Assumption of Pregnancy Risk

A Nebraska Republican, State Senator Steve Halloran, has challenged the notion that the post-Dobbs world "forces women to be pregnant" by arguing the following:

“No one’s forcing anyone to be pregnant. Pregnancy’s a voluntary act between two consenting adults.”

Immediately, one might note that both the "consenting" and the "adults" parts of that sentence are not at all necessary. And that is no small elision! But beyond that, pregnancy isn't really an "act". It's a status. People who become pregnant consent to the status of being pregnant if and only if they are permitted to terminate that status and choose not to.

What Halloran is trying to gesture at is the notion that any person who consents to sex, also consents to becoming and staying pregnant. But we don't typically call that sort of downstream effect "consent". Rather, the phrase Senator Halloran really is going for, but doesn't want to use, is "assumes the risk".  We might say that if I mouth off at strangers in a seedy bar, I assume the risk of getting punched. That is not the same thing as saying I consent to participating in a bar fight.

Halloran, for his part, believes that if a woman has sex, she assumes the risk of becoming pregnant and can therefore be coerced into preserving that status regardless of her actual preferences or any intervening changes in circumstances (whether those changes be health-related, financial, emotional, familial, or anything else). In this, he is reflecting a common Republican view. Pregnancy, as far as the GOP is concerned, is a risk sexually-active women take. And having assumed that risk, any further consent they might want to offer or withdraw is wholly and utterly superfluous. Once a woman becomes pregnant, consent for Republicans is perhaps a nice to have, but absolutely not a need-to-have.