This is a guest post in our series on the CTEWC/JMT book entitled Reproduction and the Common Good: Global Perspectives from the Catholic Tradition, co-edited by Simeiqi He and Emily Reimer-Barry. Jacob Kohlhaas responds to Hoon Choi’s chapter in the book. Links to other essays in our series can be found at the end of this essay.
Abortion is on ballots yet again this election cycle, and since the Dobbs decision, states have pursued dramatically different legal paths. While some states protect abortion access at a constitutional level, others have enacted various approaches to restricting and criminalizing abortion.
Most of this legislation targets physicians and other providers, but in some states women themselves can face homicide charges for procuring a medical or chemical abortion. Anyone with direct involvement in an attempted abortion may risk legal consequences. Oddly enough, directly causing a pregnancy or failing to materially assist in carrying a pregnancy to term are not counted as “involvement.”
Two human sex cells are required for reproduction. Only one sex has direct physical control of the timing and emission of their reproductive cells. If pregnancy is the central concern, then male ejaculation is the obvious problem. This isn’t the case in most moral, legal, and political discourse on abortion.
Men who directly cause pregnancies, but do not take parental responsibility, often disappear from the scope of moral concerns. In doing so, they avoid moral and legal consequences for their actions. Aside from child support, which is notoriously inconsistently enforced and often requires women to pursue cases against men who do not hold themselves accountable, repercussions for men who cause pregnancies can be minimal. Men are not generally required to share health expenses, provide personal and financial assistance, or otherwise offer their time and resources to secure a stable environment for children resulting from unexpected pregnancy.
Does it have to be this way? If we are looking for a clear moral and legislative target that would reduce both demand for abortion and secure support for children once born, holding men legally accountable for the consequences of their actions seems important. In other words, ejaculation, not pregnancy, seems a better starting point.
Under ordinary circumstances, any man whose ejaculation results in a pregnancy ought to be compelled to share responsibility for all medical, health, and living expenses throughout the full term of pregnancy as well as the upbringing of the child. Neglecting to contribute their fair share of parental responsibilities at any point from intercourse onwards ought to automatically trigger charges of child endangerment, neglect, and abandonment.
Perhaps this proposal needs a bit more work before it’s ready for a legislature. But, generally speaking, why should it be so strange to imagine holding men who engage in reproductive activity accountable in a comparable way to the standards widely imposed upon women?
In his contribution to Reproduction and the Common Good: Global Perspectives from the Catholic Tradition, Hoon Choi invites us to consider the value of thought experiments such as this for thinking through gender disparities in reproductive justice. Choi is deeply concerned about the disappearance of men in reproductive discourse. How can everyone know that both sexes are required for biological reproduction and yet discussions of carrying or terminating pregnancies tend to center on women’s responsibilities alone? Why is it that we can imagine all manner of ways to regulate women’s behavior during pregnancy and restrict abortion access, but can’t seem to imagine comparable requirements for the men who participate in bringing about pregnancy?
As Choi contends, a failure of our moral imaginations is at fault. Men don’t simply disappear from this discourse, they are made “strategically invisible” by moral imaginations that carry long held biases. The imaginative landscape through which these issues are considered is shaped by deeper issues of racial supremacy and gender privilege that continue to direct and foreclose avenues of moral consideration.
In a 2022 essay for the Journal of Moral Theology, I also wrote about the need for society and Catholic Theology to embrace a larger imaginative scope for conceptions of fatherhood. I argued that as understandings of gender identity and gender roles shift both within families and within larger society, theologians and communities of faith have done little to extend the imaginative scope of male identity.
While I fully accept that men enjoy unique and deeply rooted social privileges that require moral attention, my concern was for how limited constructive attention to the imaginative possibilities of male social parenthood limit possibilities for male self-understanding.
The need to augment healthy and productive narratives of masculine identity remains pronounced. Warnings that young men have lost their way are common across media platforms. Unfortunately, instead of expanding moral imaginations to include a wider range of male identity based in the human dignity and social equity, many of the loudest voices have seized the opportunity to launch polemical attacks on political correctness, woke ideology, and gender confusion. Reasserting rather than upsetting toxic patterns of masculinity through imagined retrievals of traditional values.
This reactionary response to naming and calling out toxic forms of masculinity speaks to the displacement viscerally experienced when our moral imaginations lack the capacity to extend in new directions.
Choi’s chapter similarly takes up the connection between failures of the imagination and toxic social patterns. He also deftly identifies many ways in which men are not held to even remotely comparable standards of sexual and reproductive responsibility as well as the sparsity of imaginative resources for assisting both men and the larger society in better identifying male responsibility in reproductive justice.
In response, Choi provides examples that help the reader imagine wider perspectives on male roles in reproductive responsibility than are generally available. Choi’s examples are frequently provocative but also calculated to expose unevenness between gendered moral imaginations and legal realities.
Arguably, some of the examples are more provocative than precise. For example, Choi follows Jung’s moral comparison of abortion to organ donation. While the example is illustrative of some facets of the issues, other examples could provide greater continuity. For example, the analogy of rendering aid to an injured stranger preserves the directness and personal consequences at stake in pregnancy while also offering a stronger parallel to the interpersonal dimension and unexpectedness of an unplanned pregnancy.
To engage in evaluating these comparisons, or to think through their applicability, or to imagine alternative metaphors is to participate in the activity Choi wishes to evoke. Choi’s argument entices the reader into taking up the task of imagining ourselves in another’s shoes, particularly as the recipients of the moral standards of others.
To be clear, Choi is not making an argument for situation based or morally relativist ethics. A commitment to coherent and consistent moral principles are central to the argument. What he exposes, however, is just how often the positions we take for granted expose biases and inconsistencies in their applications. In this sense, Choi’s essay is something of a heuristic experiment in Kant’s categorical imperative or a creative take on Rawl’s veil of ignorance. The central point is how our positioning and our social conditioning influence how we identify what is morally significant. Instead of simply acknowledging this, Choi provokes us to learn to actively expand our imaginative possibilities.
The content of Choi’s essay could be used productively in a classroom setting, especially in an environment where students feel comfortable expressing ideas to which they are not definitively committed. Evaluating Choi’s examples, arguing over their fitness, and proposing alternatives would be a rewarding educational exercise.
One concern for classroom application, however, is that Choi’s careful but somewhat extenuated set up to the arguments may lose students before they encounter the heart of the argument. Spending a bit less time getting to the point and a bit more time pointing to the possibilities would have been beneficial in terms of classroom use.
But this criticism pales in comparison to the work Choi has done in creating a framework for extending particularly male imaginations that may help them to better understand their own place, complicities, and possibilities within the present standards of reproductive justice. Choi doesn’t insist on where this must lead in terms of ethics or social policies. He offers an invitation for practice that might help break through the simplistic and often reactionary thinking that is endemic to our highly polarized religious and political discourse.
With both a national election on the horizon as well as a Synod in Rome at least somewhat interested in discerning women’s roles within the Church, Choi’s piece could not be timelier. It invites us all to step back and open our imaginations in ways that expose existing biases and invite new moral possibilities.
Jacob M. Kohlhaas is Associate Professor of Moral Theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he teaches a range of courses in theology, ethics, and general education. His research centers on theological anthropology and relationships. He is author of Beyond Biology: Rethinking Parenthood in the Catholic Tradition (Georgetown University Press, 2021) and co-editor, with Mary Doyle Roche, of Modern Catholic Family Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (Georgetown University Press, 2024).
CMT Series Links: The introduction to the blog series was written by Simeiqi He and can be found here. Taylor Ott’s response to the Introduction can be found here. Dr. Ann Mary Madavanakkad’s response to Virginia Saldanha’s chapter can be found here. We are grateful to all of the CMT contributors for sharing their time and expertise as they engage the edited volume’s chapters.
