Former tennis champion Jimmy Connors is taking heat for outing the abortion of his 70s girlfriend and tennis champion Chris Evert in his new autobiography, The Outsider.
From a May 20 Slate article by abortion proponent Amanda Marcotte entitled, “Jimmy Connors is woefully out of line on Chris Evert’s abortion”:
Connors is trying to shame Evert by making a spectacle of her private reproductive choices. And while Evert shouldn’t need a defense either way, the memoir seems fantastically unwilling to acknowledge that a tennis star at the top of her game has good reasons for not wanting to be pregnant….
In a statement released on May 9, Chris Evert seemed understandably upset:
“In his book, Jimmy Connors has written about a time in our relationship that was very personal and emotionally painful. I am extremely disappointed that he used the book to misrepresent a private matter that took place 40 years ago and made it public, without my knowledge. I hope everyone can understand that I have no further comment.”
Here’s how I would have phrased it:
Look, Jimmy, it’s totally unfair that some of us can get pregnant and some of us can only impregnate. But in the grand scheme of things, this system brought to us by mindless evolution is much more unfair to women than men. Not only do women have to undergo the indignities of menstruation and routine gynecological care, but if we do get pregnant, we’re the ones who either endure the abortion or have our bodies painfully bent out of shape to bear the child. In exchange, we get decision-making power over those pregnancies. Full stop. The alternative—giving a man the right to force childbirth or force abortion simply because he once had sex with you—is too terrible a violation of human rights to be tolerated in a civilized society.
So stop whining already. You sound like McEnroe.
Marcotte went further than my question does, claiming not only should fathers have no say about killing their offspring, they should say nothing in the event it happens.
What do you think? Is it acceptable to out the mother or father of one’s aborted child?
