Abstract

Contemporary philosophy offers two main accounts of how parental obligations are acquired: the causal and the voluntarist account. Elizabeth Brake's provocative paper "Fatherhood and Child Support: Do Men Have a Right to Choose?" seeks to clear the way for the voluntarist account by focusing on the relevance of abortion rights to parental obligations. The present paper is concerned with rebutting Brake's argument that, if a woman does not acquire parental obligations to an unborn child just by having voluntarily acted in such a way that had the reasonably foreseeable consequence of bringing him or her into being, neither does a man acquire parental obligations to a child once he or she is born just by having voluntarily acted in the same way.