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Pro-choice? Pro-life?
I heard this story a while ago and I still can't quite understand it. I'll call the people involved Rick and Jenna. So, the two of them dated for a couple of months, but soon Jenna got pregnant. She was 19 at the time. She wanted to have an abortion (I don't know her, so I don't know why - I can just guess that she had her reasons.) However, Rick was strongly opposed to it - he said that if she didn't want to keep the baby, she should give her/him up for adoption. She still wanted to have the abortion, so Rick broke up with her.
What confuses me here is that Rick is pro-choice and even feminist! He tells things like 'women should have control over their bodies', or 'if men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament'. I would have thought that he changed his beliefs, but he still resents his ex-girlfriend and blames her that she 'probably didn't want to get fat'. What's the deal here?! (Btw I don't think he was looking forward to fatherhood, he suggested adoption if Jenna didn't want to be a mother, but he didn't suggest she have the baby and then leave it with him, for example)
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It is easier to be for or against anything when one has no personal experience with it. This could be about abortion, war, homosexuality, drug use, anything really that divides people, most of whom have limited knowledge or experience with what they have judged good or bad for humanity as individuals or as society as a whole. We are barely equiped as humans to make personal choices that affect mostly ourselves, let alone try to make the inappropriate leaps we do everyday in assuming judgement over others and their personal decisions. "Rick" is by no means out of the ordinary in his reaction. He had no emotional attachment to other women's fetuses. Maybe he had some sense of responsibility or feeling for the one he helped create in his girlfriend's body. This would certainly be likely, but it is also possible that through this experience he realized that his male opinion on abortion has no importance in a woman's right over her own body and that he was entirely powerless and unneeded in making her decision. Whether or not the male wants the woman to "keep the baby," the male ego most always wants to have at least some part in that decision.
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I think there are a few things worth noting here.
Firstly, people can have a set of opinions that they think are politically justified and correct, but feel different when they are directly involved in the situation. This can be just plain hypocrisy of the not-in-my-back-yard variety, but sometimes it comes from the best intentions. I myself identify as being pro-choice and think the protection of abortion rights is extremely important. That however doesn't mean that I know how I'd react if I myself ever became pregnant unintentionally. I might feel that for me, it just wasn't an option, and I would hope that if I did this nobody would criticise me for being hypocritical if I made such a decesion.
Perhaps your friend Rick is like this. Politically, he thinks abortion and choice are important, but he finds this difficult to reconcile with his own personal feelings that this is his potential child. Within the abortion debate it is easy to forget that the foetus is the man's too, and he may have conflicting feelings about it as much as the woman does. I don't think you need to be looking forward to impending parenthood to feel this conflict. If Jenna felt like this she might have had the baby and given it up for adoption, and we wouldn't see that as incoherent. It's a little odd that he so strongly defends choice politically and so strongly fights against it on a personal level in his relationship, but I don't think his emotions are rare.
I admit that his comment that she probably just didn't want to get fat seems off for somebody who supposedly identifies as feminist, but I guess we don't know the full circumstances and maybe the remark comes from bitterness after an unpleasant break up against a difficult background.
He might also be somebody who is pro-choice but doesn't believe in unlimited access to abortion. The pro-choice movement encompasses a wide-range of beliefs, and very few support absolute access to abortion at any time for any reason - few for example would hypothetically support a woman who sought an abortion at 8 and a half months because she was sick of being fat or a scan had revealed the foetus was ugly. Although I am always personally suspicious of arguments such as this (I don't believe anyone takes abortion that lightly), you note that you don't know what Jenna's reasons were, so perhaps Rick has more reasons that we can currently guess to be angry, upset or hurt by Jenna's actions.
It's not incoherent to be pro-choice and still believe that a foetus has some rights: Judith Jarvis Thomson for example argued that a foetus has only a right not to be killed unjustly. This makes abortion morally permissible in some scenarios (for example, if the health or wellbeing of the mother is jeopardised by the foetus) but still allows that a foetus has some right to protection. Although I would expect a self-identified feminist to allow quite broad reasons to count towards justifying abortion, perhaps in his personal circumstances (which we do not know fully) Rick felt that there weren't sufficient reasons to justify abortion.
I wouldn't write Rick off as being a hypocrite. This situation was probably far more difficult than he imagined it would be, and though in criticising his former partner he isn't behaving in the best way possible, I think it's entirely understandable that he's confused and hurt.
All the best.
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In a way I am very similar to Rick in this story. I am pro-choice to the point where everyone has the right to do whatever they want when it comes to their own body but I also don't think abortion should be misused. It's justified when rape is involved or if there's a health risk/danger to the mother but other than that I think there is no need for it especially since it is abused and used as a last resort for birth control. It's what condoms and such is for - if you're going to have sex then think ahead. This said I don't judge anyone by their choice because at the end of the day it is after all their choice, I just don't think the option of being able to have an abortion should be abused.
I think another thing that may have been an issue here is the fact that although Rick had no intention of being a father or looking after the kid himself he still knew deep down that it was his baby as well. Something like that, and knowing that someone killed it, could have quite an impact on him hence he decided to break up with her for her choice.
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