What's the better option?

In my opinion, Valenti’s article was a little hard to perceive. Child abandonment is not something everyone deals with at some point in life, but apparently it happens more than we expect. Reading that parents in Nebraska readily took advantage of new legislation making it legal for them to abandon their children, was appalling. It was even more shocking to read that the majority of them were not young children. They were teenagers that were fully aware of what was happening to them. They could recognize that their parents, for whatever reason, had given up as being parents. The first thing I did after reading this article was relating it to the documentary, After Tiller. The pro-choice/pro-life debate in this country has so many talking points and so many sides, but this part is rarely mentioned. People who do not want to be parents are typically not going to make good parents. Most often, people do not enjoy and do not excel at something they are not passionate about. Maybe legalizing abortion would be in the best interest of states because it would keep people from having unwanted children and in the end, limit child abandonment. But then again, how is either killing an unborn fetus or abandoning them a good choice for a parent who does not want them?

Not everyone wants to have kids, and no one has to have kids, but I believe those without the desire need to take extra precautions in preventing pregnancy. Everyone has a responsibility to their own body and therefore, women have a responsibility to a child their body may produce. Today, there are options, and child abandonment or neglect should never be a result. Unfortunately for women, more pressure is given to them when they become pregnant. It seems more acceptable for a man to opt out of the life of his child when it is still in the womb, because he is not physically attached to the fetus. We discussed in class the difference between men and women when it comes to raising a child and it seems as if women are placed under more pressure to be the primary caregiver to their children. Biology plays a major part in this since women are the parent physically attached to the child, therefore making abandonment seem that much worse for a woman. Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done to change this discrepancy because there is no way to change the biological structure of having a child.