At Unequally Yoked, a reader writes in:
As a pro-choicer do you believe a man should have the right to opt out of parental responsibilities? It seems that if a woman has the right to choose whether or not she is to become a parent then a man should have that same right as well. Not trying to be a jerk just wondering if any pro-choicers have thought about this. Why should a man be held responsible for a choice he didn’t make?
He didn’t ask me, but I’ll respond anyway. :-)
I think that men and women should both have the absolute, non-negotiable right to do whatever they want with their own bodies to prevent pregnancy. So men and women both have the right to abstain from sex, to have sex but abstain from penis-in-vagina sex, to use whatever birth control on their own body that they want, etc.. Absolutely equal.
I also believe that once a child is born, both parents, regardless of sex, are responsible for that child. If they both agree to give the child up for adoption, then that’s fine; if either one of them wants to raise the child, then the other one should pay child support. Again, absolutely equal.
The inequality that exists is that women can get pregnant and men can’t; but that inequality is created by biology, not by biased laws. Arguably, this gives women an advantage (they can choose an abortion, and because they can keep a pregnancy secret from the father). But it also gives women a lot of disadvantages — even a pregnancy that goes well is physically and mentally stressful for most women, and if the pregnancy doesn’t go well it can be many months of suffering, and possibly even permanent injury or death. Men don’t face that problem.
So there is a biological inequality there; but it disadvantages women and men both.
The “choice for men” position also causes practical problems that legal abortion does not.
1) Studies have found that the weaker a state’s child support laws, the higher the number of single mothers.
If weak child support laws lead to an increase in single motherhood, then what would a law saying that men bear absolutely no responsibility do? We’d have an explosion of single motherhood, way worse than what we’ve already seen. That’s not a problem caused by legal abortion, but it is a problem that would be caused by giving men a “get out parental responsibility free” card.
2) When a woman has an abortion, the fetus dies before ever becoming a person (in virtually all abortions, including most late-term abortions, the brain’s cerebral cortex isn’t even functioning yet, due to the lack of dendritic spines). In contrast, deadbeat parents cause deprivation and suffering to existing, real people with functioning brains.
To sum up:
The pro-choice status quo is one in which women and men are legally equal, when it comes to reproduction. The inequality that exists is caused by biology, not unequal laws, and disadvantages both sexes, not only men. And unlike legal abortion, so-called “choice for men” would have very bad consequences for both society and for children.
I apoligize, Mythago – I was too short with you.
I would heartily support men being liable (even IN FULL) for the costs of abortion – women must go through the physical pain and risk – men should AT LEAST bear the financial burden.
And I agree with ALL of your other points here – I agree men can be complete shitbags and I would even agree that they are shitbags at a higher incident rate than women.
That said, I feel that our legal system allows women to exploit non-shitbag men for financial gain in an unfair way as it is currently set up. That’s all.
EasilyEnthused @99: You brought up your relationship. Your entire comment at @96 was about your problem with your wife. I find it odd that you would present your own situation as an exemplar of the problem with women, and then throw a hissy that someone would comment on your anecdata.
I didn’t miss your comment about her past deception at all. In fact, I referred to it in the very first line of my comment. You’re choosing to continue having sex with, and remain married to, somebody who admits that she has lied to you for years about her intentions and that your opinion on whether you wish to be a father or not was unwelcome.
I do note that you didn’t bother to address anything other than to complain that I actually referred to your comment, for example, ignoring the ability of men to ensnare women into having a child (and perhaps even paying child support) regardless of prior agreements. And this:
Interesting … perhaps you enjoy women having this power over men?
…strictly amateur hour. Next you’ll be accusing me of refusing to shave my legs.
“But you’re arguing that every single parent who doesn’t pay child support is in the same moral position as a starving urchin who steals bread and earns 20 years in prison as punishment.”
No, I’m doing no such thing. I’m arguing that all those who didn’t want the kid while it was still a fetus are in that position if you accept the logic of the pro-choice rhetoric. I’m not saying anything one way or the other about any other parents. Let’s focus on the ones who are the actual topic first, and if you successfully deal with that AND can somehow get me to believe that the logic about them also applies to other parents, we can THEN talk about that.
@Mythago
“throwing a hissy”
I will entertain your misogynistic rantings no further.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40603/what-is-the-origin-of-hissy-fit
EasilyEnthused, I appreciate that you’re talking about something very personal to you, and you have strong feelings. I also appreciate that you apologized to Mythago for your “perhaps you enjoy” comment.
But I also can recognize the difference between someone who is concerned about misogynistic origins of language for decent reasons, and someone who is just scoring points in a debate.
Please either clean up your act, or take a 24-hour break from this thread. Thanks.
Please. One of the neat things about the Internet is that one can go back and see what another person actually said. You stated in @87 that “If you don’t pay child support you go to jail” and that, therefore, people jailed for contempt of court because they don’t pay child support are just like a fictional character imprisoned for 20 years for stealing bread. The fact that it didn’t occur to you that “people who never wanted to be parents” and “people who failed to pay court-ordered child support” are not identical sets is your problem.
You can accept the logic of the pro-choice position and still believe that people should be responsible for their offspring. Has anyone here argued that if a woman was unable to get an abortion that she should be able to ‘opt out’ of paying child support?
Amp @104: I can also tell the difference between somebody who is genuinely pointing to a problematic term, and somebody who is going to a content-farm website like Stack Exchange for a ‘possible’ suggestion that it’s a problematic term so neener neener I can’t heaaaar yooooou.
Susan @98: Rape is not an adaptation, and there’s no reason to think that women, but not men, have an evolutionary drive towards ‘baby fever’.
Also, I think EasilyEnthused and I cross-posted, as I didn’t see the later comment until I’d already posted. But this is where the crux of the problem is:
I feel that our legal system allows women to exploit non-shitbag men for financial gain in an unfair way as it is currently set up
That is, it is fixated on the woman’s actions and assumes that they are nothing more than a desire to get extra money from the man. This ignores the fact that child support is intended to contribute to the costs of rearing a child; that the mother will be responsible for the child’s financial well-being, too; that child support is hardly a “financial gain” given the overt and opportunity costs of raising a child; and that there are many other rights and responsibilities parents have other than paying bills.
Look, I get the emotional undercurrent here: that it seems very unfair that a woman can get pregnant and you can’t stop her from having the baby (you can, actually, but let’s assume rhetorical-you is not an asshole). From my point of view, it also seems pretty goddamn unfair that women have to deal with the whole risk of being pregnant and the possibility that we may very well not be able to do anything about it, possibly because we can’t afford or obtain an abortion or we find out too late to do anything about it. (EasilyEnthused’s believe that a man who wants the woman to abort should share the cost is fine, but how do we enforce that? Can she get an injunction to seize and sell off his car if he refuses and she needs $200 tomorrow or it’s not going to happen?)
I agree with everything Mythago said in @106. But even if we ignore that, and we believe that there may be some cases in which a woman may lie to get pregnant specifically for financial gain – after all, there are plenty of people who engage in impractical scams. So, let’s play devil’s advocate and grant that this is possible.
I do not see how it motivates “Choice for men”. It may justify a more nuanced system – for example, allowing the courts to consider the circumstances of the pregnancy and, if the court concludes that the man was a victim of a financially-motivated conspiracy to bear child, then the court could decide that the state must take over the financial burden in this case. Doesn’t that make so much more sense than just giving men a universal opt-out clause?
I should stress that, even if pregnancy-for-profit were a real concern, I would not generally support such a system – for reasons I listed in my earlier posts in detail – but at least in this case, it will put the burden on the facts of the matter rather than on the whims and desires of the man involved.
(btw, Amp @55 – thanks!)
I apologize for the misogyny jab earlier. It was out of line.
I don’t feel like we’re getting too far here. For example: Mythago’s latest comment: “This ignores the fact that child support is intended to contribute to the costs of rearing a child …”
I’m not completely disconnected from reality; I realize that if the father only has to make a child support payment every month, and the mother has to pay for all the other expenses, plus find the time to care for the child, plus bear the pain and risk of childbirth – things can hardly be said to be “worse for the father.”
But playing a “who has it worse” game only makes sense if you assume both parents do not want the child. Assume the mother did want the child. To a person who desperately wants to be a parent – pain and sacrifice is a pittance compared to the joy of being a parent. And people who desperately want a child might get turned down by adoption agencies or sperm banks for financial or other reasons.
Under our current system, they have a really good option if they want to have a child – scam a man into leaving his sperm behind. Not only can you bypass the adoption red tape, but if you fall on hard times – you can always go get your “payment” from the guy who had an orgasm a few years ago.
Lastly, Eytan Zweig, may not agree with my conclusion, but at least he sees what I’m asking for – allow the courts SOME avenue for declaring that the child may have been the result of a scam that took advantage of the father. It at least removes the “legal guarantee” of a payoff. (I realize that many men do not pay their child support – the way the current system is set up, this could be because they are dirt bags or because they feel they have been “scammed” by the mother – until we develop some evaluation for these claims – we won’t know how high the number of actual “scams” there are.)
Ampersand makes the mistake of assuming that a child has to be born. The woman can have an abortion if the father is not ready to reproduce yet. The father could even be required to pay for half of it. But why are we increasing responsibility to men for a choice that the woman made? The woman made the choice to bring the child into the world. If we don’t want her to do that, then we should provide laws that incentivize her not to and to get an abortion instead. But we shouldn’t take away men’s ability to have control over his own reproduction. If you aren’t going to give him any choice as to whether the child is born, then you shouldn’t be holding him responsible for a choice that he didn’t make.
But playing a “who has it worse” game
Huh? This isn’t about who has it worse. This is a recognition that both the mother and father have legal and financial responsibility to their kid, and that child support is hardly a net benefit given the costs of raising a child.
It’s also a recognition of the interests of the child, a principle you are bound and determined to ignore. Over and over again, you talk about women ‘scamming’ or ‘ensnaring’ men, about a ‘payoff’ – you cannot get past your view that this is about a dispute between Mom and Dad, and you believe that Dad’s desire not to be ‘scammed’ (we’re back to only women being evil, I see) is an absolute right that trumps the child’s interest in the support of its parents.
Within marriage, as you don’t seem to differentiate between wed and unwed parents, C4M would lead to bizarre results. Can a husband ‘opt out’ of caring for some of his kids, but not all?
(BTW, “scam a man into leaving his sperm behind” doesn’t seem to be such a hot system for getting rich under the laws we do have, as the financial situation of single parents as a whole seems to indicate.)
ETA: I would note that you refer to your wife as having ‘baby fever’, not ‘child support fever’. Presumably the problem is that she wishes to force you into the role of fatherhood – a very serious undertaking – because she wants to be a mother. As you’re married and appear to indicate that you wish to remain so, you wouldn’t be “paying child support” to her; you’d be supporting the child as a married couple. So I’m not sure why you presented this as an example of jezebels stealing men’s sperm in order to get that sweet monthly support check.
Easily Enthused, you wrote:
The story I told is not identical to this, but it is similar, and there are some things I don’t understand about the position you take in response to your story. To start, it seems to me that, in the face of your wife’s dishonesty, not having PIV sex until the two of you work things out is precisely the most responsible thing you can do for yourself, to establish your own boundaries, to hold her accountable for her part in the relationship, for her dishonesty within the relationship and so on. Why do you present that as somehow not a viable/desirable/workable option–unless, of course, I am reading the tone of your comment incorrectly? If you were to decide to do that and your wife did not accept it–and I am not trying to tell you anything about your particular relationship, just making a generalization using what you’ve told us–it seems to me that would tell you a whole lot about your wife, her expectations of the relationship, her attitude towards men, male sexuality, etc. that would be useful in determining how to respond to her dishonesty.
I know I am projecting here, but let me also say that, it seems to me, if your wife had truly lied in the hopes of conceiving a child with you–and I am assuming here that she truly loves you, etc. and so on and that she was not doing this out of a narcissistic or otherwise entirely selfish reason for having a baby; in other words, that she wanted to have a family with you as the father because of her love for, opinion of you–then it seems to me that she must have assumed something along the lines of, “Oh, once the baby is here, he’ll come around.” Which, it appears, is a complete misapprehension of your feelings about conceiving children. That, too, points to an issue in the relationship that clearly needs to be worked out. (And if this doesn’t apply to you, consider what I have just written as an exploration of this issue taking what you wrote as a starting point, not as something about you.)
But neither of those considerations changes the fact that you knowingly had sex with a woman who could, even if she had been totally honest with you about not wanting children, have changed her mind, and she would have been well within her right to do so. In other words, you still gambled that she would not become pregnant or that she was being honest or that she would not change her mind, and if you did conceive a child with her, that conception would not have been against your will, and so why–not matter how dishonest she was–should you not be responsible for that child if she chooses to give birth to it?
Mythago – either I was unclear or you have misread me.
I, in no way, shape or form have been under the bizarre and laughable notion that women use child support to “get rich.” That is the territory of insane MRAs who I do not identify with. You must have me confused with someone else you’ve argued this with.
I am only saying this: if you want to be a mother and don’t have a lot of money to support the child – it makes sense to dupe a man into becoming an unwilling parent than to go to a sperm bank. The “duped man” creates an option for additional income to ease the burden of supporting a child – a sperm bank does not.
Richard – I’m having a hard time parsing your sentences out to answer you, but I’ll do my best to explain.
When my wife and I met, she was still in college – she and I both agreed that going to college and having a newborn was not an option and if she should become pregnant (while we both used birth control) she would abort. After graduation, we both continued to use birth control, but one month she had a slightly late period. For a few days she feared she might be pregnant and re-examined her thoughts about having an abortion. She began to doubt her willpower to have an abortion of my child – as we had already decided we would have a child after we were married and my student loans were paid off. So, now the question wasn’t IF we would have a child together, but when. However, she did not tell me any of this. I was under the impression we were operating with the same gameplan (Dual BC with abortion as a fall back until marriage and student loans are paid off.)
At some point between that late period and our marriage and subsequent scare a few months ago, she decided that if she became pregnant accidentally, she would not abort for fear of becoming sterile from the procedure and, in her words “I could not kill a child from you – I could not live with the pain, I can’t wait to have babies with you.”
She told me that if she had become pregnant and I divorced her, that she would not demand child support from me, as she said that would be wrong as she was violating our agreement on the abortion. (Of course, the reality is that if she was pregnant and kept the child, our relationship would be damaged, but only slightly – I would still be overjoyed to raise our child with the woman I love and the only woman in the world I want to have children with. I would only be injured from the dishonesty and unfortunate timing.)
As to your last paragraph – it wasn’t until I became engaged in the gender sphere online that I realized that our agreement was completely legally unenforceable if she should keep an accidental child. As someone who is struggling to pay my student loans and keep a roof over my head (who also has no living family members to rely on, even temporarily) I could not afford child support payments right now.
As to the last part of your last paragraph – I should not be responsible for her decision to raise a child by herself – a decision that she made when she told me that she would abort if she became pregnant. It’s the same decision single women who use sperm banks make – why not hold all women to the same standard of honesty and responsibility for their actions.
(Lastly, in case I did not make this clear, my wife never sabotaged our birth control efforts and has, since then, taken Plan B after a close call. If she had intentionally sabotaged our BC, I would think of her differently. As it stands, she just wasn’t up front about her decision not to have a hypothetical abortion.)
Jeffrey, doesn’t that scenario seem even the least bit unfair to any guy put in that situation? Both parties are using BC, both have (to the best knowledge of the guy involved through active methods) agreed that a child will not result from any sexual activity, and yet one still holds a unilateral right over the other to introduce a party which has a right to support from the other? If one or both parties have done all they can to mitigate the risk and another party refuses surely they should bear the costs of that choice? This is why making it something like a contract / opt-in system would be so much more clear for both parties.
Marmalade: In terms of people in their 35-60s having to repay a subsidised loan for child care surely that makes some sense. Most people’s earning power scales somewhat with age and generally your obligations to children are reduced meaning you would have more ability to pay. We do it with other large purchases / known expenditures so why not give people a way to get the social and financial support they need now with an ability to pay based repayment down the line?
From the way governments are going there doesn’t seem to really be public support for additional child funding beyond what is currently available. There is in contrast a fair amount of support for systems like the funding of University education whereby you repay as much of the loan as is feasible once you start working. If you got a deferred repayment system till the eldest child was in say secondary school (11-12?) or earning above £15,000 you could or should be able to get support for the system.
The comments seem predicated on an “abortion is bad” concept.
Why is that?
After all, in fighting for abortion, we’ve come to know that a medically appropriate abortion which happens at the early stages is, from a medical perspective, generally safer and less physically invasive than a pregnancy and birth (by whatever method.) We’ve also discussed our belief that abortion isn’t morally problematic; I know I’m not the only one who takes an “any time, for any reason” view and i sure as hell am certain that view is near-universal here if you limit it to the first trimester.
If you acknowledge that to be true (and don’t we?) then it becomes a lot less reasonable to prioritize avoidance of abortion. So what if the man’s decision or actions put the woman in a difficult position, where she would be forced to choose between aborting, or a life of discomfort as a poor single parent? If we think abortion isn’t a big deal physically (and we do, right?) then this isn’t a simple answer. Instead of just claiming “bodily autonomy wins, next issue” it becomes more of a nuanced reality.
People can choose what to do: have sex; have a vasectomy; take the pill; get your tubes tied; have an abortion; have a baby; etc. But since when do we need all of those choices to be entirely without followup costs? There are tradeoffs here: why are they made as they are?
Obviously, the details are pretty relevant. Telling people “just get sterilized, then” may or may not seem fair unless there’s affordable sterilization and, arguably, some way to preserve future fertility. Telling people “just don’t have sex if you don’t like the consequences” seems unusual given this board’s historic fights against that line, but hey, maybe you all changed viewpoints. And telling someone “well, just get an abortion if you don’t want a kid” obviously requires a lot of stuff from decent pregnancy testing to safe/cheap/available abortion services.
Perhaps you want to raise the “bodily autonomy” angle. but claimed supremacy of BA in all respects makes no sense. It’s one thing that is relevant, not the only thing that is relevant.
Perhaps abortion is bad and horrible. But perhaps it’s better than, say, raising a child. Or paying the other parent to raise a child. Or knowing that there’s your child out there, somewhere, which you gave up for adoption. Or trying to raise a child, and failing. Or being constrained by work, or geographic location, for 21 years as the result of raising a child. Or, perhaps, ending up in jail for a while if you screw up one or more of your obligations.
It’s ridiculous to think that abortion should be avoided just because it’s bad, or that people should always have a free right to choose, unfettered by burdens. When you have an unwanted pregnancy, EVERYTHING is bad; it’s just a balance. And every decision has short- or long-term consequences for 1, 2, or 3 people. Why ignore the others and prioritize only the short-term decision making of a single individual?
This is why making it something like a contract / opt-in system would be so much more clear for both parties.
Are you also okay with a man having no rights to his biological children? That if the mother doesn’t want him involved, it’s 100 percent her right to keep him out of the kid’s life for any reason?
That’s the trade-off of the opt-in system. But certainly it is both more clear and more enforceable than opt-out. With opt-out, you would be asking judges to determine how careful is careful enough when it comes to BC and who is telling the truth about verbal agreements supposedly made months or years previously.
@Chinoga – not sure if you’re asking me, but I’ll offer my opinion:
“Are you also okay with a man having no rights to his biological children?”
Generally speaking, if the only contribution the man made to the children is his DNA, then yes, that is the woman’s choice.
If the man supported the woman during pregnancy and immediately after childbirth, that changes things a bit, but I’m not sure to what extent.
Speaking personally, if I had a one-night stand and the woman got pregnant and decided to hide the child from me, I would not be happy about the situation, and would offer my medical records to the child, but I would not interfere. Me being an unwilling sperm donor is wrong, but not so wrong that I think it rises to the level of harm that 21 years of child support rise to.
Everyone here arguing for “choice for men”: Please give me a convincing explanation of why children are better off under your policy than under the status quo; and also how it is you propose dealing with the increase in fatherless children lacking child support.
G&W:
Total strawman. The comments are predicated on a “in the real world, not everyone will have an abortion, either because they don’t want one, or because they can’t get one” concept. That’s true even if you think (as I do) that there’s nothing morally wrong with abortion.
This isn’t really relevant to this discussion, but where are you getting this from? Since when do you have to think abortion isn’t physically difficult to be pro-choice? Abortion is essentially minor surgery, and like any surgery for some people it’s physically difficult to go through. Also, it’s expensive. From a physical health and a financial perspective, the more people who successfully avoid pregnancy rather than getting an abortion, the better.
(Actually, that’s a little relevant to this discussion, in that we know that in states with strong child support laws, men are more likely to use birth control. So insofar as we want to encourage people to use birth control, C4M is a bad thing.)
But it’s “choice for men” advocates who are ignoring “others,” plural; they (like you) ignore the best interests of the child. Those arguing for C4M are saying that the interests of a single party — men — are more important than the interests of two parties, children and women.
EasilyEnthused:
If this is a significant problem, then why are stronger child support laws associated with less single motherhood?
Amp – I have a feeling G&W posted their comment on the wrong post; it feels more relevant to the “links to various arguments about abortion” discussion.
(I may be wrong, though)
g&w … I think you’re mischaracterizing the primary argument, which is not that the woman has a right to bodily autonomy (though I think everyone here thinks that she does), but that a child has a right to support from its parents unless its parents find someone else to be the parents to that particular child.
That said, there is an “abortion is bad” undercurrent here, but that’s because the C4M idea is, by definition, about situations in which the woman doesn’t want an abortion. Being pro-choice politically doesn’t mean abortion doesn’t have any emotional or psychological resonance for many, many women.
If you had an opt-out, what would it look like? Some of the comments seem to assume it refers to a pre-conception agreement between the parties, some that the man could back out in the first 12 weeks of the pregnancy, some that if a woman showed up years later, he shouldn’t be responsible, some that a man should be able to compel the woman to have an abortion (not in this thread, but in the Unequally Yoked thread). Should a man who is the father of two children with his wife be able to opt-out of supporting the third if his wife doesn’t want to have an abortion? Would it only be in effect if a contract is in writing or would verbal agreements (about which it is very easy to lie) be legally binding?
Regarding the idea of a contract pre conception: This is legally impossible. Because the right to child support belongs to the child. A woman can not sign away the rights of her hypothetical children. She can not even sign away the rights of her existing children.
We have an opt-in system. You opt in by having sex. Everyone who engages in sexual acts that has the potential to create children opts into the system that says that if a child is born as the result of the sex, zie is responsible for supporting that child.
Also, regarding EasilyEnthused’s fear of “baby-crazy” (nice ableism, by the way) women who want to be single mother’s and dupe a guy into getting them pregnant to have access to child support: If the really did this, they would be signing up for a life of legal battles. And for a child who grows up with the pain of a father who doesn’t want them. This is bad enough when it happenes due to unfortunate circumstances. I have a hard time imagining people purposfully seeking such a situation. But assuming there are some who actually do this, we can assume that there are also people doing the opposite. People who like the idea of having progeny but do not want to actually help raise them. People who seek out those who they know don’t want to have an abortion and then sabotage their birth control or lie about keeping the condom on. With C4M you want to give those people an actual legal option of getting out of even paying child support. I don’t think there are a lot of these people, but if the “baby-crazy women” are enough to justify C4M, then the contraception-sabotaging assholes who just want to get people pregnant without consequences are just as good an argument against it.
Or we could forget about the urban legends / special exceptions and look at the normal situation, which is: Two people had sex, a child resulted,the child has a right to be supported by both parents.
It’s not for the money.
As was said upthread, it’s about wanting to be a mother, finding a non-screening opportunity (unlike adoption and IVF from a donor) and going for it, and well, if there’s extra cash, it can help, but it’s not the thing.
I’m sure if fathers who absolutely wanted to be fathers could also take advantage of this, they would. Gay men couples that want to adopt are often banned from it, and asking a woman to bear a child for them is illegal. What recourse are they left with? A friend who does it unofficially, maybe.
Ampersand – I decided that I really needed to read that entire study if I was going to offer any resistance to it’s conclusion, but the link appears to have gone 404 on us.
http://www.uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=10608
So now I’m going to be speculating again why we could see this trend.
First of all, I don’t think that women scheming to trap a man into either A) child support payments or B) a relationship happens very frequently, although I suspect B happens more than A.
There are a few reasons for this, I think. First of all, I don’t think there are masses of low-income women in the world who want to raise a child alone. Of those few low income women desiring a child, I don’t think that very many would attempt to “scam” a man into fathering a child with them either because of a sense of fairness or possibly a fear of violence or death at the hands of the father.
However, in states where there were “strong child support laws” and the woman wanted to trap a man into a relationship, the results show exactly what we would expect – the strong laws allow a woman to bring strong financial pressure to stay with her rather than for him to leave and start his own (wanted) family while still supporting the first woman.
To see if that speculation has any weight, we’d need to get some figures on the happiness levels of families with children born out of wedlock.
But that second part isn’t what I was originally arguing about – and I don’t want to shift any goalposts here. It’s Amp’s blog, that can be his perogative if he wants to talk about that issue.
But suffice it to say that I consider this to be reasonable: “Stronger child support laws are associated with less single parents because the number of men who decided to stay in relationships ‘for the sake of the children’ are higher than in states where the father could possibly not be tracked down or may make smaller payments.”
Forgive me if this is off-topic, but I think that everyone talking here (including myself) has no problem imagining a man using violence, threats and any other means to keep a woman in a relationship with him – it’s practically a TV Trope. Why you all having a hard time imagining women using unhealthy means to keep “their man” in their life?
@Lauren:
This line of reasoning seems to say that you would support tracking down sperm donors for child support and outlawing surrogate parents. Surely, you don’t mean that – could you explain what you do mean?
Ampersand: again, you are assuming that a child has to be born. If the woman hasn’t got the consent from the man to have a child with him and she doesn’t think she can support the child herself, then she should get an abortion. If you aren’t giving the man a choice in whether the abortion occurs, then you can’t hold him responsible for the choices of someone else. Now, if he were to agree to have a child or if he doesn’t make the decision in time, then sure, he’d have to support the child. But each parent should have the chance to choose not to reproduce if you are going to hold them each accountable for the outcome. If either isn’t ready to have a child, then an abortion should occur.
@Mythago
Yes, abandon and adoption without notifying the father are two ways to opt out if you can’t pay, and bore the child. Something the father can’t do because biology.
And abandoning the child or giving it up for adoption without the father’s consent are both illegal. You want to take the fact that biology gives women an option to do something criminal as a reason why men should be allowed to do it legally?
1) Real world, right now, choice for men can’t work. That said, it’s no surprise that plenty folks want it, since right now it’s not so hot. (Don’t like it, guys? Get a vasectomy!) But for a variety of moral reasons, it seems that it should be a viable alternative, if not a superior one. (I don’t know; i haven’t put enough thought into it yet.)
But whether or not it’s a superior option we’re never going to get to the point where it is a real world practical option at all, unless we first have the discussion about it. the pieces aren’t giong to fall into place all on their own.
Easilyenthused:
Forgive me if this is off-topic, but I think that everyone talking here (including myself) has no problem imagining a man using violence, threats and any other means to keep a woman in a relationship with him – it’s practically a TV Trope. Why you all having a hard time imagining women using unhealthy means to keep “their man” in their life?
I don’t have a hard time imagining it, as I don’t believe there’s a limit to the capacity of people of either gender for making bad, unhealthy choices. But I do think you are arguing yourself into a corner here – you started this thread being (in my opinion) wrong headed but rational, but it feels now like you are coming up with some rather implausible argumentation that is mostly trying to appeal to our fears.
Specifically, as I said, I think some women may try all sorts of unhealthy things to keep a partner, just like some men. But using child support as leverage in the way you are suggesting makes no sense. The choice as you present it is: A – support the child, or B – support the child and stay in an undesired relationship. Why do B? I mean, isn’t it still better for the man to pay child support and be out of the relationship? Even if the child support was such a serious barrier for a future relationship (which is another problematic assertion, given that, say, divorced singe parents – or divorced people paying both child support and alimony -often do end up in new relationships), then that’s no motivation for staying in the relationship.
Or is what you are suggesting an extortion situation? “Either you stay in this relationship, in which case I’ll let you keep your money and raise our child alone, or pay child support?” That’s pretty implausible, but I’m pretty sure that even under current child support laws, if a woman said that then the man would have legal recourse (maybe not against paying child support, but against the deranged behaviour of the woman in question).
But even if you come up with a plausible scenario, or convince me that the scenarios you have sketched are more plausible than I think, I still have a fundamental philosophical difference with you – and with some of the people taking the same side as me in this thread. You see, I believe that child support has nothing to do with bad behaviour or bad relationships. I believe that framing it that way – either as “child support laws are weapons for devious women” or “child support laws protect against asshole men” – is missing the point. Child support laws are there to encode a framework for one of the most basic human relationships – the relationship between parent and child. At their basis, child support laws are there to make sure that when both parents want to provide for their children but are not in a relationship, then there’s a system to allow them that. That both is, and should be treated as, the default case (not, mind you, the best case. That would be a case where both parents want to give the child a lot more than the law mandates). Now, all laws should be designed so that they work not only in the default case but also in the worst case scenarios. Such as men who refuse to pay. And I’m not against protection for men in case of obvious extortion or conspiracy. But this protection cannot cancel out the basic purpose of the law. An general opt-out clause, or an opt-in clause, or any kind of clause that makes child support optional means that we do not accept that by default parents need to care for their children. And I do not think that that is an acceptable situation.
I don’t think the kid has a right to be born at all, of course, and i don’t think that we should limit abortion rights. So I’m happy to have “abort the kid if you can’t afford to raise it” on the table as a viable option, together with “abort the kid if you’re having a bad week” option.
If you take the position that it’s better for a kid to be born than aborted then you start thinking about things differently. But that’s not especially prochoice.
Take the three variables:
1) mom doesn’t want a kid;
2) dad doesn’t want a kid; or
3) neither parent wants a kid.
We all agree that the best solution for all of them is “don’t get pregnant.” Easy to say, hard to do.
We all agree, I think that the best and most common solution for #1 and #3 is usually “mom aborts.” Mom doesn’t want a kid; mom doesn’t have a kid. there could be a lot of improvements here, ranging from “make abortion easier” to “make the dad pitch in for cost, lost wages, etc.” but the premise is basically sound.
It’s true that we allow the mother to make #1 work even though the dad feels differently. But society provides a hell of a lot of disincentives for that situation. Moreover, it’s a relatively short term thing (no kid) and there’s generally an opportunity for both the men and women to find someone else to have kids with.
However, folks basically seem to be saying that #2 is a special case: the solution for #2 is “mom has the child, but dad helps to pay for it.”
The first part of “having it” is a bit like #1. but the incentives are very different (the mother can sue for child support.)
And the effect is very different, of course. Not only does child support last for 21 years, the child lasts for a lifetime. And the effects of child support can put serious limitations on the supporting parent’s later ability to have a kid that they DO want, with a partner they DO want to stay with.
The best solution for #2 (other than “don’t get pregnant”) is to have the woman voluntarily abort. Great! That also conveniently resolves the “what about the kid?” question. So we should have incentives for voluntary abortions in these cases, and disincentives for having the kid.
Right now, we have the reverse. There are disincentives for aborting (social, financial) and there are incentives for having the kid (support. etc.)
@Lauren:
Not in any of the states I’ve lived in. My aunt got pregnant our of wedlock, claimed the father as “unknown” and then gave the child up for adoption. Big family scandal, but as far as I know, Aunt Lynn was never in danger of the big house.
I am off to teach and so don’t have a lot of time, but can I just ask, Easily Enthused, that you stop comparing men who have sex with women that results in the conception of a child to sperm banks. The comparison is itself insulting and the logic of your argument simply does not hold because you consistently elide the difference between a woman’s relationship with a corporate identity–the sperm bank–and her relationship with the individual man with whom she conceived a child.
G&W – the way you present it, #2 is a special case. But that’s because you are conflating “wanting a child” and “wanting a pregnancy”. And because your #3 is just the conjunction of #1 and #2.
From my point of view, there are two stages:
Stage 1: Woman gets pregnant.
Option A: woman wants pregnancy. Outcome: woman remains pregnant, unless medical reasons prevent that.
Option B: woman does not want pregnancy. Outcome: woman may abort, if medical and social circumstances permit.
Note that I am not listing the woman’s partner’s desires as they are immaterial at this point. Men get to help start pregnancies, but I do not believe they have any say in its course. For that matter, if one woman in a lesbian relationship gets pregnant (whatever the circumstances), I do not think her female partner has any say in the matter either. This is not about gender – it’s about the ownership of the pregnant body. If medical science will one day advance to the point where men would be able to bear children (say, via an artificial uterous), then it is the pregnant men who decide on the fate of the pregnancy, not their (male or female) partners.
Stage 2: A baby is born
Option A: Both parents do not want baby. Outcome: baby can be given up for adoption.
Option B: At least one parent wants the baby. Outcome: both parents are responsible for the baby.
No special cases in stage 2 – the parents are treated equally.
Of course, this is predicated on drawing a distinction between a pregnancy and a baby. But anyone who is pro-choice needs to believe in that distinction.
And I’m not naive. I recognize that in stage 1 women may make decisions based on whether they anticipate wanting the baby. But that particular ability is granted to them by biology, not human law. I agree that this is a fundamentally unbalanced system, but biology can be like that sometime.
I get why it sucks to not have control over it. I wouldn’t trust my fertility to another person’s non-permanent birth control. (I would trust it to a vasectomy that I knew my husband had undergone, but I wouldn’t trust some random dude’s claim of a prior vasectomy.)
I think some women probably do lie about being on birth control or aren’t as careful as they could be because they want a baby. I don’t think they are “scamming” so much as they are very wishfully thinking that everything will work out beautifully once he realizes how much he loves her and actually wanted to have kids with her, even though he didn’t know it. People engage in magical thinking, and women are people. There probably are some few-and-far-between cases of actual “scamming” – didn’t Amp have a post about some woman who supposedly collected sperm in a condom used in a blow job and then used it to impregnate herself? that would be a scam.
All that said, I will confess to a fair amount of impatience with these guys who wail about how she LIED about being on birth control or LIED about being medically infertile and never bothered to use a condom. I also wonder how many of the women who these guys are claiming LIED actually were on the pill and just missed one on accident or took antibiotics that month or whatever. I just don’t see a lot of evidence that most men are even doing the bare minimum – using condoms consistently and without the woman insisting on it, educating themselves on the basic functioning of the pill, talking to their partners about their beliefs and preferences.
If you take the position that it’s better for a kid to be born than aborted then you start thinking about things differently. But that’s not especially prochoice.
What does “prochoice” mean in this context? Are you using it as a synonym for value-neutral? I think our policies should treat abortion as value-neutral, but I’m not sure how you make an individual woman view it as value-neutral. It also seems like you’re taking the position that it’s better to be aborted than to be born, which isn’t exactly value-neutral either.
There’s a more fundamental problem with that statement – likethe rest of G&W’s post, it conflates pregnancies and babies. Pregnancies can be aborted. Babies cannot be aborted. They can be born, or not.
An abortion can be compared to a birth as far as outcomes of pregnancies go – but not from the point of view of the baby. If there is an abortion, there is no baby. You may as well ask “is it better for a baby to be born, or for its parents to never have met?” – that makes about as much sense.
No, it really doesn’t. Because you will still be paying to support that child out of your own pocket; even in the Utopian scenario where the unwilling father immediately steps up and agrees to pay his legal share of child support, that is not going to take care of the full (or even, in all likelihood, the majority) cost of raising that child. Now she’s a mother who has even less money, plus she has to, you know, raise a child by herself.
And that’s in Utopia. If Dad disputes paternity, if he job-hops or works off the books, if every time Mom tries to get him to pay child support he pays just enough to make her start over again next time he shorts the kid – what’s the point?
(Plus, there is that whole father thing. A sperm donor doesn’t show up and want visitation, or fight you for custody, or dump your child with his new girlfriend to babysit, or tell you how you should be raising your child, but a father does.)
Regarding the anecdata about your aunt, the fact that she got away with something doesn’t mean it was legal. The whole reason that Utah and Oregon try to cut unwed fathers out of the picture as soon as possible is that the father has rights, and adoptive parents do not want Biodad showing up six months in and saying “The bitch never told me I had a son, I’m undoing the adoption.”
And no, it is not the same decision women using sperm banks make. Do you think your wife married a sperm bank? That’s awfully negative.
EasilyEnthused @123 – nobody at all is having trouble imagining women acting out of base motives. It’s you and other C4M proponents who seem to have trouble imagining that men might do the same thing. I’m not even talking about violence, but about refusing to pay for an abortion, or changing their minds too late for the woman to end the pregnancy, or being deceptive about birth control because pregnancy is “her problem.”
And we keep coming back, again and again, to child support, as part of the cultural trope that women just want men’s money and the paramount relationship between a man and his children is financial.
Huh?
Lord knows I’m not in the “women are conniving breeders” camp. But are you seriously disputing that?
sperm bank > woman solely responsible for child.
unwilling father > somewhere between “solely responsible” and “gets a lot of help,” depending on the situation.
From a purely financial perspective, the ability to sue for child support is either neutral (no support, same as banking) or positive (more than zero support, unlike banking.)
Your answer doesn’t make sense.
That’s not much a conversation, then, is it? It doesn’t take a great leap of logic to conclude that if the man’s desires are entirely immaterial, they don’t get a say.
The issue of course is that plenty of people feel that the man’s desires AREN’T immaterial. They aren’t material enough to justify certain things (bans on abortion among them.) But they’re relevant to the conversation, especially when it comes to incentives and future planning.
gin-and-whiskey @139: Yes, it makes sense. I note that your unwilling father option does not include “impossible to find”, or “blood from a turnip” (as a lawyer, I’m sure you’re aware that child support is determined by ability to pay), or “will take the child away from you”.
“Purely financial” also doesn’t make sense, unless we’re going to pretend that the only motivation women have is purely financial.
Don’t you think that maybe you’re going too far, Chingona?
You lost the MRA and, I suspect, the vast majority of the C4M crowd there.
“Specifically, as I said, I think some women may try all sorts of unhealthy things to keep a partner, just like some men. But using child support as leverage in the way you are suggesting makes no sense. The choice as you present it is: A – support the child, or B – support the child and stay in an undesired relationship. W”
Huh? The common trope is that the man will value the child (or the mother of the child…) enough to stay in the relationship. It is *stupid*, but lots of people seem to believe it.
That isn’t hard to believe, right? In fact it is completely normal to believe it, right?
But I think the question of ‘trapping’ is beside the point. The pro-choice philosophy posits that the rights of the fetus are so slim that they can be actually killed for any reason (of the woman’s choice) whatsoever. Actual death is about as serious a down side as it gets. “For whatever reason” is about as slim a reason as it gets.
“Not getting child support” is less bad than “dead”. That’s the essential logic behind the argument.
Pro-lifers who have actually read Roe v Wade are as rare as fundamentalist Christians who have actually read the Bible.
I get that you’d like to turn this thread into an abortion discussion. But the relevant link to C4M is that the reason a woman can obtain an abortion is that she has the right to privacy regarding her body. (This is limited by the countervailing state’s interest in preserving fetal life.) Men, who don’t get knocked up, don’t have that interest where the pregnancy is involved. Didn’t we already go over all this?
What? Is this a game of “Top That Non Sequitur”?
C4M is all about the man’s right to opt out because the woman did not get an abortion.
I guess I need to ask. The logic behind what argument? The anti-abortion argument? If so, why are you talking about that here?
“C4M is all about the man’s right to opt out because the woman did not get an abortion.”
AND could have, for any reason whatsoever. The logic behind C4M (such as it is) is that the woman can opt out (by getting an abortion for any reason whatsoever) so the man should be able to opt out too.
I don’t even particularly support the C4m argument, but you all aren’t even remotely engaging it.
Sebastian H @146: That argument has been engaged over and over and over again. The response has been “no, you still don’t agree with C4M so clearly you didn’t understand me.”
The counter to the ‘logic’ in your argument is: women have the right to ‘opt out’ of pregnancy because they are the ones who get pregnant. Like men, they do not have the right to unilaterally “opt out” of their obligations to a child. Like men, whether or not they had any say in the decision to have sex, start a pregnancy or carry the pregnancy to term has no bearing on their obligations to the child.
It isn’t a logical position. It’s an emotional position: “But I don’t want to be stuck being a father!” That’s why we have to keep repeating ourselves over and over, because no matter how many times you dismantle the logic of C4M, many people want it to be true.
Unless you’re disabled or otherwise unemployable, you’ll be pushed to make monies, based on how much a judge can guess you’re capable of making. No “but he’s broke!” get out close as far as I know. And if she’s broke, she HAS to sue him for child support if it’s possible at all, she can’t agree not to. She won’t have to sue him if he’s unknown (but they’ll do paternity tests if she names someone), missing, dead, or physically unable to make money.
She won’t have welfare rights, even here in Quebec province where it’s waaay more lax, if there is another avenue of income from someone else, like the father. Welfare is also contingent on not being on unemployment, and like unemployment benefits, all income is subject to drastically lowering your check (here welfare goes on a “you can make 200$, but the rest gets deducted $ for $”).
It doesn’t have to be a motive, it’s simply a consequence.
If I work because I can’t stand being at home, a consequence is more monies. But my motive is not staying at home all day. See consequences divorced from their motive – and I know people like that who are 75 and will renovate the crap out of every house they live in, and move to new ones once that’s done. Just because they can’t stand doing nothing, and work is all they know. They even spend money on the deal, and are not after plus-value to the homes (those that are do that professionally, not as a hobby).
Now if mother who got a kid from that-guy gets money on top, it’s only icing. She wanted the cake, having a kid, from the beginning. Now there could be a motive of revenge ( a pretty irrational feeling, since it solves nothing and simply causes more anger in the vengeful, and propagates the pain, on top), but since we don’t prosecute petty thought crimes, we can’t have stats on that.
Personally, I don’t want a kid because I’m too immature emotionally and too cynical about the redemption of the world. I’d feel like I’d burdened the world with more mouth to feed, and the kid with living in this crappy world of ours, both.
But in our world, if I was fertile, I’d have to never have PIV sex, because I might lose my purity. I mean, my seed.
Schala @148: The judge ‘guessing’ is actually the judge looking at whether the person paying child support is actually able to earn as much as they say they can. For example, if you’re a senior QA analyst and you’re getting divorced, you can’t quit your job and announce to the judge “Sorry, I don’t make any money, please set the amount of child support I owe at $10 a week.” It doesn’t mean that if you are an unskilled minimum-wage laborer that the judge is going to tell you that you could be the CEO of PayPal if you really tried so he’s going to use that as the baseline.
I can’t speak for Quebec, but in most (if not all) of the US, if the parent receiving child support is really broke and goes on public assistance, the state is going to turn around and try to get the money back from the parent who is supposed to be paying.
It doesn’t have to be a motive, it’s simply a consequence.
This doesn’t even make sense.
First the argument is that women “ensnare” men into pregnancy purely so women can profit off child support – which absurdly ignores the childrearing expenses the mother will assume, and the negative economic effects of single motherhood.
Bad news, btw: PIV sex is not necessary for pregnancy.
G&W @140 –
I may have been guilty of over-simplifying. Obviously, a conversation is better than a non-conversation. But I was trying to strip the situation down to the worst case scenario, when all else fails. But if I understand your view correctly, it’s similar to Sebastian H’s – C4M will basically provide a means for men to encourage women to have abortions.
Let’s assume that that’s correct. Let’s assume that that’s how it will be used in some cases, and that it will be effective (I don’t really think either is right, but I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole). What of all the other cases? What of all the cases where the man really couldn’t care less about whether the baby is born, he just doesn’t want to pay? What about the baby, who may well need support and never participated in any conversation?
If this is really about finding ways to encourage women to abort children that the father doesn’t want, we can brainstorm such methods. But C4M is a blunt tool, one that will be used to do far more harm than good.
I know there have been a lot of well-worded replies, and I was initially going to try to respond to them all, but I think Eytan Zweig’s last paragraph tackles some underlying issue that motivates me to take my position (or to at least argue as devil’s advocate here.)
Close, actually – but not quite. What I want is people who make the choice to create a child to be responsible for supporting it – but, apparently where we differ here is that I believe that as we live in a world where birth control and abortion are legal – the “choice” to create a child does not begin when a man orgasms.
What I want is a world with more children being born who are wanted and desired by at least two people who will be able to support them – and therefore I want a world with less children wanted by only one parent who will not be able to support them alone.
If C4M actually encourages more women to abort a child that they will have to raise alone – I will support it. Frankly, I don’t think we’re there yet because some people still think zygote=baby.
In the meantime I only wish for child support to be unenforceable in cases of rape and for courts to respect pre-conception contracts that waives a man’s child support obligations when a woman refuses to have an abortion they both had agreed to.
EasilyEnthused:
First, the paragraph you quoted wasn’t directed at you but at Gin-and-Whiskey’s earlier response to me, which did seem to be taking that position.
Second, I don’t believe the choice to risk having a child (not “the choice to have a child”, btw, which is a different matter) begins when a man orgasms. It begins when a man decides to have heterosexual sex. And just to be clear, I’m not nitpicking the fact that orgasms can happen in other contexts, but rather I’m saying that the orgasm happens after the choice (also note that trying to avoid orgasm is not an effective method of contraception).
And I simply don’t accept the “if C4M results in more women aborting it must be good”. There are plenty of ideas that will achieve the same result and are also bad. We can institute a single parent tax – if a woman gives birth to a child and the father is not involved, the woman needs to pay $10,000. That would result in more abortions. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s an abhorrant idea. C4M may be less terrible, but it’s still pretty bad.
In the meantime I only wish for child support to be unenforceable in cases of (a) rape and for courts to respect (b) pre-conception contracts that waives a man’s child support obligations when a woman refuses to have an abortion they both had agreed to.
Your very first comment raised the prospect of a (c) woman from your past, or, to make it less personal, a man’s past, showing up later and asking for child support for a child he didn’t even know about.
Others have said a man should be able to (d) opt-out in the first 12 weeks so that the woman can make an informed decision about whether she wants to raise a child by herself.
The two cases (a & b) you list for an opt-out wouldn’t help a man in either c or d, and d wouldn’t help a man with c. It also seems to me that c is most likely in one-night stand or very short-lived, casual encounters, in which case b is pretty unlikely to come into play.
Of all of these, I think the one that seems the most fair to me in a common sense way (not in a legal or political or social science sort of way) is some sort of statute of limitations for informing the father, but the political reality is that we are doing everything we can to slash every form of public assistance, so if there is a biological father to go after, the state will go after him, and the legal reality is that the mother cannot waive her child’s right to support. The other practical problem I see is that under that scenario the woman is essentially severing the man’s parental rights without his knowledge, and while you might be fine with that, lots of MRAs and even lots of men who aren’t MRAs would have a problem with that.
Anyway, my point is actually a question for you and any other C4m advocates. What, exactly, do you want? How, exactly, would it work?
Chinoga, I appreciate you trying to depersonalize my personal story from earlier – but I don’t mind. I brought it up – so it’s fair game.
In my personal “nightmare” scenario – if I was hit by a child support request many years after the fact by a former one-night-stand of mine, what I would like is a chance to stand before a judge and say “Your honor, if I had known that this child existed and would be in need of my support, I would have better managed my finances to afford for it – but now it is many years later and I have investments in my own children with my own wife that I made based on the assumption that no previous children of mine existed and would need my support.”
I would also want that court to, with rationality and common sense, realize that the woman who was now applying for child support had intentionally left me out of the life of my child – and had made a choice to attempt to either raise the child alone or with the help of her family.
I’d want that court to say that taking food from the mouths of children born into a home where both parents wanted and planned for them to put into the mouth of children with a deceitful single parent makes little sense and is a perversion of justice.
But our current systems don’t work that way. Child support laws that were written before abortion and adultery were legal are currently blind to the nuances of parenthood in modern society.
Biological DNA (and presumptive parenthood) is all that the courts see – and that needs to change for fairness to the people with the power to create and nurture new life.
What I would LIKE to see is a statute of limitations for when a child exists to the date the parent applies for child support. I would like to see pre-conception abortion contracts validated. I would like to see the ability for men to contest child support for numerous reasons OTHER than simple paternity.
(Aside: I’d like to make a call to any other contributors here, like Mythago, who are familiar with deadbeat dads and the number of them who are intentionally skipping out on child support. Were they in relationships with the mother when she became pregnant? Were they married? Were they TRYING to have a child? I don’t work in social services and my experiences with child support are limited to my mother and father after their divorce, which is a whole nother can’o’worms – I’d like more information but my research is seemingly fruitless.)
It should also be noted that some of the people who lecture men about “child abandonment” if they want to have an option to have their own “abortion” but the woman has the child anyway, are some of the same people who support late term abortions, where the fetus has gained consciousness and thus personhood and become a baby, where partial birth abortion literally chops up the baby, and where all late term abortions leave the child to die. How can these people take a baby who is conscious in the womb and kill it or let it die and then turn around and lecture men for not supporting (but allowing to live) a child that he never agreed to in the first place?
@155: Oh, look. Another Ahabist.
And you’ve offered no real basis for why this scenario should be the law, other than “I want”. It’s also pretty ugly that you forget that a [rhetorical] child that you’ve fathered on another woman is just as much one of your “own children” as a child you have with your wife. The obligations you have toward a child do not depend on whether you’re currently in love with its mother.
In your scenario, btw, the judge could just as easily respond that you deliberately chose to have sex with women knowing that it might result in fatherhood, and that it was incumbent on you to manage your finances to provide for that eventuality.
And again, this is why we keep going around and around in circles on this. The belief in C4M is an emotional one; I don’t want to be a father unless I say so and because I can’t get pregnant there is no chance I can have an abortion, and I don’t like that.
@Mythago: Well we agree on one thing – we are going in circles.
One thing I want to mention, though:
I’m not “forgetting” the above – I’m rejecting it.
I reject that I have an obligation in supporting a child that I did not chose to create – it’s as simple as that.
I understand that you reject it. But the basis of your rejection is “DO NOT WANT”. That is not really an argument for setting aside as to men only the current system, in which both parents are legally obligated to care for their born children regardless of whether they chose to become parents.
We are not, I hope, talking about a scenario in which you were sexually assaulted by any of your pre-marital partners. Absent that, you engaged in PIV sex with the full knowledge that if your partner became pregnant, that she might decide to carry to term and keep the child. (And before you complain that this gives women special benefits; believe me, we’re well aware of the risks we face if contraception fails. There’s a reason that at least in the US, contraception is largely perceived to be a woman’s problem.)
As a practical matter, this seems to be a bit of a tempest in a teapot: you’d be talking about a situation where the contraception failed and the woman decided to carry to term, and she kept the baby, and she was able to identify you sufficiently that either she or (if she received public benefits) the government could track you down and demand support. Which you’d be paying at a level of ‘starving graduate student’, too. How likely is that chain of events?
As I’m sure has been pointed out before, Mythago is using the same arguments that the pro-lifers use. “You women choose to have sex knowing you could get pregnant. Getting an abortion is just you being irresponsible. Pro-choicers base their views on emotion, not reality”. Mythago is saying the exact same thing, except about men.
A C4M that depended on pre-conception agreements might well represent a case of “be careful what you wish for.” My guess (but perhaps I would be proven wrong) is that very few women would sign such pre-conception agreements. If they existed in a legally enforceable form, men who insisted on the agreements might face their pool of potential sexual partners getting very small and might not propose such agreements, thereby waiving their right to opt-out. Which would put us right back where we are now, with some men taking reasonable precautions and lots of men just assuming it’s her deal and she has it covered and everyone rolling the dice. If such agreements existed but women wouldn’t sign them, any man who went ahead and had sex anyway would do so with the full knowledge that he would be responsible for any child that resulted. Just like now.
“Sebastian H @146: That argument has been engaged over and over and over again. The response has been “no, you still don’t agree with C4M so clearly you didn’t understand me.””
I don’t even agree with C4M, so it really looks like you’re just being an ass by dismissing me that way.
Nearly every time we talk about abortion here, we get plenty of stories about how birth control can fail, unexpected things can happen, a boyfriend can pressure to have an abortion, the mother might be poor (and unwilling to give up for adoption) etc. So far as I can tell, none of those things are the fault of a fetus. Yet they are allegedly excellent points in the abortion debate–even so far as very late term abortions. From the pro-choice point of view, the fetus is an entity with no rights whatsoever. It can be killed for any reason the woman wants. And here on Alas, there are numerous people who argue that it would be best if that were possible with a minimum of questions asked all the way through all nine months of pregnancy. (see for example Amp)
So by the logic of the pro-choice argument, the fetus can have its life extinguished for any reason whatsoever up to some particular time. For some here, that time is “exiting the womb”. For others it might be “viability”. For others it might be something else. Whatever that point is, before that point, fetal rights are so tiny as to allow the fetus to be completely killed until then. Not inconvenienced. Not doomed to a life of poverty. Not put back a grade. Killed.
The C4M argument, engages that same timeline. For the period where fetal rights are so tiny that it can be killed, C4M suggests that it can also be disclaimed.
The weird thing for me as an outsider (who is not excited about C4M and whom people around here certainly wouldn’t count as pro-choice) is that all sorts of arguments which are considered laughable by you-all in the context of the abortion debate seem to be taken very very seriously in this context. “She made the choice to take that risk when she had sex (even with condoms and on the pill…)” = horrible argument in the abortion context. “He made the choice to take that risk when he had sex (even with condoms and her on the pill…)” = da bomb in the child support context.
Pregnancy is a nine month thing that she didn’t sign up for just because she had sex *to precisely the same extent* as he didn’t sign up for an 18 year child support obligation just because he had sex. We can have arguments about what extent that is, but it is in fact the same extent.
But look at the language of the support argument. It essentially comes down to “he took risks by having sex, he needs to live with it”. This is the very argument that you HATE HATE HATE in the abortion context. Where does its moral force come from all of the sudden now?
“I reject the idea that I have an obligation to the person that I did not choose to injure (but did injure) in that automobile accident.
I reject the idea that I am responsible for unintended consequences of my actions if somebody chooses to act differently than I expected them to act causing a different result than the one I wanted.”
Is this really the C4M argument that you’re making? If it is, I don’t find it convincing. I hope I’m misunderstanding the argument.
@Mythago, one of my former partners did “envelop” me in PIV sex without a condom while I was asking her to get off of me – she would not get off of me. She had just brought me to orgasm and the possibility of her getting pregnant was >0 … but admittedly, that was only one of my former partners.
@Jake:
I don’t like your car accident analogy. A car accident happens in a blink of an eye – a baby takes six months.
Jake, let’s say you invite me to your house for a garden party. I bring a bag of walnuts to share. You and your guests enjoy my walnuts, but unfortunately, a walnut is dropped and lands in your garden. The next month, you notice a sapling growing among your azaleas. You ignore it. Eventually, a few months later, the sapling has grown to a mighty tree (it was one of those fast-growing trees, dontchaknow) and needs to be trimmed because it is almost touching power lines.
If our civil courts worked like our child support system – I’d be responsible for paying to trim your walnut tree. If that’s how you want the world to work … well then …
This is also where I hit a snag in the argument.
I said previously that it was slut-shaming, and was told it was not. So telling someone, “don’t have sex, or we’ll make you regret it eventually” isn’t a threat, because the application comes from what, law officials? Judges? Because the slut-shaming is institutionalized?
@JakeSquid
Here, if you are responsible for an accident (it didn’t just happen, you caused it), your insurance pays, not you.
And the difference between an accidental pregnancy and being responsible for causing an accident is that an accidental pregnancy is more similar to an accident you are not responsible for, and the other party isn’t either. It’s an act of god that caused the accident. But the other party is sueing YOU for damages. Not god.
@Jake (sorry for the double post)
If I am driving a gravel truck in front of you, and a rock comes off of my truck, strikes and chips your window – you could (rightly) sue me to fix the chip, maybe even the whole windshield.
If you ignore that chip, it grows into a large crack, obscures your vision and you drive off the road into a ravine, I’ll be damned if I’m going to replace your entire Toyota, get my drift?
Hibernia @159: Do try to follow along. Women as well as men are responsible for their born children, regardless of whether they wanted to be pregnant or could obtain an abortion. Take your kayak elsewhere, please.
Sebastian H @161: Actually, “if you have a baby, you’re responsible for it” applies to women, too. Or are you, too, still clinging to the false but rhetorically-useful pretense that women have no legal and financial obligations to their children?
The difference between abortion and legal responsibility to a child is that one involves a pregnancy contained in the woman’s body alone, and the other involves an existing child. Men are not obligated to pay “fetus support”.
The C4M argument, engages that same timeline. For the period where fetal rights are so tiny that it can be killed, C4M suggests that it can also be disclaimed.
Perfect! During the pregnancy, the man will not have to pay any child support! No, seriously, the issue is precisely this … that if the fetus is not killed, it becomes a child. The child’s rights are ongoing. That’s why they cannot be disclaimed.
I am aware that there is a certain amount of irony in the arguments being made here. That said, I think the situation of a woman with a fetus inside her body is fundamentally and qualitatively different than the situation of a man or woman with a legally mandated financial obligation. Socially and legally, we consider impositions on someone’s body to be greater and more serious impositions than impositions on someone’s wallet. To use a metaphor that will be recognizable to anyone who has debated abortion on the internet, we mandate that parents financially support their children, but we don’t mandate that a parent provide a life-saving organ transplant for their child, though most of us would not think very highly of a parent who refused.
Also, no one here has said that a woman who has a child isn’t responsible for the child’s welfare. I’ve known several women who learned they were pregnant at too late a date to have an abortion, even if they would have wanted one. They are legally responsible for their children. In the one example I used above, the woman had her tubes tied, so I guess that’s just bad luck, but in another example, the woman was not especially careful with her birth control. I will say it right here, that if she really didn’t want to have another kid, if she was unwilling to take that responsibility, she should have been more careful about her birth control and more prompt about determining just what was up with not getting her period. (First home pregnancy test was negative. She didn’t take another test until she started to feel movement.) If she had tried to give the baby up for adoption, her husband would have objected, and she wouldn’t have been able to. Not that different from the situation a man is in.
Schala @164: The argument is not “well you had sex, so you deserve to pay child support as punishment for not keeping your dick in your pants.” THAT would be slut-shaming, and I for one would profoundly disagree with such a view – which, btw, feeds into the MRA idea that child support has nothing to do with the inconvenient brat, but is all about the person paying it and is a punishment. Please explain to me how “there’s a child now, and as one of its parents, you have certain obligations toward the child” is slut-shaming. Particularly as the latter argument applies to both men and women.
Here, if you are responsible for an accident (it didn’t just happen, you caused it), your insurance pays, not you.
Now there’s an idea. Men who don’t want to take the risk of unexpected child support payments can take out an insurance policy. Low monthly premiums in exchange for peace of mind.
For someone who had no intention of having a child, it can be very well be punishment.
It’s only not punishment if it’s wanted by said parent.
1) She can abort and she has much more reasonable (and effective) short-term birth control than he does. She can decide she is in no financial position to bring a child in the world, regardless of what he wants (and that’s fine).
2) She can adopt it out and abandon it with no problem, without even so much as mentioning the father. And the father cannot do that, because he’s not giving birth, and has no access to the baby the moment it is born the way she does. No more financial burden, no obligation to anyone, not even the kid – and zhe’s alive by then no?
So, if she really doesn’t want to be responsible, she has ways out, he doesn’t. His only way out is if she aborts, and she gets the only say there, so it’s not exactly a reliably way out.
So the situation is:
A and B have sex, A gets pregnant, she can use birth control, if that fails, abort, and if she has moral qualms about it, adopt it out – without notifying B of any of that. But if she has the kid, B pays.
What’s the problem with A having sex with B, from the point of view of A? That she might get STIs, and might face inconvenience.
What’s the problem with A having sex with B, from the point of view of B?
That he might get STIs, and face 18-21 years of continuous garnished-from-his-wages payments for a kid he probably didn’t want (because most conceptions are not wanted, on average – or we’d have 25 kids).
Car insurance is mandatory, for everyone, and has higher premiums for men than women, too.
Thankfully I don’t drive or even own a driving license, or I’d be considered male for that purpose (as I am legally so, even if not socially so).
And car insurance doesn’t reimburse damages done to someone. It’s no-fault here. You don’t get to sue the other because your Armani jacket got stained in the accident, or because you became disabled due to it. Taxes pay for that person through a government organization. And not extremely high amounts like the US courts love (seriously, 5 million $ for being punched by Gatti?).
If both men and women paid this insurance, and could use it to finance abortions (thus abortions becoming paid by that insurance, if they occur), then yes, no problem. If only men paid, no. I’m for equality.
And if you don’t pay that insurance, you at least can have it coming to you – you didn’t take precautions.
What if you don’t have insurance? What if you don’t have enough insurance. I’m willing to drop the accident analogy. What about the second rejection at comment # 162?
“I reject the idea that I am responsible for unintended consequences of my actions if somebody chooses to act differently than I expected them to act causing a different result than the one I wanted.”
Is that an accurate understanding of your argument?
As I pointed out earlier, the “well, if you don’t like the consequences of sex*, just don’t have sex” line has been pretty well shredded w/r/t women. As it should be: having sex is simply what most people do, once they’re of sexually active age.
Seriously: do any people think “don’t have sex” is an acceptable solution to a woman’s problem? “That’s right, women, problems from accidental pregnancy are solved! Just stop having sex if you don’t want kids!! Or, get your uterus removed!” Yeah, that would fly here. Not.
You all would presumably recognize that as bullshit. As such, I’m stunned that folks here can keep a straight face when they”re suggesting it for men. How can you justify that line?
*By which I mean consensual sex.
@chingona: “we consider impositions on someone’s body to be greater and more serious impositions than impositions on someone’s wallet.”
The problem is that this is not always true. If it was, then mandating that 6th grade girls get HPV vaccines would be worse than slavery since HPV vaccines directly affect your bodily autonomy while slavery leaves everything under the skin alone. I hope everyone would agree that this would be a ridiculous standard. So the idea that if it doesn’t affect you under your skin then it really doesn’t matter is not a supportable policy.
@Mythago: Your policy allows women to decide if they are able to support a child or not while it does not allow the same choice to the man, but requires both genders to be equally responsible for the decision that only one gender makes. That is sexist. So you either need to allow him some choice in whether the abortion happens or not or you can’t hold him responsible for the choice that the woman makes. She needs to be responsible for her own decisions, not force the responsibility onto someone else. This needs to be a decision made between the two parents. If one goes rouge, then they need to be responsible for the result. If you don’t want single parents, then promote the idea of the woman getting an abortion unless both she and the father want a child. That is the only fair policy.
I apologize Jake, I meant to address that but got lost in my analogy.
You said:
“I reject the idea that I am responsible for unintended consequences of my actions if somebody chooses to act differently than I expected them to act causing a different result than the one I wanted.”
I would say:
“I reject the idea that I am responsible for extended unintended consequences of my actions if somebody reasonably fails to mitigate the consequences of my initial actions.”
Another example: If I visit your house (after being invited) and accidentally break a window while there, I should repay you the cost of breaking that window. If I repay you the cost of the window, and you wait a few weeks to have the repair done and rainwater seeps into the open window and ruins your carpet, it would be unfair for me to pay for the carpet to be replaced.
Of course this situation is complicated if A) I wasn’t invited over to your house, B) I intentionally broke the window or C) if I don’t give you the money to fix the window. I recognize these complications but think that pursuing them here might be off topic – I’ll leave it up to Amp.
If it was, then mandating that 6th grade girls get HPV vaccines would be worse than slavery since HPV vaccines directly affect your bodily autonomy while slavery leaves everything under the skin alone.
Slavery IS an imposition on bodily autonomy. Someone else literally own’s your body and can do with it what they like.
(And mandatory vaccines are never truly mandatory, as parents can opt out based on “beliefs,” not even necessarily religious beliefs. But that’s really only tangential to the main thing that is wrong with your argument.)
If both men and women paid this insurance, and could use it to finance abortions (thus abortions becoming paid by that insurance, if they occur), then yes, no problem. If only men paid, no. I’m for equality.
I know you’re Canadian and I don’t know how it works there, but most American women are already paying for insurance that would cover their abortions.
Seriously: do any people think “don’t have sex” is an acceptable solution to a woman’s problem? “That’s right, women, problems from accidental pregnancy are solved! Just stop having sex if you don’t want kids!! Or, get your uterus removed!” Yeah, that would fly here. Not.
If a woman is not able to have an abortion for whatever reason, should she then not be responsible for her child? Is that your argument?
@Chinoga 179:
Um – yes? I was under the impression that a woman who gives birth to a baby and does not want to care for it may give it up through either safe harbor laws or by listing the father as “unknown” on the birth certificate and putting it up for adoption – it’s certainly not fair to the father at that point, but it is certainly her legal right.
I don’t actually expect people to not have sex, but it’s a fact of life that not all problems created by sex have solutions and not all solutions are available to all parties. (Herpes has no cure. If you want to be 100 percent sure you don’t get herpes, you can not have sex. The vast majority of sexual beings are going to have sex anyway. Thus, some of them will have to live with herpes.)
Allowing men to opt out of child support doesn’t even solve a problem created by sex. It just shifts the burden from a shared one to one born solely by one party.
Well, my political philosophy is sort of “those who make the choices get the benefits and consequences of those choices.” I don’t think “avoid all sex” is a reasonable option, so I take that off the table. (if you think it’s a reasonable option, i’d love to hear why.)
1) women get free abortions and BC. Men get free vasectomies and BC. The goal is to reduce the number of unwanted kids, not to increase the number of wanted kids. So this doesn’t necessarily require society to also provide free pregnancy assistance. If you want “no kid,” we’ll help; if you want a kid but can’t pay for pregnancy care then perhaps you should reconsider parenthood.
2) either party can contract for whatever the hell they want. If a couple wants to contract “Father will take sole responsibility for the kids, financially and personally” they can do so. If a couple wants to contract Mother to do the same thing, they can do so.
Will this result in fewer people having sex? Sure, maybe. But that’s a net social benefit. There’s nothing wrong with aborting; there’s nothing wrong with parenting–the only problems are DISAGREEMENTS. We should avoid disagreements. Try to find someone who wants what you want before you screw them.
3) Either party can break their word, of course. But we’re dealing with with that already, so there’s no need to have the heebie jeebies about it. We can help folks (we already do) or toss folks in jail (we already do) or give/remove social benefits (we already do) or take away their kids (we already do) or whatever. It’s not as if we don’t have a system in place to deal with parents and kids and money and contracts and shit.
4) Sometimes people will regret their choices. Oh well, that sucks. But it’s better than not having a choice at all. Other times people won’t bother making a choice. That, too, is better than not having a choice at all.
5) Sometimes people will lie, defraud, etc. We deal with it now. We’ll deal with it then. It’s not as if we don’t already have a system in place to deal with parents and kids and money and contracts and shit.
6) At least at the beginning, we may end up with more single parents. We may end up with more poor parents. We may end up giving social services to people at a higher rate. (Of course, we may also end up with fewer unwanted kids. Wouldn’t that be grand?)
But so what? We deal with it now and we can deal with it then; it’s just a blip in the system and as things go a fairly minor one. Perhaps all people (man and woman alike) will pay higher taxes, creating social pressure for others to avoid having kids they can’t afford. Or perhaps everyone will hate it, and want to change back. OK: If society decides that the experiment doesn’t work, then it’s perfectly reversible.
I was under the impression that a woman who gives birth to a baby and does not want to care for it may give it up through either safe harbor laws or by listing the father as “unknown” on the birth certificate and putting it up for adoption – it’s certainly not fair to the father at that point, but it is certainly her legal right.
We’re in serious Groundhog’s Day territory here.
Once more, this time with feeling … If a woman gives a baby up through a safe haven law, the state makes an effort to find the father. If a man gives a baby up through a safe haven law, the state makes an effort to find the mother. If either the mother or the father wants to keep the baby, the other party is assessed child support. The purpose of safe haven laws isn’t to make child abandonment legal but to avoid a potentially worse outcome.
A woman who lists the father as unknown isn’t exercising her legal rights. She’s circumventing the father’s legal rights. The state doesn’t bend over backwards to prevent this from happening because as a society we seem to think it’s good to have healthy newborns to offer for adoption. It’s not done out of respect for the mother’s rights. It’s done because she has something that “we” want. However, biological father’s have sued – successfully – to have adoptions undone in cases where the mother listed the father as unknown or lied about the father’s identity. So the law sides with the father on this one.
Mythago, the woman gets to make a unilateral choice for both parents. She can choose to abort if she feels *she* cannot or does not want to support the child. She can choose to give the child up for adoption (and can often though not always do so without ever telling the father especially in the kind of situation where forced child support would ever be a problem). She can also make the unilateral choice to keep the baby (voluntarily subjecting herself to the health issues which you normally find so compelling in the abortion context) which will put her sexual partner on the hook for 18 years of child support and potential jail time if he can’t/won’t pay.
Worrying about whether or not that is ‘slut shaming’ is hyper-technical dodging. It absolutely trades on the moral argument behind slut shaming–that if you aren’t willing to put up with normal biological risks of sex you shouldn’t have sex and that once you have sex, you are on the hook for all possibilities from it. In this case it isn’t slut shaming, because the point of the moral logic is not to keep you from having sex, it is to make you pay the price of having sex. But you don’t accept that logic in an abortion context at all and you have done absolutely nothing to explain why you think it has moral force when you normally deny it.
Your explanation seems to be that the sexual partner has moral responsibility to make such sacrifices as the father of the child and that this responsibility flows from the fact that he took the risks of having sex.
This could be saved through a different moral argument–which is that parents have a special responsibility to their offspring, well above and beyond that which we normally ascribe to unrelated parties. But all the pro-choice discussions we normally here, specifically deny that in an abortion context. (We hear of waking up one morning hooked up to a mystery concert violinist (not your daughter), or talk of a parasite (not your son); special responsibilities of motherhood are rarely if ever acknowledged in the abortion debate from the pro-choice side).
You don’t accept that responsibilities for accidents from sex or special responsibilities of parenthood, or even responsibilities for not having an abortion in the first 3 months should attach any heightened requirement on a woman’s right to choose to kill her fetus and from previous discussions that would seem to extend all the way into the ninth month so far as legal protections for a fetus as far as you’re concerned. I put it in such bald terms not to invoke the shock value of an abortion debate, but to specifically contrast it with the worst the absent father can do–which is choose while it is a fetus to leave it without money support later.
But when you’ve declaimed special responsibilities of parenthood as a useful argument, and you’ve declaimed “sex accidents” as a useful argument, there isn’t much left to hang it on.
Here’s an offer:
I’ll keep answering your questions that you raise–but you have to answer my questions. That’s what makes it a conversation, as opposed to an interrogation.
@Chingona at 178
Abortions are mandated to be covered as long as you’re a Canadian citizen, by even the most basic universal healthcare scheme that exists. I don’t know how late they are allowed though, but probably later than most of the US.
Oh and, Canadian citizen includes naturalized citizen who weren’t born here. The distinction is rather small if you live here permanently, and don’t restrict from any office.
That implies that the consequences of your initial actions are detrimental to everyone involved. I don’t think we can safely assume that in this case since we know that the determination is almost entirely subjective. I would find this stance reasonable if everybody viewed the consequences in the same light. Since this is not the case, the logic fails to convince me.
My argument is basically the same as gin and whisky’s at 174.
Which might still accurately represent Jake’s view of my position, I couldn’t say.
“A woman who lists the father as unknown isn’t exercising her legal rights. She’s circumventing the father’s legal rights. The state doesn’t bend over backwards to prevent this from happening because as a society we seem to think it’s good to have healthy newborns to offer for adoption. It’s not done out of respect for the mother’s rights. ”
Ok, but the practical reality is that she can list the father as unknown and give up parental rights. Which is what we’ve been saying all long. She can make that choice *even if she doesn’t have an abortion*.
Provided they hear about it and ARE contacted BEFORE the kid is adopted. Or then the kid will most likely stay with the adoptive parents, because it’s the best interest of the child. And the mother will never have to pay one cent, because the father doesn’t have custody.
So, you give it up far enough away from home, don’t inform dad, baby is adopted, dad learns about it somehow, dad sues, dad loses his parental rights legally.
Oh and this assumes dad can afford a lawyer to begin with. Minimum wage employment can barely afford to live alone or with a housemate, let alone a 100$/hour person.
@Jake 187: I think you might be onto something there – but I can’t quite parse out your sentence.
I don’t think “detrimental” is inherent in my argument. For example, if we go back to the walnut tree analogy, you very well may love the beautiful walnut tree in your back yard. Hell, I might like to come over and we could both play patty-cake while sitting underneath it – but that doesn’t mean I’m responsible for taking care of it now that you let it grow in your garden.
I’ll keep answering your questions that you raise–but you have to answer my questions. That’s what makes it a conversation, as opposed to an interrogation.
I’m not sure why this is directed at me. The question that you answered at 182 wasn’t directed at you specifically, though it’s obviously fine that you answered. I gave my answer to the “just have sex” issue at 181 (we cross-posted), and addressed EE’s objection to 179 at 183. I’ve pretty consistently responded to various points people have brought up. I’m sorry — it’s a long thread — but I’m not seeing other specific questions you asked that I ignored. I’ve also been seriously neglecting the work I’m supposedly on the clock for, so if I don’t respond right away, that’s why.
Which is what we’ve been saying all long. She can make that choice *even if she doesn’t have an abortion*.
Right. By cheating/not following the rules. And if they get caught at it, they’ll have to pay child support to the father. Men also can make the choices to not follow the rules and thus avoid paying child support. Both men and women have the option of breaking the law to avoid supporting their biological children.
Provided they hear about it and ARE contacted BEFORE the kid is adopted.
In the United States, men have successfully had adoptions undone AFTER the fact. Years after the fact. Children who lived two, three, four years with their adopted families were returned to their biological fathers.
And now I really have to get some work done.
A walnut tree is not a child. From a public policy perspective, we don’t care if a generic walnut tree suffers or dies from lack of resources. Making sure that every walnut tree has adequate resources to grow up healthy and whole is not widely accepted as an urgent goal of public policy.
For that reason, I don’t think that the analogy between walnut trees and children tells us anything useful regarding what public policy regarding children should be.
@Chingona: How can you say that slavery is a violation of bodily autonomy, but then turn around and say that being forced into payments you didn’t choose is not? Yes, yes, slavery is much more severe than being forced to reproduce against your will, but it a lesser degree of the same basic principle. In both cases, you are doing work, but the money is being taken from you when you never got a chance to choose this arrangement. And that isn’t counting the time and energy that the man is also supposed to be spending on the child. A man can promise to love all his future kids and still feel unprepared to have kids at this moment. I feel like too many people are treating whether a woman can choose whether or not to have a child as a crisis, while at the same time assuming that it has little to no effect on the father, which just isn’t true. First trimester abortions are quick and easy. Raising a child for 18 years is not. Abortion in the first trimester should be the choice of each couple if they don’t both agree to have kids.
@Ampersand
Public policy still allows single women go to a sperm bank and single men or women to adopt children (in some cases.)
We allow human beings to say “I am capable of supporting this child of mine on my income alone.” But as it stands now, we only allow women to change their mind and have a fall-back system if things aren’t going their way – as far as I know.
Also, I know it may seem like semantics here, but a man and a woman do not create a “child.” A man and a woman create a “zygote” which has no rights and no responsibilities to claim from anyone. A woman alone turns a “zygote” into a “child” – a being that does have rights and responsibilities to it. It is that power of transformation that is bestowed on her by biology.
And with any great power comes great responsibility – I trust women to decide what to do with their own bodies – if I did not – I would be pushing to block single women from going to sperm banks or some other nonsense.
Wrt C4M, yeah, I think your argument implies that the consequences are detrimental. Whatever, I think that your ensuing comment highlights the unbridgeable divide between our positions.
You place the rights of the father above the rights of the child. I do the opposite. Your moral stance leads you to your conclusion as my moral stance leads to mine. Unless one of us can convince the other of the superiority of one moral stance, we’ll disagree until the end of time.
chingona @183: Yes, we are. But some of these arguments for C4M fall apart when you acknowledge that a pregnancy is not the same as having a born child, and that the responsibilities of both parents to a born child are identical (unlike with pregnancy). So you have to just ignore them. Rinse, repeat.
EasilyEnthused @197: I’m happy to go into the reasons we allow sperm banks and treat them differently than fathers, if you care. But I think I’ve finally figured out one reason this is going in circles: there are really two separate approaches here.
One is the consequences view. That is, responsibility to a child is appropriate because the parent’s actions led to there being a child; “if you didn’t want X, you shouldn’t have had sex.” Somebody who follows this view would allow an exception for people who didn’t mean to do X, or who tried not to do X. For example, someone who believes that rape victims should be allowed to have abortions, or that women should be allowed to abort if they show they were using contraception responsibly, holds a “consequences” view; it is only all right to avoid the consequences of having sex if you were morally blameless .
The other is the result view. It doesn’t matter how the consequences came about; you are responsible for the child, because the child is by definition faultless and has needs that trump the parent’s. Someone who believes that women should not be allowed to abort, even if they had no intention of having sex or getting pregnant, because abortion is always the taking of a human life and thus is the highest moral good, holds a “result” view.
(Superficially, someone who slut-shames is in the “consequences” camp, but I think they aren’t really; such people are not really weighing the child vs. the parent’s behavior as much as they are using the child as a club to bludgeon people who do things they don’t like.)
The law takes the “result” view, which I share. The overriding concern is the child’s interests, and yes, sometimes that means that people who didn’t want to have kids and couldn’t avoid it are going to be stuck with parenting.*
EasilyEnthused, I believe that you take the “consequences” view. I don’t mean that disparagingly; I mean that you appear to believe that whether a parent is responsible for a child depends on whether that parent chose to conceive, and possibly even whether they had the opportunity to back out but declined. (I’m not as sure about the latter, and don’t wish to assume, because you haven’t said whether you think C4M should apply to a man who enthusiastically and deliberately gets his partner pregnant, but then changes his mind, or whether the reasons he changes his mind or the effects of the flip-flop on the mother are relevant.)
So when you say “I didn’t want to be a father” and I said “you took that risk”, I really am being the Devil quoting Scripture here. I myself don’t believe that whether a man or woman meant to have sex**, or get pregnant, or had the opportunity to use contraception or abortion is relevant once there is a born child. But quite understandably, you interpret that as my saying “I believe that you should be responsible for your child because you couldn’t keep your pants on until marriage”, and that is in fact not my view.
*By ‘parenting’ I mean the entire package of responsibilities towards a child, including child support, childrearing, the duty to protect the child from harm, etc. If you are not a parent it may be a bit abstract to realize that paying the bills is perhaps the least burdensome and challenging part of having kids. I also despise the misandrist view that the only thing a man has to contribute to his child’s welfare is money.
**Obviously this is especially unfair to rape victims. The approach many states take, and which I think is probably the least terrible way out, is to say that as a matter of law a rapist is not the legal parent of any child conceived from that rape. No child support, obviously, but also no parental rights; s/he is no more a parent of that child, in the eyes of the law, than you or I. The remaining parent is then free to raise the child, place the child for adoption, etc., and the rapist does not benefit or exert any control over the child or the other parent. This completely eliminates the situation in which an adult woman rapes a minor boy, becomes pregnant, and then keeps custody of their child while hitting him up for child support, incidentally forcing the boy to have her in his life if he does want to be involved with the child. It also gives no percentage to a man who thinks raping his wife or girlfriend is a great way to tie her to him.