False analogies, women's rights edition

...or, People who try to make things which are Very Far Apart sound Very Close Together (and Need a Smack Therefore)

John Scalzi & company on the push for a so-called 'Roe v. Wade for Men':

...here's the deal: If you have a sex with a fertile woman, you may just fertilize her. It's implicit in having sex, even if you've done everything short of not having sex to avoid it. If you want to have sex without the risk of fertilization, get a vasectomy, boink post-menopausal women, or have sex with men. Those are your options...

...The argument here, as I understand it, is that if a woman has the choice to end a pregnancy, a man should have the choice not to pay support for a child he didn't want. The problem is that these are not equivalent issues.

A woman can end her pregnancy because it involves her person, and every person should have the right to say what happens to his or her body, up to and including hosting another human inside it. Paying child support has not a single thing to do with that; it has to do with some twit not wanting to deal with the consequences of his actions. Certainly the woman has to deal with the consequences of her actions: she must either have the child, and then support it or put it up for adoption, or she must end her pregnancy. For some dick to walk away from all responsibility on the weak excuse of "hey, I didn't want that," is monstrous. God knows men already do that; the last thing we need to do is give them legal cover.

And from one of his commenters:

Getting pregnant is a life threatening condition. Even in America, women DIE because they get pregnant... As a man, nothing a man could say could compete with this.

A "pain in the financial ass" never compares to "you could die".

On a broader note, Scalzi again:

...[the Christian man arrested in Afghanistan] reminds me again of a little rule of thumb I use to decide just how seriously I need to take a religious or political leader, which is [to] know at what point he decides women have had enough of that whole "rights" thing. If the answer is "at some point less than the rights of men," then I don't entirely feel the fellow has the moral standing to lecture me about a single goddamned thing. The fellows above, hooting for the death of this convert, strike me as the sort who would get concerned about the evils of women wearing slacks, so you can imagine what I feel is their level of moral authority.

Of course, let's not get too proud over here, shall we. We've got lots of folks who are happy for women to wear slacks, true enough, but don't trust them to run their own bodies.

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