last anyway? Byron Jones, from the last chapter, articulated this point when we asked him his thoughts on the ideal time to become a father. He replied, “When you are financially able to take care of the children. And that’s when, nowadays? I have no idea, because, when is it? I mean, shoot, for the average guy stable employment don’t last long. You might work this week and be out the next week, you know?”
Another dynamic helps resolve the tension men might otherwise feel over having children in these circumstances. Recall that most pregnancies are either semiplanned or happened because the men were “just not thinking about” contraception at the time. Were they simply assuming that their partners were “taking care of it” in some way? For some, this is clearly the case. Kanye is a twenty-eight-year-old African American father of at least two children and is currently receiving General Assistance. He had his first child in high school when he was sixteen and the child’s mother was fifteen. “A guy grows up thinking if he is intimate with a female, she is supposed to be on birth control.”
Yet most men admit they had no reason to assume that their girlfriends were taking precautions, and they still failed to initiate a conversation with their partner about the possibility of pregnancy. Consider the case of Jones, a white twenty-year-old working two part-time jobs, and his former girlfriend Jessie. One evening before their now one-year-old daughter was conceived, Jones and Jessie had been walking together down the aisles at Wal-Mart, browsing through racks of baby clothes and accessories. Jessie had taken the opportunity to almost casually inform Jones that she had stopped taking her birth control pills nearly two months earlier. Although he was surprised, Jones took the news in stride and told us later that he didn’t think it was “really any big thing. Like I wasn’t saying, ‘Uh-oh, better get back on the pill.’ And we totally knew the consequences, I mean, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t need sex education; I know how it works.” Jones summed up their outlook this way, “We were fully aware, but I guess you could say we weren’t really worried about it.”
From these and many other accounts, it seems that low-income couples often practice a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to birth control. From parallel conversations with mothers in these neighborhoods, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas learned that a woman often stops taking birth control because she wants kids and lacks sufficient incentive to wait.15 A man may want a child badly too, at least eventually. But each wants a child for his or her own purposes—the desire often has little to do with their relationship with each other. And neither party usually seriously discusses their desires openly until a pregnancy occurs—he prefers instead to let her take control over whether or not birth control is used. He typically continues to relinquish control once the pregnancy is confirmed, as he almost always places responsibility for the next set of decisions on her.
Men rarely counsel their partners to have an abortion—this usually occurs only when a woman is very young or still in school. While most fathers we spoke with believe abortion is wrong, even those who are strongly morally opposed are typically careful to say that because she is the one bearing the child and giving birth, the woman has the ultimate say. While this sounds quite progressive, there is often another logic in play. Because she is the one who chooses to stop using birth control and then decides whether to bring the pregnancy to term, she also bears the ultimate responsibility for those choices; the buck stops with her. By stumbling into fatherhood without explicitly planning to do so, men’s sense of responsibility for bringing a child into the world in even wildly imperfect circumstances is significantly diminished. He can always say, “Well, I didn’t set out to become a father, it just happened. She wasn’t taking birth control, and when she got pregnant it was really her decision to have the baby.”
WHAT HAPPINESS MEANS
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