says Bruce, “that I was the father and she was the mother.”
When accidental pregnancy occurs, discussions of abortion often follow. Although some of these pregnancies are terminated, disagreement among the couple often forestalls abortion.8 Intriguingly, these men are more likely to oppose than advocate for ending the pregnancy in these circumstances. Taken together, the planned and accidental pregnancies account for only 30 percent of the total. Just over a third are somewhere in between; we call these “semiplanned.” We asked Michael, a forty-one-year-old African American father of an adult son and a four-month-old daughter, whether the conception of his oldest child, at the age of eighteen, was planned. He responded, “Semiplanned. We didn’t sit down and say we wanted to have a baby. It just happened.” “Did you think she might get pregnant?” we asked. “Yeah, but I didn’t care. It was good. I was still a young man. I wasn’t wearing no protection, so it happened.” Men like Michael feel fatherhood’s pull to some degree but haven’t seriously discussed this desire with the woman they are with at the time. Although these men say they were well aware that unprotected sex would lead eventually to a pregnancy, they didn’t seem daunted by the fact (see table 4 in the appendix).
In sum, while a handful of pregnancies are either clearly intended or unintended, many are “semiplanned” or somewhere in between. Yet a rather large number—nearly four in ten—are not on this continuum at all. In these cases men say they were “just not thinking” about the consequences of their actions when conception occurred. Like those in the semiplanned situation, these men say they had no lack of familiarity with the birds and the bees but admit to using condoms only occasionally if at all. They also admit they knew or suspected that their girlfriends were not using birth control, though few say they had bothered to ask. Thomas, for example, is a white twenty-seven-year-old father who says he has worked at practically every type of fast-food franchise in Philadelphia. His first child was conceived when he’d been with Laurie, whom he met at a party, for only six months. Thomas claims he never even considered the fact that she might get pregnant, though he knew she wasn’t consistently taking the pill: “She was missing it,” he says. “We talked about it for just maybe a minute or a half an hour. We said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’ It wasn’t serious—just one of them things, you know?” When asked how he reacted to the news, Thomas recalls, “I was confused, like I wasn’t sure I wanted a child. But I didn’t want an abortion. No, I was against that. It’s not right. If you get pregnant, you get pregnant—you know what I’m saying? And not out of careless sex, ’cause if you don’t want to get pregnant you know what to do.”9
Yet what is striking is that relatively few men who conceived while “just not thinking” denied paternity, and none who acknowledged responsibility said that they didn’t want to have the child. Furthermore, nearly all expressed a determination to be actively involved in their child’s life.10 Bart, for example, a white twenty-seven-year-old who processes orders in a warehouse, has only a tenuous relationship with his two oldest children by a prior partner. He describes his response to his new girlfriend’s pregnancy in this way: “I said to myself, ‘I want to be there for the pregnancy. I want to be there through everything—when she goes to the doctor, when she has the baby, to wake up with the baby in the middle of the night.’”
As we’ve hinted at, though one might suppose that the degree to which the pregnancies were planned or actively avoided would heavily influence men’s reactions to the news of a conception, the correlation is far from perfect. While those with planned and semiplanned pregnancies almost universally welcome the news, those who are “just not thinking” when conception occurs still respond positively—with either happiness or acceptance—more than six times out of ten. Even more amazing, about a third of those who had been explicitly opposed to having children and were taking measures to prevent conception were either happy or accepting when the pregnancy was announced. What are we to make of the surprisingly positive nature of men’s responses?11
Perhaps the men who most eagerly embrace the news of a pregnancy are simply those who are in the best life circumstances. To see if this is so, we turn to the stories of Ozzy and Terrell, who, like Andre Green, were especially enthusiastic. Ozzy, who collects SSI and does odd jobs, is a thirty-five-year-old white father of one. He was twenty-seven when he met Dawn one night on South Street, a strip of loud bars, live music venues, and tattoo parlors, and thus the favorite congregating spot for many of Philadelphia’s working-class youth. Ozzy was out with a group of his friends and Dawn was with her friends, and after the collective laughing, teasing, and flirting was over, the two ended up exchanging phone numbers. Four months later Dawn was pregnant.
There were bigger problems though, aside from the fact that they had known each other such a short time. The first was that Ozzy was an unemployed high school dropout who still lived at home and had developed a problem with a variety of substances, including alcohol, Xanax, Valium, cocaine, and marijuana. The second was that Dawn was only sixteen years old. “I lied to her about my age,” Ozzy admits. “I told her that I was like twenty. Then after a couple of months I started to like her a lot so I told her the truth.” Despite his problems, Ozzy was thrilled—without reservation—by the news of Dawn’s pregnancy. “I always wanted to have a kid,” he told us. “But before I met Dawn I never really found the right person to have one with.”
Terrell, a black nineteen-year-old supermarket stock clerk, was just seventeen when he heard the news about the conception of his oldest child. But this came as no surprise to him, as he had lobbied hard for his girlfriend to have a baby. He had just begun his sophomore year at West Philadelphia High School when he met Clarice, a friend of his cousin’s. “I come home from school one day, and I saw her sitting on the porch. Ever since that day I’ve been liking her. I had it in my mind that I’d get her.”
Terrell was surprisingly sure of himself, seeing as how seventeen-year-old Clarice was pregnant with another man’s child at the time. Meanwhile, he was doing poorly in school and cutting classes regularly. After he violated a contract that required attending a certain number of days per month, the school finally kicked him out. It was when Terrell was “sitting at home with nothing to do” that he began to “get with” Clarice, who had just broken up with her newborn’s father. The first thing he did was to try and convince her to get pregnant by him right away, despite the fact that he had just left high school and had no job or any prospects of one. “I wanted a son so bad. I saw all these guys with kids, especially with boys,” Terrell explains. “I always wanted a son, especially when they start walking.” Clarice was understandably reluctant, but Terrell was persistent. “She came around to it, came to her senses,” he says with satisfaction. “We sat down and had a long talk about it. Two months later she was pregnant.”
Ecstatic that he was about to become a father, Terrell immediately signed up for Job Corps after hearing the news. After spending several months in Pittsburgh acquiring some of the skills of the construction trade—drywall and plaster work—Terrell quit and returned to Philadelphia to witness the birth of his son. Several months later, just as he was adjusting to being the father of a newborn, Clarice had some additional news for him: she was pregnant again, this time with twins.
What the stories of Ozzy and Terrell reveal is that men’s willingness to embrace, or occasionally even pursue, pregnancy does not always, or even usually, hinge on their life circumstances. In fact, it is often men in some of the worst and most desperate situations who are also the happiest when learning of a pregnancy. Why would this be so? How would the prospect of bringing a child into the world under these circumstances be an appealing one?
The answer lies in the way men answered one important question: “What would your life be like without your children?” One might expect that men would complain about lives derailed, schooling foregone, and job opportunities forsaken. Yet we heard very few tales about sacrificed opportunities or complaints about child support and the like. Overall, children are seen not as millstones but as life preservers, saviors, redeemers, and the strength of the sentiment behind these fathers’ words makes
