Responsibilities to the Father

Pregnancy is a tumultuous time in any parent’s life, particularly when it comes to personal autonomy and expanding responsibilities toward a family. Through it all, a bond can develop between a mother and her unborn child that is unlike any other. But who is often forgotten in these discussions? The partner—particularly the father in cisgender relationships, or, in cases involving surrogacy, the intended parent or parents who are not carrying the pregnancy.

As a cis woman, I’m going to have the audacity to play devil’s advocate for the non-pregnant parent and consider how the choices made during pregnancy can affect the child’s other parent as well. This is my opinion piece on a complicated question: How much input, if any, should a father have regarding decisions that could affect his child during pregnancy?

Some time ago, during a venue changeover on New Year’s Eve, my date and I were quietly sitting on a curb outside a bar. As we waited for our designated driver to pick us up, we overheard two women discussing a passerby who had told one of them, who was heavily pregnant, to put out her cigarette.

As she continued smoking, the pregnant woman complained to her friend that even if people publicly shamed her for smoking, what was stopping her from staying home and getting drunk or high instead? Her friend chimed in that she had frequently gotten high during her own pregnancy and had seen no ill effects in her child as a result—a possibly biased assessment on her part.

My date and I heard the whole conversation and said nothing.

When our driver picked us up and we were on our way to the next event of the evening, I asked my date what he thought about the conversation.

His response was blunt: “She shouldn’t do that to another guy’s kid.”

I asked him what he meant, and he raised something I hadn’t really considered before. He thought it was unfair to the child’s father to have no say while watching the other parent make choices that could potentially affect the health of a child he would also be responsible for raising. Even if the parents were no longer together, he pointed out, the father might still share the emotional, practical, and financial consequences of any resulting health problems.

I realized he had a point worth considering. Those women weren’t making choices that affected only themselves. Smoking or using certain substances during pregnancy can also affect fetal development, which means the consequences can potentially extend to the child and, by extension, the other parent.

That creates an uncomfortable gray area between a pregnant woman’s right to bodily autonomy and questions about responsibility toward a pregnancy she has chosen to continue. To be clear, I am not discussing abortion here. That is a separate issue and outside the scope of this post.

The legal and ethical distinction becomes particularly interesting once a child is born. Society generally accepts that parents have considerable freedom in how they live their own lives, but there are limits on what they may expose their children to. Yet pregnancy complicates that distinction because the fetus remains physically dependent upon—and inside—the body of another person. Protecting one cannot easily be separated from regulating the other.

And that is where seemingly well-intentioned rules can become troubling.

When does concern for a developing child become interference with a pregnant person’s right to self-determination? Questions of well-being can become difficult very quickly once we start trying to separate medical evidence from opinion and personal preference from genuine necessity.

Should a partner, for example, have the authority to prevent a pregnant spouse from eating foods they consider unhealthy? How could such a rule possibly be enforced without becoming invasive? What happens when a pregnant woman needs medication that carries some potential risk to fetal development but is also important for her own health? If a child is later born with an illness or disability, how could anyone establish that a particular decision during pregnancy caused it?

More importantly, granting partners legal authority over these decisions could create opportunities for controlling or abusive behavior toward pregnant women, who may already face enormous social pressure about virtually everything they eat, drink, take, and do.

That brings me back to the distinction between having input and having control.

Ultimately, it may take a village to raise a child, but that does not necessarily mean the village should have authority over a pregnant woman’s body. Outside of extreme circumstances, bodily autonomy remains an important principle. At the same time, I don’t think acknowledging bodily autonomy requires pretending that the other parent has no legitimate emotional investment in what happens during the pregnancy.

Perhaps the more reasonable expectation is not that one partner should have legal control over the other, but that both parents should recognize that decisions made during a wanted pregnancy can affect a family they will eventually share.

The pregnant parent has the body in which the pregnancy is occurring. The other parent still has a relationship with—and responsibilities toward—the child who may eventually be born. Those two realities can exist simultaneously, even when balancing them becomes uncomfortable.

So where should that line be drawn? When does individual autonomy meet familial responsibility during pregnancy, and how can couples navigate that conflict without turning concern into control?