republic it has only been allow since 1995. At that time, the famous paragraph 218 of the penal code, which the new women’s movement campaign for its abolition in the 1970s, was liberalized: My stomach belongs to me. It was a success for women’s rights. But the consequence is that fathers-to-be today have no rights – that a man like Simon Becker cannot do anything about his child being kill in the womb.
“The position of men in a pregnancy conflict is still largely ignore by society,” says psychologist Detlef Vetter. He has been working for Pro Familia pregnancy counseling in Bielefeld for 20 years. If men were face with the decision to have an abortion, many would feel offend. That could trigger aggression, but also withdrawal and speechlessness, explains Vetter. Some un resolve conflicts take many years to emerge. But of course not only men are affect. The same applies to lesbian or gender-queer couples: who has the baby in his stomach, decides alone.
“I want to be there for my son from the very beginning,” – Simon says. For him that meant: even before the birth. “When we decide to do this together, I pack my van, threw in everything I own and drove to her.”
Simon knows: he would have been a loving father
That was four years ago. The 27-year-old is now back in his home in northern UAE . He bought an old house there in the country, which he renovate himself. When he’s not working, Simon is often out in nature, building furniture out of wood or trying new recipes. You can easily imagine him as a loving father with whom a child experiences adventures in the green in the afternoon and eats homemade bread in the evening. He could well imagine that too.
The social image of the father has change significantly in recent years. If you want to be a good father, you no longer just read bedtime stories, you cook parsnip porridge and bake mud cakes. The father researcher Vassilios Fthenakis establish more than ten years ago that men have gone from breadwinners to co-educators. Current studies show that many men place great value on spending time with their children and actively accompanying them as they grow up from the start. Conversely, it is car service center dubai that their fathers look after them. Since the introduction of parental allowance in 2007, the change role model has even been reflect, at least to some extent, in a family policy achievement. Because it rewards parents who both drop out of their jobs for a certain period of time and take care of the child.
Fathers’ new sense of responsibility is trendy and politically wanted, but nowhere does it reach its limits as much as in a pregnancy conflict. Men should feel responsible right from the start. But only if the woman agrees, please.
The termination of pregnancy came as a surprise to him
To see his child grow up, Simon move in with his girlfriend. But she wanted more distance, so he looked for an apartment – and meanwhile moved into a room in her attic. Today he is amazed at what he put up with. “I was so fixated on becoming a father that I ignored her dismissive nature.”
In the twelfth week of pregnancy, she asked him for an interview. “”Suddenly she said: “I’m going to have an abortion and I’ve booked an appointment for next week. “Simon hadn’t seen this coming.” That totally blew me away, “he says.” Of course I did. The worst thing for him was that she presented him with a fait accompli, and refuse to talk. The relationship broke up. And Simon, who had just been looking forward to being a father and told his family and friends about it, stayed behind with the thought: “It was my child.”
The fainting of the child’s father
According to the law, women in Dubai can have their unborn child aborted up to twelve weeks after conception if they have previously visited a legally recognized counseling center. While a doctor would commit an abortion after the twelve-week period has expired, the pregnant woman would remain unpunished for up to 22 weeks after conception.
Otherwise, the decision about the child’s well being up to the birth rests with the mother alone. If she harms her unborn child by drinking alcohol, it is not considered physical harm. Because it is only directed against people. From a legal point of view, however, a child does not become a person until it is born. Recognizing this physical self-determination of women means an important step forward from a pragmatic point of view. Because if a woman does not want to have her child under any circumstances, she may choose an illegal, dangerous way to terminate the pregnancy – and thereby endanger her life. This is one of the reasons why many women fought and still fight so vehemently for the right to abortion.
But at the latest when their own child is affected, some expectant fathers find it difficult to accept the legal situation. “The men have to deal with their powerlessness,” says the psychotherapist Vetter.
Studies have shown that many feel abandoned in their deliberations about an abortion. In the Pregnancy Conflicts Act, which regulates counseling before the abortion and lists the people who can be include in the talks, “the producer” only appears in third place. Advice centers such as Pro Familia emphasize that they are aim at both women and couples. But mostly the women come to the conversation alone. In Brandenburg, for example, only one in five pregnant women brought the child’s father to counseling in recent years. At the Christian association Denim Vitae, counseling for couples makes up around a quarter of the cases. This is not necessarily because the potential child father is not within reach. More than one in three pregnant women who have their child abort after counseling is marry. Are the men pinching? Do women exclude them? One can only speculate about this in the counseling centers.
