On poking and owning

Okay, so the Ohio state legislature is working on a bill that would put any source of fresh sperm in charge of any uterus said sperm encountered. Under House Bill 287, any woman seeking an abortion would have to produce a signed note from the sperm donor saying that it's okay to terminate the pregnancy.

In other words, if a woman doesn't want to be pregnant, but her abusive husband/date rapist/stepfather/creepy pastor/one-night stand/vindictive ex won't sign the paper, that uterus is going to be "no vacancy" for the next nine months, and there's not a damn thing she can do about it. Why? Because he planted his man flag in her uterus, dammit, he planted his seed, and whether or not he even wants the kid, he has every right to make her endure the risks and hardships of carrying it against her will.

Luckily, there's a very simple solution to this problem. If a man and a woman shared, say, a special edition box set of Seinfeld DVDs, and she decided she didn't want it anymore, she wouldn't throw it away - she'd give it to the man. And he'd by no means force her to hold on to them, just because he wanted to keep them - he'd take them off her hands.

So if a woman is pregnant with a man's fetus, and she no longer wants to be, the reasonable thing to do would be to give the fetus to the man, let him finish gestating it in his uterus, and everyone’s happy.

At that point, of course, it's the man's responsibility to provide adequate facilities to raise a fetus to adulthood, but that shouldn't be too much trouble, right? It's no more than he was expecting of the woman who had custody of the fetus in the first place. The Ohio state legislature is right in saying that a man deserves a say in the disposition of any fetus that's half-his. It just doesn't make sense that he'd have any right to store it in another person's uterus without her permission.