The Texas legislature has been busy sharpening its sword against abortion access. Just last week, lawmakers pushed through another measure in their ongoing crusade, empowering private citizens to sue doctors and drug manufacturers linked to abortion pills entering the state. It’s the latest in a series of aggressive maneuvers to choke off reproductive options for women, and it raises a glaring question: if Texas is so intent on enforcing “life,” why does all the responsibility for that life fall on women?
If the state truly believes that every conception carries an unshakable moral obligation, then the logical next step is simple: fathers should be required to support their children and the women carrying them, no matter how fleeting or casual the encounter that created them. No more slipping away quietly after a one-night stand, no more vanishing into the shadows of “not my problem.” If Texas wants to legislate morality, it should legislate responsibility equally. But it won’t.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: the weight of these laws has always been meant for women. Women are expected to carry pregnancies, women are expected to deal with the medical, financial, and emotional consequences, and women are expected to shoulder the judgment that follows. Men, meanwhile, get a hall pass. That imbalance is not incidental, it’s intentional.
Imagine, for a moment, if the legislature flipped the script. Imagine a law that mandated immediate recognition of paternity, enforced financial support beginning at the moment of conception, and required fathers to contribute not only money but also tangible support, transportation to prenatal appointments, half the cost of maternity care, shared responsibility for childcare. Picture a legal framework where men were tracked with the same zeal that women are now, where fleeing fatherhood was treated with the same severity as smuggling abortion pills.
Would Texas dare? Of course not. Because holding men accountable would mean dismantling the carefully cultivated narrative that places women alone at the center of this moral battlefield. It’s easier, politically and culturally, to demonize abortion than to demand responsibility from men. Easier to legislate against pills than to legislate against absentee fathers.
And yet, the hypocrisy is hard to ignore. The argument underpinning these laws is that “life begins at conception” and must be protected at all costs. But protecting life does not end at birth. Protecting life should mean ensuring that children are fed, clothed, educated, and supported. Protecting life should mean recognizing that bringing a child into the world requires the effort of two people, not just the one whose body does the work of gestation.
If the Texas legislature were serious about valuing life, it would draft laws requiring DNA testing at birth and immediate legal recognition of paternity. It would penalize men who attempt to dodge responsibility. It would guarantee that women are not left in poverty while men walk free. In fact, it could go further: if a woman is required to continue a pregnancy against her will, then the father should be required to shoulder half of every burden that pregnancy creates. That’s what true “family values” would look like.
But instead, Texas politics has built a system where women are controlled and punished, while men remain largely invisible. The debate centers on abortion because abortion is about women’s bodies, women’s choices, women’s autonomy. It is not an accident that men, whose choices are equally responsible for conception, are missing from the conversation. Their accountability would make the debate too honest.
This is not just a question of fairness; it’s a question of integrity. If lawmakers insist that women carry pregnancies under threat of legal reprisal, then men should not be permitted to shrug off their obligations. If women are bound by force of law, then men should be too. Anything less exposes the entire project as not about life at all, but about control.
Think of the single mothers already struggling to raise children without consistent support. Think of the women pushed into poverty while their children’s fathers build new lives elsewhere, unburdened. Think of how many of those stories begin with men who never intended to stick around. Texas lawmakers don’t seem interested in that reality, because acknowledging it would require them to confront a cultural imbalance that benefits men and disadvantages women.
The cruelty of the current trajectory is that it pretends to be about morality when it is really about politics. If the moral argument were genuine, it would be applied evenly. Both parents would be bound equally to the child. Both would be forced to sacrifice equally. But morality in Texas law has become selective, deployed as a weapon against women while sparing men the same scrutiny.
It’s easy to legislate against women’s options. It’s harder to legislate against men’s neglect. And so the imbalance grows deeper, and the rhetoric around “life” grows hollower.
If Texas wants to prove its sincerity, the next law should be one that forces men into the picture they have long been erased from. Require them to acknowledge every child, no matter how the child came to be. Force them to contribute, to show up, to accept the weight of their decisions. Bind them legally and financially until those children reach adulthood.
That would be consistency. That would be fairness. That would be justice.
But it would also expose the truth that the statehouse does not want to confront: the war on abortion was never really about life. It was about control, and the people being controlled were never the men.
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