The abortion contract may not be the most romantic concept in the world, but it has practical potential. Especially for the straight man who fears accidentally knocking up a woman who unexpectedly wants to carry the pregnancy to term in order keep him and/or his child-support money in her life for the next eighteen years. Or, at the very least, abortion contracts might quiet the men’s-rights types who believe such women are everywhere, conspiring to get pregnant and deny them their right to choose. (In fact, doctors say the opposite happens with alarming frequency.)
Abortion can be kind of heavy, so abortion contracts should be lighthearted and verbal — along the lines of “our objective is not procreation, pinky swear” — and definitely precoital. When they are hashed out after the fact, abortion contracts can become contentious, expensive, and even a little supernatural, as it did for abortion-contract pioneer and NBA player J.J. Redick.
Redick appears to have resorted to an abortion contract in 2007 with ex-girlfriend and model Vanessa Lopez. MediaTakeOut has a copy of the document, which states that if Lopez proved she’d gotten an abortion (and had been pregnant in the first place), Redick would try to make things work between them for one year. Specifically, he would “attempt to establish and maintain a social and/or romantic relationship between themselves for a period of one year from the date of this Agreement (hereinafter “The Relationship”).” The contract included a promise to pay her $25,000 if he broke things off prior to one year, stipulating that any contact after “The Relationship” had been terminated would be considered “stalking.” It also asked Lopez to agree that Redick is not the father of the soon-to-not-exist fetus, which is where things start to get a little time-travel movie plot. Wouldn’t agreeing he wasn’t the father relieve him of the child-support obligations he wrote this whole thing to get out of?
