Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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All the other girls killed my babies. They had abortions. I said, ‘She’s my first—I’m gonna give her everything.’” Joe, a white forty-five-year-old father of four who drives a horse and carriage for tourists, says simply of his reaction to the news that his first child was on the way, “I wanted a son, and I had a son!”
Forty-six-year-old Roger (who manages a thrift store), twenty-six-year-old Little E. (who works at a butcher shop in the Italian market), and Ozzy, age thirty-five, who does odd jobs and collects SSI (or “disability”) for mental-health problems—all white men—each claim a strong underlying desire to have a child that was galvanized by the news. “I always wanted one!” Roger tells us, to explain his ecstatic reaction. Calvin, who combines maintenance work with occasional jobs with a moving company, was twenty-five when his first child was conceived. He recalls a similar response: “I loved it. I love kids!” This white forty-five-year-old now has five children.
James says that he planned it all out. This white forty-year-old father of four has his own home business assembling computers. Although he was only nineteen at the time his first child was conceived, he claims, “I wanted to have a kid. I wanted to get my girlfriend pregnant and have a baby. Nobody made me that way—that is me, how I came up. I was a working kid. I thought I made a lot of money. I was ready for it.” At the time, he suspected that his girlfriend was having sex with several other men on the side, yet he says, “When I found out she was pregnant everything changed. I was like, ‘I don’t care if she is cheating,’ and at first I was so happy.”
WERE THE PREGNANCIES PLANNED?
Taken together, the happy and accepting reactions to a pregnancy comprise over three-quarters of all responses (see table 2 in the appendix). At least some of the men who were happy at the news thought that they were “ready to become a dad,” as James had, or said they had “always wanted” kids. Yet recall that Andre Green had clearly not set out to have a baby with Sonya. Nonetheless, when faced with the opportunity to embrace a pregnancy, he seizes it with both hands.
A critical ingredient to our story’s arc—high hopes, yet often failed ambitions in relation to fatherhood—is the fact that precious few pregnancies are either actively avoided or explicitly planned. We asked each father to tell us the whole story around each conception, whether he had talked about the possibility of children with his partner beforehand and whether either he or she was using any birth control at the time. We then sorted fathers’ answers into four categories: “planned,” “semiplanned,” “accidental,” and “just not thinking at the time” (see table 3 in the appendix).5 Planned pregnancies—cases in which men said they wanted to have a baby at the time and had talked with their partner about it—account for only 15 percent of the total.6
Accidental pregnancies—where the couple actively avoids a pregnancy (with birth control) or believes they can’t conceive due to infertility—are as rare as planned pregnancies. Note though that both condoms and the pill are highly effective at preventing pregnancy; thus “accidents” due to contraceptive failure are likely the user’s failure and not the product’s.7 When William, a twenty-five-year-old African American father of four who works as a dietary aide at a nursing home, is asked about the conception of his oldest child, he responds, “My girlfriend told me she was taking birth control pills every day faithfully. Somehow she just got pregnant. I don’t see how. I told her I didn’t want none, not yet, and she said she ain’t want none neither.”
Bruce is a white forty-five-year-old father of twins who occasionally finds jobs through a temp agency. Even though he didn’t particularly want children, he didn’t “believe” in safe sex either, because “every time I had any kind of relationship, there is no babies born.” Imagine Bruce’s surprise when after only two months with Debbie, she announced, “I am seven weeks pregnant!” Forty-two years old at the time, Bruce responded with disbelief—“I am shooting blanks!” he exclaimed. “You can’t be pregnant!” The argument was settled when they went for a DNA test. “That was when she found out,” 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