The argument is specious, of course, but that doesn't matter to those who employ it since it packs an emotional wallop which obscures its logical inadequacies.
Even so, it's worth the effort to unwind its shortcomings, and Roland C. Warren does just that in a recent column at the The Federalist.
Warren, who is the president of a large network of pregnancy centers called Care Net, writes that,
I have heard this challenge to men so often that I have coined it the “no womb/no say” perspective. In short, since a man does not have a womb to carry an unborn child, he should have no say in what happens to an unborn child in the womb.There's an irony in the attempt by pro-choice organizations which otherwise exclude men from having an opinion on the issue to nevertheless recruit men to support abortion rights. There's an even greater irony, as Warren observes, in the fact that the Supreme Court, which in 1973 discovered the right to terminate a developing human being hidden away somewhere in the shadows of the Constitution, was comprised of a group of old, white men.
Anyway, Warren defines the “no womb/no say” principle as the claim that, "Unless one is impacted by an issue or action in the most direct way, one should have no agency in making decisions about that issue or action", and proceeds to demonstrate that the claim is absurd:
Should a woman who is a stay-at-home mom and, therefore, makes no income outside the home, have a say on tax policy? After all, she doesn’t directly pay taxes for an income. Or, should someone who does not own a gun or has never been injured by a gun have a say in what our nation’s gun laws should be? Again, a non-gun owner is not going to be directly impacted if the access to guns is limited.Of course, it could be objected that in each of these examples people are, or were, affected by the policies and that's what entitles them to voice an opinion on them, but surely abortion doesn't just affect the mother and her unborn child (who might well be male, after all). A policy which allows 1.5 million unborn children to be killed every year is surely a policy that affects all of us, if not directly then indirectly.
[C]onsider the Civil War. The South was primarily an agrarian society that, in large measure, was structured and directly dependent on slave labor. Indeed, a key aspect of the South’s “states’ rights” argument was that since the North’s society and economic system would not be as directly impacted by the abolition of slavery, the North should have no say. Indeed, “no slaves/no say” was the South’s proverbial battle cry.
Also consider the issue of voting rights in the United States. From our nation’s founding, voting rights were limited to property owning or tax paying white males, who were about 6 percent of the population. So the notion was “no property/no say.” And even when voting rights were extended to other men, women were excluded. Why? Because the view held by many men was that women were not and should not be as directly involved in the economic and civil aspect of American society as men.
Consequently, these men held a “womb/no say” perspective when it came to voting rights. Well, the Women’s Suffrage movement challenged this perspective, and in 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, women were given the right to vote … by men.
To argue that because men can't get pregnant that they therefore have no business expressing an opinion on the morality of the policy - unless they hold the "correct" opinion - is just as fatuous as telling someone today that because they're never going to risk being enslaved they therefore have no right to voice an opinion on the morality of slavery.
