Quite a while ago, regarding the “Choice for Men” debate, Cathy Young asked me:
Yes, but the comparison is misleading; it implies that the disparity is caused by hypocrisy in the feminist position, when the disparity is actually caused by differences in male and female anatomy. (No pro-choicer would deny men the right to abortion, if men were physically capable of pregnancy.)
When pro-lifers say women’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, what they really mean is, “I want to deny you one of your medically viable options.” There’s no reason, except for pro-life laws, that women can’t get an abortion after pregnancy begins.
In contrast, when I say men’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, that’s a statement of biological fact. It’s not an argument in favor of denying men viable medical options; it’s an observation that men physically lack those options.
Although the statements look similar on the surface, the substantive difference between the two positions is enormous, and can’t fairly be overlooked.
Mendy:
Fair enough. But the man is your children’s father, and that relationship is separate from you and your husband, for good or bad. This has nothing to do with your case, but I happen to agree (and I cringe to say this) with some FRA’s that many mothers don’t respect the importance of fatherhood. A woman wanting to move her children far from their father for her new husband’s job appalls me, but I know that’s not what you’re saying. Anyway, the fact that some parents are negligent doesn’t alter the underlying principle that children have a right, which is legal and moral by any decent person’s standards, to the care and support of both parents. To use another underlying principle of a woman’s bodily integrity to nullify a man’s care and support of his children is so odious that I can’t believe there’s a person out there who thinks this is a reasonable point of view.
but point taken, they do allow parents to waive support on behalf of their children
No. They legally decouple biological parenthood from legal parenthood. A sperm donor was never the “father” of his children, in the eyes of the law. He never had any parental rights to waive. (You can’t waive rights you don’t have.)
Elena:
I understand the argument you are making, and I think it is valid in most cases. However, there are cases like mine where the children are loved, cared for, and supported by two parents. Only, one of the parents isn’t biologically related to the child.
I don’t keep my ex from seeing the girls, and I have a wonderful relationship with his parents, but I hate having to console my daughter’s when he breaks their hearts by not keeping the simplest promise of a visit or phone call.
In issues as personal as parenthood it is hard for me to divorce my emotions sometimes from the larger picture, but I will try harder to do so in the future.
I think, unfortunately, it may be true that women devalue fatherhood (although my guess would be that this would be the most rare among feminist women). But that’s largely because *men* devalue fatherhood. One of the ways they devalue it is by *not* taking responsibility for conception and contraception.o
Also, I dare say that more of us grew up closer to our mothers than our fathers, and that’s not an experience that can be wiped out in one generation. It will take some time for fatherhood to really be valued but mostly that’s going to require work by men and by fathers.
Tara:
I think you are right, though I was very close to my father. It will take the actions of men and fathers to change these attitudes.
Ismone,
“I think the tie-breaker is the pregnancy”“either carrying, or choosing not to carry, a child has moral and health implications for the person carrying. ”
This alleged tie-breaker based upon the fact that the fetus is inside the female and must be expelled from the female does not hold as definitive. Females can procure abortions whether their reasons are based upon pre-partum or post-partum difficulties (i.e. whether they do not want the burden or pregnancy or the burden of child-rearing).
Imagine a female who wants to have a child, so she copulates with the purpose of becoming pregant, and she succeeds. The pregnancy develops and she suffers it burdens fully intending to complete it. However, during the second trimester, an amniocyntesis reveals that the baby has Downs Syndrome. Upon learning this, the female reverses her decision to have a child and aborts. She did not abort becauses of the physical, bodily burdens of pregnancy, which she was fully willing to accomodate, but solely because the post-partum burden (economic and laborious) of raising a retarded child was too onerous for her. Abortion law does not discriminate between pre-partum or post-partum reasons for abortion. Indeed, “health reasons” in the legalese, do not mean solely physical burdens of pregnancy, but also the socio-economic and emotional burdens that the female would face while rearing a born child. I am not basing my argument solely upon what existing statutes or case law says, but I’m just informing what the law says. States cannot deny abortion to females who initially intended to procreate, as they should not, as changing circumstances and facts during the pregnancy may cause her to change her mind. And I know of no female advocacy position or pro-choice position which says that females who initially wanted to be pregnant can be prohibited from aborting later on.
Trying to separate bodily imposition from legal/economic imposition is impossible because such impositions are unjust for the same reason, they violate the autonomy of a non-consenting person. One’s autonomy can be violated and assaulted in many ways. The person can be physically attacked, physically confined and restrained, or can be physically penetrated by an external agent (stabbing, sexual assault). I could trick somebody into a room and lock him in there, violating his liberty without even touching him. I could also assault somebody by force-feeding her a poison which enters their body and harms it from the inside, weakening and debilitating her for nine months. Are you saying that the former action is not a rights’ violation simply because I did not physically enter or penetrate the person’s body? Of course not! Both actions are a violation of a person’s autonomy, if they did not consent to stay in the room or drink the poison. The female faces nine months of bodily imposition and 21 years of rearing and servitude (unless she surrenders the child to the state). The male faces 21 years of rearing and servitude, whether or not he forfeits his parental privilege. For 21 years, the product of his labor will be extracted under force of legal sanction to support a creature whose creation he did not consent to. And if I might invoke some Lockean analysis, forcefully extracted the toil of one’s labor for an end that the person does not agree to is tantamout to forced “labor” for that end. Of course, if he refuses to hand over his income for the child’s support, he can also face criminal sanction, suffering bodily coercion as his body will be placed into confinement.
“I’m not saying that because something is a possible natural outcome, it is morally good, I’m saying that when it is the actual natural outcome, it needs to be dealt with in the real world with law and social policy. ”
And prior to 1973, females who suffered the natural outcome of pregnancy had to suffer it to its completion, and social policy changed thanks to judicial intervention based on normative principles. You are not merely giving descriptive comments of what social policy says. You are normatively supporting the current social policy (which makes each male’s sexual act a consent to the burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing, a notion which abortion rights repudiate, so far as females are concerned). The existence of abortion rights estabishes a principle, that consent to sex is only consent to sex, and is not consent to secondary outcomes of sex. Females do not have a “natural” ability to abort a pregnancy, at least not safely. Humans are not naturally immune to syphillis or chlamydia. Artificial methods allow humans to escape both of these kinds of secondary outcomes of sex. Is it okay for the state to deny people antibiotics for syphillis because they knowlingly had sex without disease barriers, because it thinks that wreckless sex should be punished and deterred and consequences should stay intact? Oh, better yet, can the state deny HIV-sufferers medication because they should have known better than to engage in wreckless behavior? Again, they knew such an outcome was possible, so there is an equal case to force them to suffer the unfettered ravages of the disease rather than waste state resources in order to cover their wreckless act.
As a side note, you should also realize that many males are consigned to paternal duty even if they did not actually consent to an overt, potentially reproductive act. If the female deliberately lies about contraception and becomes pregnant, the male is consigned. If the female steals semen from a used condom procured for her by another female and impregnates herself with the semen, the male is still consigned. Even if the male is a minor, under the age of consent (unable to appreciate the consequences of sex), the male is still consigned if his female rapist becomes pregnant. If a male put an amount of semen into a woman’s genitals, saying by soaking a tampon in semen, and she becomes pregnant, obviously she did not consent to the impregnation or to suffer nine months of parasitism and 21 years of servitude and she can abort the embryo (though I do not know if his actions constitute full-blown rape). If the female steals semen from a discarded prophylactic, the male is obliged to suffer 21 years of servitude.
Your treatment of the shopping analogy confuses me. Justin was demonstrating that if the female, on her accord, decides to proceed with an action that the male has eschewed, then she alone assumes its burdens, because it now becomes her unilateral decision. However, if you feel that the fact that neither party was intending to get pregnant must be incorporated into the analogy, then how about this. A male and female are walking through a part of the city. They have been warned that this part of the city has many orphan children who grab onto people’s legs, begging to come home with them. They are both aware of this and try to stay quick on their feet to avoid the grasping children, but one manages to latch itself onto the female’s leg. She has a change of heart and says, “This child is so cute and I might not mind having it, so let’s take it home and support it.” The male refuses, “I did not agree to take this child into my house, or devote my liberty and labor to is upbringing.” The female is allowed to remove and detach the child if she likes, but if she decides to keep a child who latched on, the male is now dually obligated to pay and devote his labor to this child that she unilaterally wants to accept. And if he moves out, she will have the courts seize his property and his body (if they arrest him to compel support) in order to subsidize her unilateral decision. Perhaps she is facing more physical burdens than he is, because the child latched onto her leg and she is carrying it back to the apartment. And according to you, this fact means that she can appropriate the male’s labor to support this child until it reaches maturity? If the male wants to support this latching street urchin, fine. But the fact that the female uniquely suffers a temporary period of direct physical burden prior to her 21 years of servitude does not empower her to consign the male to 21 years of servitude in kind.
And Justin was not defaulting to biological essentialism in his last posts, not the position of “you get knocked up, deal with it.” If that was the case, he would be spouting off how females have choice, the choice not to have sex. Medical science has given females a way of safely extricating themselves from the sexual consequence before and even after conception. For a long time, the law tried to proscribe both contraception and abortion, not so much on the grounds that babies should be saved, but because they felt females must suffer the penalty of their sexual acts, to punish and to insure their desired social order of procreative sex. Those policies violated individual rights and now females have a political right to extricate themselves from lega/sexual consequences. There is nothing that biologically forces a female to care for an infant after birth, other than laws and social policy (and even then, females can still surrender the child to the state and escape that too). There is nothing that biologically forces a male to care for a child conceived with his sperm, other than laws and social policy.
As for this question of unfairly penalizing the female if she has beliefs contrary to abortion, you seem to be saying that if a person voluntary elects not to extricate his/herself from a situation or its consequences, then another person is obligated to break their fall and blunt their obligation. To adapt Justin’s scenario, imagine a couple considers buying a house, talks to the vender and the both acknowledge that the price and burden are beyond their capacities. However, the female says, “I know that buying this house is onerous, but I have become sentimentally attached to it, and I cannot emotionally bear to decline the owner.” By your standard, the male is now economically consigned to her destructive decision simply because she had an emotional/moral compunction against acting in her best, rational interests (eschewing the burden). If after a baby is born, and both the mother and father acknowledge that raising the child is beyond their capacities, imagine a father saying “I am morally opposed to giving up a child for adoption, so you, dear, must also pay and sacrifice 21 years of your life, even though I am unilaterally deciding to keep the child.” The female today can forfeit her parental rights and duties, and the male does not have veto power to impose them upon her (I am referring to the post-partum duties, care and economic support). However, if the female unilaterally decides to keep the child for whatever moral or emotional reason, pre or post-partum, the male is forced to support that unilateral decision, against his will. A double standard indeed. I am sure that if a man had moral or hedonistic objections to contraception, that you would have no problem in forcing him to accept the outcomes of his non-contraceptive sexual acts. Yet if the female has such objections, you insist that she must be cradled and that somebody else who did not consent to her pregnancy must share the burden of her unilateral decision.
Dorset, what change in the law are you suggesting, specifically?
* * *
Your language implies that you think that mothers have a right to put up children for adoption, but fathers do not. That’s not true, legally. Both parents have an equal legal right to put their children up for adoption; and, in ordinary circumstances, neither parent can legally do so without the consent of the other.
* * *
When men have sex – even using birth control – men are aware that pregnancy and childbirth is a possible result. Men are also aware that if the woman gets pregnant, it will legally be her decision to have an abortion or not.
So I’m confused. In what way is the decision to have coital hetero sex, thus leading to a chance of childbirth, a “unilateral” decision?
If you want to say that men who are raped, and thus become fathers, should not be responsible for their children, I’d agree. If you want to say that men who become fathers because of stolen semen, rather than consensual sex, then again I’d agree. But these cases are not the norm.
What you’re saying is that in all cases, the decision to have coital, hetero sex, which as we all know carries a chance of childbirth, is “unilateral.” But that makes no sense. I’ve had sex, and it was my own choice to have sex. If I didn’t want the sex, I could have easily said “no.”
But I didn’t. I didn’t say “no” because – despite the fact that I was fully aware that sex can sometimes lead to pregnancy, and despite the fact that I was fully aware that pregnancy sometimes leads to children – I wanted sex more than I wanted to absolutely guarantee that I wouldn’t become a father.
That was not a “unilateral” decision made by people I’ve had sex with, without my participation. I chose to have that sex, knowing all the risk that choice included. For you to claim otherwise is fundimentally dishonest, and in effect tries to make every man who voluntariily has hetero sex into a rape victim, someone with no ability to consent or to say “no.”
* * *
That said, I do agree that it’s unfair that men can get saddled with child support for a couple of decades due to what may have been a momentary lapse in judgement. But the alternatives are also unfair – to the mother, and even more so to the child.
Looking through your very long post, I don’t see you address – even once – the question of what’s in the best interest of the child. But surely if anyone has had a decision made for them without their consent, it’s the child, more so than the father. If – as your logic seems to indicate – we should defer the most consideration to the needs of the person who had the least choice, doesn’t that mean we should rate the child’s needs above the father’s?
It seems to me that significantly raising the child’s chance of being raised in poverty is more unfair to the child, than paying child support is unfair to the father.
Now, if you can come up with a solution that takes unfairness away from all three parties – the child, the mother, and the father – I’d endorse that. However, what “choice for men” usually does is take away all unfairness from the father, while increasing the unfairness for the child and the mother. Unless we’re prepared to say that the father’s position is the only position that matters – and I’m not prepared to say that – then that’s not a real solution.
I depends on the nature of fairness. We can accept that children have a right to be supported by their parents, but it doesn’t follow that parents then should be liable to pay child support.
I think an interesting solution would be to change the nature of child support obligations. I would suggest that if a parent is willing and capable of raising and supporting their child themselves, it is unfair that they should be compelled to pay the other parent to do so. It seems that this just adds insult to the injury of someone not being able to live with their children.
The Choice For Men argument can be summed up in “women have choices long after men stop having choices, so men should have choices, too.” Everything else is said by the C4M crowd in support of that fundemental assertion.
Choice For Men, as presented, doesn’t solve that “problem” because the woman will continue to have choices. Knowing that “Slippery Slope Arguments” are fundementally invalid, there’s nothing to keep men from saying “Hey, she had another choice, so I want another one, too!”. I would argue that Choice For Men already is a “slippery slope” sort of argument — he had a plethora of choices, he made them, time’s up, sorry.
Among the “supporting arguments” are a number of arguments based on “the bee-yatch LIED to me!” and “hey, my rubber broke!” Let’s just get rid of any more remaining pointless comments — okay, so your mama’s ugly and she dresses you funny, too. Did I forget anything?
What Choice For Men conveniently ignores is that men had choices prior to coitus and those men chose to avoid or ignore those choices. For each of those arguments (“the bee-yatch LIED to me!”) men have choices before coitus. Men can choose to use additional forms of birth conrol even if the woman asserts she is on birth control. Three forms come to mind immediately —
1. Spermicidal vaginal suppositories
2. Latex condoms
3. Spermicidal gunk inside the condom
Those three forms of birth control are available to 100% of men and something any man can witness being used at the time of coitus. Which means, “the bee-yatch LIED to me!” is not a valid reason. The real situation is “It’s not my problem!” because birth control is defined, by men, to be “not my problem.” What Choice For Men, then, is really about is wanting a “do-over”, which is often pronouced “Hey, no fair! I wasn’t supposed to lose!”
Other choices exist for men that are frequently ignored. They include
• Vasectomy
• Sperm banking before Vasectomy
• Sex For One
• Coitus interruptus (oldie but a goodie)
• The Rhythm Method (heh)
• Sex during menstruation
• Watch her take the damn pills, you dope
Need I go on?
Each of those, however, requires that men acknowledge responsibility on some level for birth control. Which is very conveniently dodged by Choice For Men.
This is the FAQ for Choice For Men. Does anyone see “How can I have a vasectomy?” or for those men who want children, just not now, “If I have a vasectomy now, how hard is it to have undone later?” I looked over that website and noticed information about birth control methods which are under men’s control are completely missing. They have an entire document on Creative Solutions to Forced Fatherhood but nothing on Creative Ways to Avoid Conception.
In short, Choice For Men is about avoiding responsibility for birth control, and then avoiding responsibility for a child that’s already been born. Men have choices, men even have the ability to take some degree of control over whether or not conception occurs.
Word, nik. It’s all about control.
My understanding is that coitus interuptus can still lead to pregnancy. So can having unprotected intercourse during the menstrual cycle. One important choice men can practice during sex, of course, is simply to not have vaginal intercourse with their partner. When men get over the idea that if they can’t stick their penis inside a woman’s vagina it’s not REALLY sex and they’re not REALLY men, they’ll be able to have sex with less fear of becoming fathers.
So your argument is that if the man does not prevent conception from occurring, the law ought to force him to take responsibility for the child. It’s a reasonable argument, but please do not pretend that it is substantially different from the pro-life argument that if a woman does not prevent conception from happening, the law ought to force her to take responsibility for the child (by making her carry it to term).
I mean, whenever it comes to men, you consistently bring up the issue that he consented to have sex, so he has “choice,” which you would not consider a sufficient argument that a woman has “choice” even if abortion were outlawed.
Also, a few comments:
So I’m confused. In what way is the decision to have coital hetero sex, thus leading to a chance of childbirth, a “unilateral” decision?
This is misleading. Dorset never, even said that the choice to have coital hetero sex is a unilateral decision, and it is obvious that he is not saying that. He is saying that the choice as to whether or not to carry the child to term is a “unilateral” decision.
What you’re saying is that in all cases, the decision to have coital, hetero sex, which as we all know carries a chance of childbirth, is “unilateral.” But that makes no sense. I’ve had sex, and it was my own choice to have sex. If I didn’t want the sex, I could have easily said “no.”
No, he is referring to the decision to carry a pregnancy to term as being unilateral. Why is it so bloody difficult for people to understand that?
You consistently argue that the fact that the man has the right to choose not to have sex or not to have unprotected sex is a sufficient level of “choice” for him. After he makes that choice, he should be held liable for the consequences. But woman should have choice throughout the pregnancy (or at least throughout part of it, depending on whether you believe in restrictions on late-term abortion), and then be able to stick the male with the costs of whatever choice she made.
What it comes down to in the end, but which has only been brought up by a few posters, is that you believe in a right to “control one’s body,” but not in a right to control one’s property (i.e. one’s earnings), so you have a problem with forcing someone to carry a baby they don’t want but not in forcing someone to work to support a baby they don’t want. Say that, but please stop all this nonsense about the man having “choice” when he decides to have sex, because NO ONE IS DENYING THAT.
Absolutely no one here is arguing that men do not have the choice whether or not to have sex. No one is arguing that heterosexual sex is female-on-male rape, or that the male did not have the choice as to whether or not to use a condom; in fact, the original argument that you are trying to refute:
I’m sure you’re aware that your arguments about the choices that men do have echo with an uncanny precision the arguments made by abortion rights opponents … that women have the choice not to get pregnant.
Indicates that we understand that the man has not been raped. Also, the “pro-choice” position does not rely on all heterosexual sex being male-on-female rape, so if the “choice for men” position is trying to parallel to “pro-choice” movement, obviously they are not arguing for “C4M” on the basis that the men were raped.
Men can choose to use additional forms of birth conrol even if the woman asserts she is on birth control. [i.e. so it is aall right for a woman to lie about birth control and then fore the man to pay up]
Now, in this one particular instance, it seems to me that one could argue that the man has been raped (although C4M does not depend on such a condition, so this is a side issue).
It has been argued that if a woman agrees to sex on the condition that the man use a condom, and the man penetrates her sans condom, it is rape. (I am assuming that this applies not only if the woman sees the man does not have a condom and refuses, but also if the man penetrates her sans condom before she realizes he does not have a condom). Then if a man has sex with a woman on the condition that she use birth control, and she lies about using birth control, is that not also rape?
Alsis writes:
Just about anything, short of gonadectomy, leaves the possibility of pregnancy. My observation is that Choice For Men focuses on money and not on pregnancy reduction.
My other observation is that birth control is being forced on women with no responsiblity being taken by men, including the Choice For Men crowd. Also, emphasis is placed either on how untrustworthy women are (“the bee-yatch LIED to me!”) or on a single form of birth control. If condoms are so unreliable, how about using something else as well?
So, while coitus interruptus isn’t reliable in and of itself, it is one of many available forms of birth control. All of which are ignored by men, including Choice For Men men.
Makes more sense?
Amen! (After all, the sponge is back!) Not to mention the all important (and, I admit, frequently idealistic) conversation that begins “If I get pregnant…”
But again, that all assumse that we homo sapiens always make the best possible decision at any given moment, and in this case, that’s a moment in which it is notoriously difficult to make even a SLIGHTLY good decision, and thus we’re left with “You did it, now ya gotta pay.”
I’d have to say I agree most with Amp here: it’s unfair to the fathers at times, but the alternative either far more unfair to the child (allowing him to not pay child support) or horrific (allowing men to demand an abortion of their partners).
One thing that distresses me, however, every time this topic comes up is the equation of children with punishment. While I understand the more complicated issues involved – pregnancy, single motherhood, and social pressure, I would have to suggest that viewing other human beings in terms of punishment for past behavior (and by “human being” I mean “outside the womb and breathing with their own lungs”) is a disturbing trend – no matter WHICH side of the debate it comes from.
AlieraKieron writes:
Gee, I dunno. I tend to think that people who aren’t prepared beforehand need to be avoiding sex. M.A.D.D. has done a great job at changing drinking behavior. Perhaps we need a new group — People Against Sexual Stupidity, or P.A.S.S. — to get the message out there that birth control is something to think about when getting dressed in the morning?
And, bringing this back on topic, I don’t see Choice For Men talking about that either.
Ampersand, I never said that consentual intercourse was a unilateral decision, and I do not see how you made this confusion. What I was saying, as Glaivester points out, is that the decision to continue a pregnancy is legally unilateral on the part of the female. The force of law gives the female exclusive discretion in deciding whether or not to continue the pregnancy, despite what the male says, and it should be that way. However, if the decision is unilateral and against the will of the male, he should not be obligated to finance that decision. Go back to the analogy of walking in the area of latching children.
The male and woman mutually decide to walk through the area, however the female unilaterally decides to keep and support the rogue child who clings to her leg. Just because they mutually agreed to walk together in a certain area does not mean that they mutually agreed to accept and support a latching rogue child.
As for the change in law, I am saying that once a male is informed of the existence of a pregnancy of the child, that he be giving a temporary period, say a month, to decide whether to claim parental rights and accept parental duties or to forfeit both and eschew any claim or duty to the child.
As for the adoption laws, a female can legally abandon her infant (thanks to “Baby Moses” laws) and even if the male knows and claims the child for his own, he cannot sue her for child support and he cannot force her to remain a custodian of the child. Even if the father forfeits all parental rights to the child and has no custody, he is still liable for child support if the mother proceeds against him. Though both can waive custody, the father remains liable at the discretion of the mother, while the mother is not.
“Looking through your very long post, I don’t see you address – even once – the question of what’s in the best interest of the child. But surely if anyone has had a decision made for them without their consent, it’s the child, more so than the father.”
I did not address it, because these alleged best interests are IRRELEVENT in the area of a non-consenting parent, as much as they are irrelevent when it comes to the power to divorce. If you actually believe that the best interests of the child can trump property and liberty rights, you are asking for a world of trouble. Can a female’s right to divorce be obstructed because the husband brings in accountant’s and psychologists to prove that her requested divorce will imperil the economic and mental welfare of the children? And don’t obfuscate this by saying that if divorce is initiated, then it’s always in the interests of the child. If the mother is initiating a separation that will lead to economic decline and parental separation, there is a genuine question if her acts may adversely affect the child’s interests. If the child’s best interests can trump liberty rights, then the mother can only successfully divorce if she convinces the court if her divorce is necessary to serve the child’s best interests. Of course, it is not done this way, and the female can bring about divorce for the most capricious or selfish of reasons, as she certainly has the right to do so. If the best interets of the child can justify 21 years of servitude, then why not justify the prohibition of an adult from dissolving a marriage and marrying someone else?
Better yet, imagine a person who is convicted of a serious crime, and in addition to his term of incarceration, he is also ordered to pay a huge amount of restitution to the victim’s family. Later on, new exculpatory evidence exonerates him definitively, yet the victim’s spouse says, “Even though he has been exonerated, my family and my children are economically dependent upon the restitution payments. Without them, the children shall lapse into poverty.” Using your logic, the judge will conclude that it is less unfair to fine a person for a crime that they did not commit than to leave the victim’s children in poverty. If the “best interets of the child” is controlling over individual property rights or liberty rights, such a sick demand of restitution is tenable.
You are switching justifications, before basing it upon indirect culpability of the male via sexual intercourse, and now basing it upon the more endangered and pitiable plight of an underprivileged child. Once you switch to that justification, a roughly utilitarian scheme which says that impositions upon liberty and property are acceptable so long as they do not make the violated person (the male) as worse off as the person you are trying to help (the child), then whether or not the male copulated with the female becomes irrelevant. If a female sues two males for child support, one who is caring and wealthy and the other is who is incarcerated and unemployed, the best interests of the child are clearly to have support claims upon the wealthy male, and even if the unemployed criminal is actually proven to be the biological father, the child’s best interets would still obviously be to have the wealthy male’s support and resources. If the best interests of the child are paramount and trump liberty or property rights, then judges should also be able to assign child support obligations even to males who have not sired the deprived child in question, or even ones who did not even have sexual contact with the female.
When others have posed this question of whether or not a woman can be forced to abort if raising a child in her circumstances would be harmful to the future child, you have vociferously denied this, saying that the best interests do not justify a bodily intrusion upon the female. Okay, if a destitute mother foolishly chooses to give birth to a child that she can only provide a destitute upbringing, what if the state simply waits until the child is born and seizes it immediately afterward to give it to a waiting, more affluent couple? There would be no bodily intrusion into the female. The state would simply be seizing another person, the child, and putting them into an available setting that provides more economic and other security. Why should the female’s liberty to gestate and raise the child be afforded more consideration if the child would enjoy a more secure existence in a waiting affluent home? Assume this is all done immediately after birth before any conscious bond has formed, so that you cannot object by saying that emotional separation overrides economic interests.
When we suggest potentially violating the female’s rights in the name of the best interests of the child, you reject it because that female’s body is sacrosanct, so forced contraception or forced abortion of an unfit or questionable female is off limits, so you say. This standard is problematic, and is inconsistent with your utilitarian position of allowing rights violations to keep the child from being worse off. If a female is pregnant with a child who definitely has Tay-Sachs, ALD, or cerebral palsy, and decides that kindness be damned, she wants to give birth and keep the child for as long as it lives, she is asserting that her individual bodily rights trump this future child’s bodily best interests. This child will be born and will suffer tremendous bodily pain, debilitation, immobility, being a tortured prisoner inside its own wretched body. With just one suction procedure imposed upon the female, we can prevent this future tremendous bodily suffering of this future child. Under your scale, what is more unfair? For an obstinate female to suffer a few hours of vaginal/uterine violation or for a child to suffer years or decades of tremendous bodily pain and debilitation? If a female’s decision to give birth jeopardizes a child’s future bodily welfare, I do not see how her temporary bodily integrity can trump that, under your scheme of what is “more” or “less unfair.” The only way that a person’s bodily integrity can trump a tremendous utilitarian consideration like that is if autonomy rights are inviolable. If one’s bodily integrity cannot be violated to prevent greater bodily suffering, then one’s economic autonomy cannot be violated to prevent the greater economic suffering of somebody whose birth they did not consent to.
And AlieraKieron,
Perhaps it is morbid to view other human beings as punishment, but unfortunately that is the inevitable consequence of viewing human individuals as autonomous entities with rights claims against other human beings. Let us face it, babies are a potentially onerous and burdensome consequence, otherwise abortion, the means to prevent their creation, would not be so sacrosanct to the advocates for the rights of females. When a burdensome consequence befells somebody who engaged in a hedonistic indulgence, what could it be but a sanction? Babies are an egregious demand that deprive an individual of a tremendous amount of resource and liberty and health. Without the sentimental palliation, babies are an unadulterated punishment. And there are people who do not have the sentimental palliation. The abortion rights movement tried to temper this by changing the nomenclature (baby=fetus=cells), but the implication is unavoidable in child support proceedings. Courts, when sentencing a male to child support obligations, did often use the word “penalty” and “suffer” to describe his fate. And since family courts can often back up their support sentences with incarceration, considering children as a criminal penalty is not inaccurate.
We pray and cheer the development of a male contraceptive (a chemical pill) and tests are underway.
Choice for men does not eschew birth control or consider it unnecessary. However, we take umbrage at the notion that males are culpable for the effect of failed or absent contraception when the female has a sacrosanct right to prevent the onerous birth and child-rearing even after her contraception has failed or she has neglected to use it. Should females who neglected to use contraception or had defunct contraception be enjoined from obtaining an abortion because they should have known better? Whether the female is pregnant due to failed contraception or her outright negligence or stupidity does not negate that she has the unilateral right to procure the abortion. Consent to sex is only consent to sex, not consent to secondary outcomes, otherwise females would be consigned to pregnancy. Unless the male independently consents to the outcome of pregnancy, he is not responsible for an outcome that the female has the unilateral right to control. If the female was forced by law to stay pregnant and had not recourse to reverse the pregnancy, then the male could be liable for the failures or absences of contraception.
Should people who contract an STD because of neglecting to use prophylatic barriers be denied antibiotics, medications, or treatment?
By the way, Ampersand, aside from your glaring misinterpretation corrected by Glaivester, you did not address anything else in the post.
Dorset,
I think it would be a lot more considerate of women’s bodies if women weren’t expected to run off for an abortion after the man decides he’s not up for fatherhood. I don’t see Choice For Men addressing that. I think this comment of yours
is very telling. Contraception isn’t just “hers”. Considering the man is the one inserting his reproductive material into the woman’s body, I’d argue that responsibility for contraception, and contraceptive failure, is 100% that of the man.
And your comment belies your supposed mutuality; not only are you saying that it is “not just” the female’s, you are saying that the male is totally responsible for all sexual outcomes because he is the penetrator. If copulation is a mutual decision, contraceptive burdens can be assumed or neglected by either male or female. The fact that he penetrates her does not mean that he has all the power and is controlling the encounter. If that were the case, unconscious or raped or statutorily raped males are also 100 % responsible for their encounters. If the female allows or entreats the male to penetrate her and ejaculate inside of her, she is potentially just as wreckless as the male who penetrates without whatever brand of prophylactic. If a male and female are leching, and the female says, “Don’t worry, I’m on the pill” in order to allay his fears or because she wants the encounter to happen or plans to ruin him, she has promised to him that she has attended to the contraceptive problem. If she says that and becomes pregnant, he is not responsible any more than he is responsible for contracting HIV when she told him, “Don’t worry, I don’t have HIV.” Should we deny him HIV medication because he should have been shrewd enough to assume that she is a wreckless liar?
Imagine a female with a cervical inflammatary disease and hemophilia. She knows that having sex can cause severe bleeding, injury, and even death for her. Nevertheless she copulates with a male, leading him to believe that she is fully healthy. After she almost bleeds to death as a result of the penetration, she sues him for her medical expenses. Is he actually still liable even though she misled him or assuaged his concern?
And since you are keen to point out the diversity of contraceptive or anti-birth methods, females do not simply have to endure an onerous dilation procedure for every botched copulation. They have a range of options:
-The Morning After Pill
-RU-486
-Vacuum procedure
-Dilation procedure
Dorset,
So we’re clear, I don’t accept your “latching children” analogy. I’m not even sure I understand how that analogy relates to pregnancy.
Using contraception is the only way to have a chance at reducing the risk of pregnancy. Multiple, independent, forms of contraception is the only way to avoid “The bee-yatch LIED to me!” and “the rubber broke!” I’m not sure how this would translate into the “latching children” analogy. Perhaps greased and spiked leggings, and swinging a baseball bat in the general direction of any child who came close?
What’s the role of contraception in this scenario? Did the man, knowing he might become responsible, remove said “latching child” from the leg of the woman? Where’s the discussion about what to do if a child tries to “latch”? Where’s the man running interference if he’s unclear on whether or not the woman will choose to keep a “latching child”?
What I read, time and again, is a lack of responsibility for preventing pregnancy by men. It’s almost as if “contraceptive planning”, or that what “contraceptive planning” entails, isn’t part of men’s vocabulary. I don’t see that in your analogy, I don’t see it on the Choice For Men board, and I don’t see it in the discussions of various men.
(And, FWIW, I think that if a woman rapes a man, or somehow steals a man’s semen, and then has a child, I’d hope the child’s father would sue for custody and a court would grant it. I would not want any child of mine raised by a rapist or thief. In the oft-cited case out of Kansas, the pleadings focused on the boy’s parents avoiding financial responsibility, and not on the child’s health and welfare being raised by a rapist and/or child molester. Which confirms my belief that C4M is about money, and not about children.)
I see, it is the duty of the raped male or his relations to accept 21 years of burden and servitude because the male was raped? If the male decides to claim and care for the child, then that is quite a magnanimous act, but is superogatory, not obligatory. He is not obliged to accept the burden of that child anymore than a woman who was raped and kidnapped for nine months would have to accept the child that she was forced to carry and expel.
As for the analogy, a male and female mutually decide to walk in a part of the city which is known to have a multitude of orphan children who latch onto people’s legs (usually female legs because they think them more inclined to sympathize). They are mutually deciding to embark upon an activity in which it is possible that an entity may attempt to claim their bodily and economic resources. Are you seeing the parallel to pregnancy now? They have a range of options to minimize this chance.
-Not walk into the area at all (abstinence)
-Grease or spiked leggings (thanks for the idea)
-Chasing off or intercepting the child before it clings to a leg
-Mace or tasers
Now imagine that the couple walks into the area, using any or all of the above methods, both not originally intending to accept a latching child. The methods for whatever reason, fail to keep an intrepid child at bay (the male was slow to spot him, the child grabbed an arm rather than a greased leg). The female reflects and reverses her position, wanting to keep and support the child, even though she has the legal right to have the child forcibly dislodged. Under current conditions, the male is now forced to share in her 21 years of servitude. If you are still uncertain of how this analogy embodies the hazard of pregnancy, keep asking for clarification.
Whether or not the female was negligent in contraceptive concerns is irrelevant so far as her right to abortion is concerned. Her right to abort to avoid either the bodily burden or the 21 years of servitude does not shrink because she had wreckless sex. The male cannot force her into bodily burden or 21 years of servitude because she was contraceptively negligent, and neither can she the male.
The rape victim and his parents have NO OBLIGATION to regard or care for that child because it was produced in a non-consentual fashion. If someone or someone’s child were raped, do you think their concern for the product of the rape must override their outrage that the rapist thinks he/she has a further claim upon the victim’s liberty and resources.
As for your last condemnation, one could easily say that abortion rights are all about money for women or their selfish career aspirations. One’s money and property is the product of one’s labor and taking it is an infringement upon a person’s autonomy and liberty. (And you seem to find thieves to be reprehensible). This is a case of a rapist or a thief trying to steal from another person, trying to profit from the product of her initial violation. Because the family does not want to pay or subsidize the rapist’s or thief’s unilateral decisions, then they are evil and avaricious people?
If a person makes a unilateral decision to appropriate another person’s gametes for reproduction or continue a pregnancy to term, it is that person’s burden alone. Claiming the other person’s money to finance that unilateral decision is stealing and claiming that other person’s autonomy to support that decision is enslavement.
Dorset,
So, did they discuss getting a taser? Did he decide he wasn’t willing to shoot a “latching child” if it “latched” onto his female partner’s leg? Did he understand, when he decided not to shoot a potential “latching child”, that the result might be she might just change her mind?
As I wrote in one of my earlier responses, he’s had all the right choices. He could have gone to the store, bought a gun, and shot the kid. Because that’s what spermicides do — they kill sperm.
When used correctly, and in combination, contraception works. The man had his choices. Asking for yet another choice, which will be followed by another, and another, and still another, is flat out unfair. Men have the ability, on their own, and without relying on women, to prevent pregnancy.
As for child support, men have legal rights there as well. Men can sue for custody and support. That’s another choice I don’t see C4M advocating. But that would require that the man, instead of the woman, accept responsibility for raising a child he helped bring into this world.
No, because it’s the obligation of a parent to protect their offspring from a rapist. The child’s born. This isn’t a theoretical child — it’s a real child. And if you’re going to claim the woman is a rapist, why the hell would any parent allow their child to be around a rapist for even one single second?
The entire argument is based on how evil the woman is, but the man doesn’t act like she really is evil.
Males can and due sue for child custody (though their chances are usually dismal of prevailing). However, the legal system already allows men that avenue of recourse; it does that allow them the avenue of recourse of forfeiting parental rigths and obligations, so that is the avenue that the C4M movement advocates for.
Honestly, would you berate the pre-1973 abortion rights movement for not focusing on the female’s right to give birth and raise children. Of course not, because prior to 1973 females already had that reproductive entitlement, but they did not have the converse entitlement of terminating a pregnancy to avoid the bodily and liberty burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing. So, the movements usually agitate for rights and entitlements that the legal system does not yet recognize.
I’m sorry, I know of no contraception that is 100% effective. And your answers to the conundrums of deceptions or breaches contraception are utterly non-responsive. If the female dug the condom out of the garbage and extracted the semen, is he still liable? Should he have assumed that the female would go to such measures? If she asked for a condom from another female acquaintance of his and inseminated herself that way, is he still liable? Under the status quo, the male is categorically liable. Your response was that “he should be trying to get the baby to keep it away from a rapist or thief.” That does not answer the argument. You are still saying that even deceives or coerces the male in order to extract the gametes, he is still liable for the product of the insemination and must suffer 21 years of servitude. If you are not distinguishing such scenarios from when the male knowingly deposits his slime into the female, your basis of tacit consent is superceded by the premise of “guilty by insemination.” If the male’s sperm got into the female, even by deception or coercion, you are saying that he is categorically liable. A female who allows a male to penetrate her, knowing that there is no contraceptive device, is just as liable and wreckless as the male who is penetrating her.
Females are considered categorically unliable for the pregnancy up to two trimesters after conception (FYI: I don’t agree with the two trimester limit and I believe in abortion on demand during the entire pregnancy). Her right to avoid the burdens of pregnancy or of child-rearing are not contingent upon whether or not she took measures to prevent a pregnancy. The state cannot prohibit females from avoiding the responsibility of a pregnancy based upon indications of tacit consent to pregnancy during or before copulation. It cannot say, “Oh, you did not use contraceptives during intercourse, you were consenting to the possible pregnancy at some level, no abortion for you.” It cannot say, “Oh, you told the male that you wanted a baby before you copulated with him, no abortion for you.” Even if the male produces a contract with the female’s signature saying that the female intended to become pregnant, the state cannot obstruct her abortion. Just like a person cannot force another person to continue serving or laboring because the person previously signed a contract to be a servant. The abortion rights movement skips over this ridiculous difficulty of implied consent to pregnancy from certain previous indications (no contraception, what she might have said) by asserting that pregnancy must be agreed to, separately, on its own, not as an implied secondary consequence. Once one argues that sexual activity resulting in a pregnancy is consent to that the pregnancy, abortion rights become untenable.
The male and the female both have pre-pregnancy choices. Technology and social policy have afforded the female a post-conception choice to nullify the pregnancy burden. The female is not “naturally” capable of safely aborting a pregnancy. Artifice made it possible, but social policy stood in the way for a variety of reasons, one of the reasons being that females who consent to sexual activity also consent to pregnancy and that it was their responsibility to face the unfortunate burden of their wreckless acts. The abortion rights movement said that that was wrong, that consent to sex is only consent to sex, not consent to pregnancy, and that a person’s autonomy demands that social policy allow that person an ability to avoid the onerous consequence of a pregnancy.
This is not an issue of a slippery slope, as C4M only seeks to grant males the same autonomy entitlement that social policy allots to females, to avoid the onerous burden of a pregnancy after conception. Choices stop when they infringe upon the choices of other persons. Of course the male cannot force her to abort anymore than he can force her to give birth. The choice is unilaterally hers, and her prior non-use of contraception or allowance of semen to enter her does not nullify her choice to avoid the conclusion of the pregnancy. This is not “flat out unfair.” His decisions cannot force her into 21 years of servitude; her decisions should not be able to do the same.
One’s unilateral choices do not entitle one to the use of another person’s liberty and property. The female who decided to keep the latching child made a unilateral decision. When the male asks, “Dear, what are you going to do with that latching child?” and she says that she has suddenly decided to keep it and he says, “Well, dear, if that is your decision, you’re on your own and I want no part in it.” You would have her say, “You agreed to walk here with me, you knew these children try to latch onto couples, so you accepted the burden of whatever might result, now you have to care for this child until it reaches legal majority.”
If the male took every possible precaution, armed himself and the female with tasers and guns, latch-resistant leggings, and had her assurances that she would do everything possible to avoid a latching child, and he incapacitated every accosting child, would that make any difference to your standard? If the female, out of nowhere, obstructed his defensive measures and embraced a latching child because she suddenly decided that she wanted one, does that change anything under your precepts? I doubt it.
You still have not addressed the disparity. You are saying that failure or absence of contraception makes the male culpable for the pregnancy and offspring. That is the not the case with the female. Even if she was outright wreckless and disregarded contraception, social policy still cannot impinge her right to nullify the consequences of her wrecklessness. Her consent to copulation does not equal consent to the burdens of child-rearing. In order for her to be justly saddled with that obligation, she has to agree to it independently, on its own terms, not implied secondary consent via sex. If that is the case for the female, that should be the case for the male, who must also consent to the pregnancy idependently on its own terms. If he does not, he must be able to sign away his parental prerogative and tell the female, “Your independent decision, your independent burden.”
You have now shifted your standard of what determines responsibility to offspring. You have been repeatedly stating that males are responsible for the offpsring’s support because they consented to an act which they knew could result in the production of offspring. That is, you are saying that they indirectly consented to the offspring’s existence by having consentual sex. Offspring that are produced through rape or the theft of games are the product of a NONCONSENTUAL ACT. In such cases, the person did not knowlingly and voluntarily engage in a potentially reproductive act. Deceit and/or coercion nullifies the consent that you have been banking on.
You are now saying that the existence of a child is all that is necessary for the biological parent to be obliged to that offspring, whether or not that parent consented to the act which produced the offspring. If a female is abducted, raped, impregnated, and imprisoned for nine months by the rapist who forces her to give birth, is she then obliged to care for that child after she has been saved from the rapist’s custody? She had absolutely no consent in the copulation, impregnation, gestation, or birth process, yet her enslavement produced offspring which is biologically hers. Certainly the apprehended rapist should not have custody of the child, but should she be obligated to care for the product of a coercive act imposed upon her? If you are adhering to your new standard that parents are obligated to support their biological offspring because they are their biological offspring, this abducted and raped female would seem to be similarly obligated.
A further question. If the raped male and his relations have been denied custody and will not obtain it, but the female who raped and bore the child is still suing them for child support, does that change your former pronouncement? Even if if the raped male or his relations have no legal hope of extricating the offspring from the custody of the thief/rapist, are they still obligated to surrender their economic assets to this child(s)? Or how about this, the rape child is in neither parent’s custody and is in state custody? Are you saying that you would demand that the raped male pursue custody and assume parental duties of the product of his rape, even after it is extricated from the rapist’s custody? Same question, if it were a female rape victim and the offspring/product of her rape/abduction.
The “actuality” of the child is irrelevant. There are billions of “actual” children, none of whom that you owe a 21-year duty of assistance, because you did not consent to their creation. A raped male does not consent to the creation of offspring as result of his rape. He cannot keep the rapist or thieving female from giving birth, as her reproductive rigths are inviolable. If he did not consent to the child’s creation, he has no more obligation to this actual biological offspring than he does to all the other actual biological juveniles in the world.
Dorset,
My goal isn’t to change your mind. It’s to expose C4M’s agenda — it’s all about money. Men already can prevent pregnancy and they can do it without having to rely on women. But men don’t want to be burdened with contraception, children, or being financially inconvenienced. Men just want to get their rocks off, no strings attached.
If it is not your goal to change my mind, then do not respond at all.
I already addressed your accusation of avarice. Even if the C4M advocacy is overwhelmingly concerned with protected monetary interests, that is not a compelling indictment. The seizure of monetary or economic assets to support an end or decision that the individual did not consent to is still a violation of a liberty right. Not to mention that males are also directly deprived of liberty when imprisoned as a penalty for defaulting on child support payments.
If advocating for the right to avoid the onerous burdens of pregnancy is evidence of hedonistic selfishness, females can be accused of wanting “to get their rocks off, no strings attached,” just as much as the males can, and emergency contraception, abortion pills, surgical abortion, and “Baby Moses” laws allow them to do just that. You seem to have this notion that male sexual gratification is an inherently predatory, pejorative act and that any possible sanction or punishment upon that act must be maintained and bolstered. And what are females? Poor innocents who are essentially always the rape victims of lecherous males who must be afforded every entitlement to escape the consequence of what the males did “to” them?
Females, whether or not they bother with contraception, whether or not the contraception works, have the right to opt-out of the burdens of child-rearing post-conception. Her lack of bothering with contraception does not rescind her post-conception right to evade the consequences of her sexual act. The male should have the corollary post-conception right to be free of the consequence of a female’s unilateral actions. You are saying that males cannot “rely” upon females in order to prevent the consequences of a pregnancy, which they would not be doing under the C4M, anymore than an aborting female relies upon the male in order to procure the abortion to evade the consequences of her pregnancy. Yet, you are saying that the female is entitled to appropriate and rely upon the male for 21 years in order to continue her pregnancy. The male cannot “rely” upon the female to either continue or end the pregnancy, yet the female can forcibly “rely” upon him to continue it and to sustain its living outcome, for 21 years no less. Interesting.
Dorset,
You sound very angry.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it tends to result in a stream-of-feeling type post. Try to structure your arguments better, and rely less on weak analogies which convince nobody.
I’m pro-C4M, but your posts are basically unreadable as they are, and I bet I’m not the only person who feels that way.
Dorset:
This is not your blog. You don’t get to decide for what reasons a person responds.
FurryCatHerder:
I can’t speak to the intent of other C4M supporters, but my concern here is fairness. I have no personal dog in this race; I have no children, don’t expect ever to have sex again, and if I do, you can be damned sure that I’ll use multiple methods of birth control.
Sure they do. So do women. And unfortunately, both men and women screw up, from time to time. However thanks to the available range of post-coital birth control methods, this no longer has to result in a child. If it does, then that is the woman’s choice, for which she should be held responsible.
Daran writes:
Do you understand that under the guidelines proposed by C4M that men have zero incentive to care about birth control, and just about zero incentive to claim a child? Any “mistake” that happens becomes completely the responsibility of the woman, and many of the “solutions” to an unwanted / unplanned / boyfriend-dumped-me pregnancy threaten the health of a woman?
In theory Choice For Men isn’t a bad idea — if one is talking about, say, buying a car. Woman goes out, buys a car, tells boyfriend she is going to be making huge payments for the next 84 months (when I was younger 36 months was considered to be “forever” …), and gee, he’s going to have to help out more with the bills because she’s got this giant car note. Boyfriend says “No”, she returns vehicle under her state’s “Buyer’s Regrets” law, no harm, no foul. But pregnancy isn’t car buying, and abortion / adoption / childbirth aren’t without their problems.
Pregnancy and childbirth has a profound effect on a woman’s body. So, too, does abortion. Pregnancy can reveal health issues which make future pregnancies unwise, and abortion can create health problems which likewise affect future pregnancies, as well as long term health. Even hormonal birth control — The Pill — has health risks for women. “Fair” would be getting men on board as equals in preventing unplanned / unwanted pregnancies. The good news is that men have options — other than vasectomy — that, when used in combination, make pregnancy extremely unlikely. Men need to begin exercising those choices before shirking responsibility after pregnancy has occured.
Bill Clinton (though I’m sure he wasn’t the first) said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”, and I’m inclined to agree with him (and every unnamed woman who said it before him). Choice For Men would, I think, create more abortions rather than less. Men, based on the arguments of Dorset, would have a huge financial incentive to disown a child, and that would in turn, I think, push more women in the direction of terminating a pregnancy. Although there is a shortage of healthy and white infants available for adoption, I don’t believe that the adoption “marketplace” would be able to absorb an influx of children up for adoption that C4M proponents claim it my produce.
I also see a lot of misogyny (and whatever “mis-” refers to dislike of children) in the C4M position. Not only does C4M push all the responsibility for birth control, pregnancy and child-rearing 100% back onto women, but it also seems to profoundly devalue, or create / support a devalued attitude towards children in general.
Under C4M children are items in a ledger book — such-and-such dollars for so-and-so years, missed opportunities for doing something more personally rewarding. Nature, nuture, biological reality, irresponsible men, too many years playing with dolls, who knows — women seem to understand that children aren’t just credit and debit entries in a ledger book. C4M gives children the same status as a car — after 2 to 8 years, trade it in, get a new one. Costs too much to maintain? Sell it. Too much of a bother? Sell it. Don’t like the dealership’s mechanics? Sell it.
Dorset raised the issue of rape and raising a child who’s the product of rape. First, rape of men by women is not especially common. Yes, “Women rape, too”, but men aren’t running around terrified that some women is going to rape him, steal his sperm and run off and have a baby. Or at least outside of C4M arguments I never hear about that. In the Kansas case, were I Queen of the Universe, I’d have put the woman under the jailhouse. I don’t care how much a 12 year old boy thought having sex with his babysitter was “fun”. A 12 year old boy is likely to think binging on pizza and Coke® is “fun”, that staying up until 5AM playing “Mega Galaxy Destruction Quest” is “fun”, along with a lot of other bad ideas. This is why 12 year old boys and girls aren’t allowed to drive cars, buy alcohol, vote, or get a new VISA® Platinum card in the mail ever time a “pre-approved” letter appears in the mailbox.
The public policy that gave us the Kansas case didn’t occur in a vacuum. It occured against the backdrop of decades of men deciding not to pay for their own children and to shift that burden onto The State. So, states responded, along with the federal government, by creating laws which held both parties responsible for their off-spring. And yes, both parties are “responsible”. It’s just that for some strange reason, men seemed to have been the ones doing the “being irresponsible”. Again, could be biology, could be nurture, could be too few years playing with Barbie®, or too many nights staying up until 5AM play “Mega Galaxy Destruction Quest”.
Entirely too many times the pattern was “boy meets girl, boy and girl get busy, girl has baby, boy splits after changing too many diapers / cleaning up too much baby puke / missing out on too many nights with other boys”. It was a pattern that a lot of people, men and women, noticed and laws were given teeth. That’s the history that C4M has to acknowledge before anyone is going to think C4M is about anything more than men once again getting to dump children on women.
Daran,
Please explain the weakness of my analogies. The bulk of the arguments here attempt argument by example and reductio ad absurdum, as do most authors who attempt to demonstrate the tenability of their assertions by parallel links with plausible positions. If somebody asserts or implies premises and those premises permit an absurd or egregious position, it is usually grounds for reconsidering the assertions.
I don’t see how my posts are unreadable stream-of-consciousness, when they usually directly respond to whatever previous rejoinder and beginning with the most glaring contradiction of it. My posts are no more motivated by anger than are Catherder’s posts which accuses C4M advocates of being greedy lechers. If you find them incoherent, then tell me which segment that you find impenetrable and I will try to clarify. Perhaps whatever observers find my posts and analogies unconvincing, but them and you are keeping your suspicions and refutations to yourself, making them equally useless as if they were nonexistent.
And Catherder can heed or dismiss my suggestion as Catherder pleases. Since Catherder’s post that eschewed the goal of changing my mind was brief, cursory, and considerably shorter than the previous posts, I assumed that the previous, longer posts were launched in order to dissuade or contest me. Since that is no longer the objective, there does not seem to be another purpose of responding to me. I am no more rude or presumptious for assuming that than you are for assuming what emotions motivate whatever person’s posts.
Dorset, I have been reading your posts very closely, and have spent some time thinking about them. They are internally very logical and make some good points. But there seems to me to be one fairly large hole in your basic argument, and I hope you can address it if I am successful in explaining it clearly (not always my strong point!).
IRL, the woman has the most postcoital choices because the biological connection between her and the child if the pregnancy continues to term is (almost always) indisputable, since generally there are witnesses to the birth – the exception being where the woman manages to hide both the pregnancy and the birth and abandons the newborn undetected. Therefore it is almost impossible for her to deny the connection between her and the child, and she is the person upon whom the burden of deciding what to do with the child rests, always, whether she wants that burden or not.
As for the man, IRL his postcoital choices are limited because his biological link to the child in the past has been inferential (beyond the woman saying, “He done it!”). Nowadays, we can generally figure out who the man is with DNA sampling, but unless a) his DNA profile is already available in some database or b) he’s associating with the woman, we can’t connect the dots between the DNA profile and the body that carries that profile around. So a man can decide whether or not to acknowledge his relationship to the child, which means he can choose to abandon the burden of deciding what to do with the child.
For various historical reasons, with which I’m sure you’re just as familiar as I am, this inequality of choice got legally translated into inequality of support. Given how our current society is, I would agree with you that the way the legal system treats the parent-child relationship needs some changes and there is definitely a lot of unfairness.
But the hole in your argument (I have finally gotten there) that I am having problems with is this: Absent active deception by the woman (the “stealing semen” argument), if the man does everything he can to make sure none of his genetic material goes where he doesn’t want it to go, what happens if a baby results anyway? What if the man and the woman each use two contraceptive methods (for a total of four) and the woman still gets pregnant? You seem to be arguing that the man should get a free pass if he doesn’t want the child, because he did his best not to have one. (I’m not talking about deceitful actions here, just accidents, and you don’t really talk about male contraception much.) But if the woman also did her best not to get pregnant, the only decision of hers that appears to get your goat is the one where she decides to keep the child and asks for help in raising it. (You also don’t address helping to pay for an abortion, so maybe that decision would bother you, too.) If both the man and the woman get on the train to Chicago, and they both said they didn’t actually want to get to Chicago, if they end up in Chicago anyway, who pays for the hotel? Reasonable people would share the cost, seems to me.
Ah, so all the males who have accepted fatherhood burdens in writing and via adoption are doing so solely because of legal coercion? The absence of choice for males is not an incentive to accept parenthood, it is a coercion.
The mistake of failed or absent contraception is equally the fault of the female if she voluntarily copulated with the male aware of the fact that no contraception was in use. The fact that some effects on unprotected copulation may differentially affect the participants does not mean that one participant must differentially support the consequences of the other’s voluntary negligence. If a male informs a female that he carries human papillomavirus but she decides to have unprotected intercourse with him anyway, knowing the risks, she assumes the burden of the potential infection and cannot sue him for medical costs when she voluntarily jeopardized herself. The fact that exposure to papillomavirus has greater health risks for females (cervical cancer) does not shift differential culpability or extra obligations to males. The male may merely have to take antibiotics in order to ameliorate the problem, while the female might require a pap-smear or a biopsy. That does not mean that the male is obligated to subsidize her biologically more onerous burden as a result of her voluntary risk-taking.
If a healthy person and a medically vulnerable person, both of sound mind, mutually agree to participate in a potentially hazardous activity, the healthy person is not obliged to attend to the harmful consequences that befall the vulnerable person. A male is no more obligated to pay for the pregnancy of a female than is a female obligated to pay for the angioplasty of a male with cardiac problems who had an infarction as a result of their copulation.
Females have long had the option of obtaining a tubal ligation in order to permanently be invulnerable to pregnancy (though it too has been known to fail). The fact that they had this option does not negate their right to an abortion should conception and implantation still occur.
I am glad that you seem to be coming to your senses about scenarios when the male may have been coerced or deceived. Though are you still saying that the raped male and his relations are still liable for child support or not? The uncommon status of such situations is irrelevant. The uncommon status of the need for partial-birth abortion does not justify revoking the right to the procedure. Even if sexual activity become so self-regulated and conscientious that unwanted pregnancies were unheard of, the right to contraception and abortion ought not to be rescinded. Social policy is what it is, not always just, but we are making normative assertions of political rights and what public policy ought to be.
The “items on a ledger” should also include “up to 60% of my income, therefore of my labor” and “incarceration should I default on the monetary obligation.” If money is such a petty concern, why is it so vital that the female and the offspring receive it? The absence of extraction of economic assets has integral and devastating effects on a person.
You are now asserting that a certain right (choice for males) should not exist because it has potentially deleterious social results, exactly the same kind of argument that conservative forces made against the right to use contraception, the right to consentual sexual acts, and the right to abortion. I fully support those aforementioned rights, but let us not pretend that the possession of those rights has been socially innocuous. The absence of coercive laws against contraception, fornication, and abortion has some link with a rise of abortion, the rise of unwanted births and all the ensuing dread. Since the crime rate in South Africa seems to have risen after the end of apartheid and the granting of equal legal rights to Black South Africans, does that mean that differentially stripping black South Africans of free movement and legal rights is okay if it seems to prevent social harms?
And one can easily claim that the pro-choice movement is mired in misandry and misopedia (hatred of children), because the pro-choice movement has long implied that unborn children are unwanted, deadly parasites upon females that obstruct their autonomous careers and lifeplans and that each pregnancy is quasi-violative act of colonization by a male upon a female. The C4M movement is not the one that substituted the nomenclature of “cleavage of cells” for children. What’s more, C4M does not necessarily entail the biological death of the child in question, while the abortion rights movement necessarily crusades for the right to do just that. FWIW, I absolutely support the right to abortion, but do not pretend that the culture of abortion rights advocacy has had no pejorative effect on the perception of offspring. Perhaps many advocates of the political movement of abortion rights might personally share this comprehensive and hostile outlook towards other human beings, but that is irrelevant, because they have made a political argument not contingent upon acceptance of misandry or misopedia. That argument is that consent to sex is only consent to sex and is not consent to secondary outcomes that entail bodily or laborious duties of support. Maybe pro-choice advocates dream of a world where females are totally divorced from males in all aspects, just like C4M advocates may dream of a world where females are gratification receptacles. However neither side bases their argument upon gratification of their personal aspirations, they base it upon arguments of individual autonomy and rights.
C4M is not seeking to “dump children” on females, as the females still have their pre and post-conception options to avoid childbirth or to accept it. We only want the males to have the same post-conception entitlement to avoid the burden of a child’s existence.
Dorset;
Is C4M, as forwarded by you, really about abortion at all? I get the impression it’s more about a general argument about the right to disclaim parenthood.
As a hypothetical: a woman brings a child to term (perhaps she doesn’t want an abortion which she thinks is physically invasive, or values the father’s wish for a child). If both parents want their child to be adopted few people would have a problem with this. Would you support the mothers right to exercise Choice 4 Women and leave the father with sole parenthood? Or does she instead have a moral obligation to get an abortion if she doesn’t want to be a parent? I get the feeling you would support C4W (though correct me if I’m wrong). If this is the case I suspect this issue is just about whether parents should be able to disclaim parenthood unilaterally, as opposed to bilaterally, and nothing much to do with abortion.
Since this seems to be an honest request, I’ll explain.
Analogies are valid arguments under a very specific set of circumstances — the form of the argument (“The Analogy”) must match that of the original argument, and the truth of each part of the analogy must be the same as that of the original argument.
If you satisfy those two requirements, you have a valid analogy. Your analogy fails on both points, therefore it’s just not a valid analogy.
Structurally your analogy doesn’t match what occurs during coitus. During coitus a man “expels” his semen. What occurs with that semen remains, for some length of time, under his control, or certainly under his potential control. He can “capture” it in a condom or “kill” it with a spermicide. He can set up a “perimeter defense” so that if it escapes being killed before capture, that it’s killed outside of the capture device. Whatever the situation, he expelled semen from his body and into a woman’s body.
Your analogy looks valid because it is in the form of an argument. It’s even in the form of a valid argument. However, it’s not in the form of “what happens during coitus”, and that’s what you’re trying to argue for. What you’re actually arguing against is something called “The Unrebuttable Assumption of Paternity”. That because a man and a woman live in the same home, if she winds up with a child, he’s on the hook even if he can prove he’s not the father.
For your analogy to be valid it would have to reflect what occurs during coitus and the role of each player. It would have to include the transfer of the “latching child” from the man to the woman by a willful act on his part. Although virgin births are part of some religions mythologies, they don’t happen in real life. The man through the (virtually always) willful act of inserting his penis into a woman’s vagina, transfers semen from his body to hers.
For your analogy to be valid, it would look more like this —
Man and woman enter “latching child zone”.
Man picks up cute “latching child” and hands it to the woman saying “Gee, this one is cute! But you’d better not keep her — remember, dear, we don’t want children!”
Woman accepts child and observes that the child is, indeed, irresistably cute, and can’t seem to let go.
The man and woman would have to be aware of their choices and the rules for dealing with “latching children”. The current rules about “semen” are that a man has complete control over “semen” until it passes beyond his control and into a woman’s body. After that, he’s consented to whatever the semen, in whatever state it might be, does. Analogously, the man would know that he had the option of grabbing every “latching child” who comes close and stuffing him or her into a duffle bag (“condom”) or forcefeeding said “latching child” a large dose of poison (“spermicide”) when it comes near, or before handing it to the woman (“vaginal spermicide suppository”). The man would even have choices for dealing with latching children — “Isn’t this one cute?”, followed by putting said child back down without handing it to the woman (“withdrawal method”). He could see if the woman’s hands were tied up in such a way that she couldn’t snatch a child from his hands (“The Pill”). He could take a Polaroid photo of the child and hand it to the woman (“vasectomy”).
In this analogy, as with coitus, the initial point of control is an action performed solely and exclusively by the man. In the coitus case, the man ejects semen from his body. In the “latching child” case, the man picks up a latching child and then releases it. In both case, where the object — child or semen — goes, and the condition it’s in after released, is under the man’s control.
(That should probably be “Irrefutable Presumption of Paternity”. It exists in a number of states where a husband is legally defined to be the father of any child conceived during the marriage, even if he can prove he is not the biological father, and even if the wife admits to an adulterous relationship. Those laws need to be repealed, in my opinion, and the biological father held responsible instead.)
You make a compelling advocacy for implied consent, and I am bereft to see how it leaves room for the female’s abortion rights. Unless it is rape, copulation is a mutual acceptance of events that can lead to conception. The male is countenancing the expulsion of material that could lead to conception, and the female is countenancing the acceptance of said material. To you, for the former party, this act is implied and enforceable consent to 21 years of servitude. For the latter party, you do not hold this act to be enforceable implied consent but merely consent to the proximate coitus, not to its secondary outcomes. Even the female wanted to become pregnant and actively facilitated it, she has the full right to reverse that decision. Not even an initial formal statement of consent is required to enjoin the male.
You are trying to rephrase the analogy to make the male appear as if he is welcoming and actively facilitating the entry and burden of the offspring, which he does not do, at least not anymore than the female does when she allows male genitals transmitting semen to enter her own genitals. I explained what the proximate act attracting the latching children was, which was walking in a conjugal manner. These roaming children do not target single walkers, they tend to target couples. The proximate act which makes them vulnerable to latching children is walking together in this area. The children, finding a dual unit more advantageous to accost, start jumping and begging. The male’s own body is his culpable vessel; he can decide to not walk in the area, to position himself so as to keep his distance from the female so that they do not appear as a couple, or walk next to her armed with anti-latch measures. Even though they both have prior warning that this behavior will make them vulnerable, their actions do not indicate consent to the burdens that these children shall impose. The original analogy did not exclude the symbolic act of the male’s coital complicity; it is represented by the male electing to walk with the female in the area. That did not appear guilty enough for your taste, but that does not mean that the analogy left out the mutual aspect of coitus.
And the female is mutually culpable for allowing the male to enter her genitals. Your characterization of segments of coitus as being “solely and exclusively” controlled “by the man” is disturbing and inaccurate, if you believe in such a thing as consensual copulation. You are conflating the penetrating party with agency and the penetrated party with passivity. What if the female thrusted her pelvic regions towards and upon the male genitals in order to engulf them and their effluents? What if she approached from a superior position and lowered her orifice onto the male genitals while the male stayed prostrate (He is not being raped, but has simply elected to be less physically mobile than the female). If you maintain that the agency and culpability is still the male’s because he elects to leave his genitals inside the female until he ejaculates, what if he declines to continue until ejaculation and withdraws? Of course, you would still hold him culpable if any pre-ejaculate caused pregnancy. If his “passive” acquiescence to having his genitals engulfed by this more sexually active female constitute the necessary implied consent, I fail to see why the standard female’s “passive” acquiescence to the entry of male genitals into hers do not constitute binding implied consent.
Her tacit allowance of possible conception does not translate into an enforceable obligation to suffer the consequences of conception. If accepting the gametes into the region which would facilitate conception does not constitute implied consent to child burdens, why does depositing the gametes constitute enforceable implied consent? The distinction is that one involves external material being inserted internally and the other constitutes internal organic material being expelled.
The suggestion that since the male’s role involves organic material expelled from his body makes implied consent binding means that servitude can be assigned for actions other than vaginal intercourse. If the male never penetrated the female and ejaculated somewhere else, expelling the semen, and the female then takes it and inserts it into her genitals in order to effect pregnancy, is the male still liable then. You appear to be saying exactly that. He forfeited his property claim to the semen by expelling it, but he did not willfully expel it into the female genital orifice. If voluntary expulsion of bodily material means implied consent to whatever that bodily material is used to facilitate at the discretion of another person who app, the male who externally discarded his semen would be just as liable as the male who engaged in vaginal penetration. You previously expressed disapproval towards females who lie about contraception in order to obtain semen or who obtain the semen even after the male had kept it away from her orifice discarded it. Your new assertion now means that those females are equally entitled to child support should they use the unconventionally appropriated sperm to cause pregnancy. Even a wealthy male gratifying himself is potentially liable under your standard. Is this the new clarified standard that you are establishing?
The pro-choice movement wisely eschews the hazard of trying to read indications of something that can constitute implied consent by insisting that pregnancy and child-rearing must be consented to independently on their own terms, divorced from consent to copulation. It does not matter what contraceptives the female did or did not use, or if she told the male that she wanted to be impregnated, or even if she signed a contract of motherhood. Her prior actions which may be construed as inviting child burdens do not negate her right to terminate it and avoid the parental burdens upon herself.
At first I thought you were going to raise the bodily perview objection. Since you were hinting at it, the female’s claim to repel and reject the advances of a pregnancy and the male’s claim to repel child support claims are founded upon the same premise of individual autonomy. Their consensual sexual acts do not constitute implied consent or secondary waiver of liberty to twenty-one years of servitude, at least that’s what the pro-choice movement insists about the female. They insist that that engaging in sex is not a waiver to allow the child to claim the female’s bodily sustenance for nine months or her personal liberty for 21 years. The male’s engaging in the sex act should not equal the implied waiver which the female’s actions clearly did not.
Attempts to exclude the male from the same entitlement because the baby does not physically intrude upon his body leads to unacceptable conclusions: that infringements upon liberty are acceptable if they do not directly enter or physically penetrate the person’s body. If I put a sign on the ground which said, don’t stop on this or you will be imprisoned, and a person, out of skepticism, curiosity, or stupidity, stepped on the sign and then a cage falls on them, I have violated their autonomy. I cannot claim that I am entitled to keep the person imprisoned because I warned the person not to step on the sign. If the cage was large enough and fell from above, I can confine and imprison him without laying a finger on the person’s physical body. There is no physical penetration or handling of his body.
Reasonable and courteous, but hardly obligatory. If they both were trying to go somewhere other than Chicago, they are individually responsible for being lost and suppporting themselves in the interim. If the female elects to follow a male on the train and he misleads her, she agreed to accept the risk of his bungling. If he wants to help her with accomodations, he could, but he is not obligated. If they are romantically consigned and he says, “pay for your own room dear,” it will probably mean the dissolution of their pairing, but either partner is free to exactly that. Perhaps it is reasonable and decent for the female to inform the male, “I was pregnant with your offspring and I aborted it,” but she has absolutely no obligation to do so.
As for your question of what the male might financially owe, I’ve been meditating on this. If I damaged somebody’s fence, I would be liable to pay to repair or replace the fence. However, if the wronged owner decided to take this damage fence as an opportunity to make expensive renovations and changes to the fence or replace it with a whole new one, I certainly am not liable for those revised changes. I would be liable for what the fence was originally worth, to reasonably reconstruct the force to its status prior to my inflicted damage. If the male’s impregnation is analogous to damage upon the female, he would be liable to pay a sufficient amount to restore her to state before he inflicted his damage, that is, a sufficient amount to make her unpregnant. If she decides to use his inflicted impregnation as an opportunity to renovate herself and her life by becoming gravida and then a mother, he should not be liable for that.
I do not think the damaged property analogy applies because unlike the property owner, the male did not vandalize the female’s person. She elected to participate with him in a potentially hazardous act. It would be like the property owner inviting me to shoot targets on his fence. If the analogy did somehow apply, the male would be liable for the price of what it takes to return the female to her prior, undamaged, unpregnant state, the price of an abortion. If she decides to use his inflicted damage as an opportunity for bodily and lifestyle renovation, that is her own venture and she ought to pay the difference.
Nik,
Yes, I absolutely defend the hypothetical mother’s right to do exactly that.
This proposed entitlement for males is usually conflated with abortion because both abortion and C4M are post-conception, pre-partum methods of avoiding the burdens of childbirth and child-rearing. I define abortion as the pre-partum right to avoid the consequences of birth and child-rearing. Males would sign a waiver of parental responsibility, females would have to consume a pill or employ a suction device. Different methods to fulfill the same entitlement.
Dorset,
First, I’ll note that you’ve abandoned your analogy, and we’re back to arguing the original point.
Semen is ejected by the man’s body regardless of what the woman does. This is a biological fact. It has nothing to do with sexual positions, practices, passivity, activity, or even whether or not either or both of them are particularly good in the sack.
Specifically, it occurs thusly —
(Male Ejaculation)
And I don’t see women running around, stealing used condoms out of trashcans, and getting pregnant that way. Constructing “Straw Man” arguments is a nice way to get a good finger workout, but it’s a lousey way to win an argument.
A good reference for logical fallacies, as well as a nice introduction to argumentation is Fallacies.
Dorset,
Abortion and contraceptive rights arise out of bodily autonomy issues, not out of a right to avoid responsibility for one’s actions. That they also allow one to avoid responsibility for one’s actions is a plus, but trying to construct equivalent methods of avoiding responsibility that have nothing to do with bodily autonomy, and arguing for them on the basis that other people’s bodily autonomy allows them the chance to avoid responsibility does not make any sense. The parallelism is simply not valid.
An action that avoids responsibility for a child by preventing the child from coming into being is completely different than an action that would refuse responsibility for a child that does come into existence. For a child that does come into existence, we require that both parents agree to abandon responsibility, and don’t allow either parent to unilaterally abandon responsibility.
Also, what is up with your use of male and female rather than man and woman? For some reason, I have a very hard time reading something that talks about “the male” and “the female” doing things without reading the author as a raving misogynist nutball. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Just a style tip, if that isn’t how you want to be read. :)
Dorset:
I was not talking about physical intrusion. I was talking about being able to prove responsibility for a born child, which in your terminology represents “21 years of servitude”. In our current society, a born child legally belongs to its biological mother and a man who may or may not be the biological father, unless other arrangements are made, which means our society automatically considers both contributors of genetic material liable for 21 years of servitude (to continue using your terminology). But making other arrangements generally requires that both parents are identified and given an opportunity to contribute to the decisionmaking process. (I am deliberately excluding Baby Moses laws here.) In many states, for instance, a woman cannot give a child up for adoption without identifying the putative father and attempting to notify him of the decision. Because it’s easy to identify the mother and hard to identify the father, the woman has more postcoital choices than the man. Just because the woman is the one who has to initiate legal action for child support for a born child does not mean she’s trying to rope the man into involuntary servitude out of meanness (although it is often expressed this way) – this is the way our society has decided to go about making sure the man fulfills his legal obligation. (BTW, I don’t notice you arguing about men who want the children that women want to abort or adopt out, which I think more than a few C4M adherents are interested in.)
What I think you are aiming for is a change in society to where the basic assumption is that a born child belongs to the world or something, and the two people responsible for its existence get individual and independent opportunities to opt out of taking care of it at any point in time. On the surface, this may seem to be a more fair way of handling things, but only in a world where the child is gestated in a tank. The very real health risks for the woman involved in contraception, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, and the postpartum period put the heavier burden on the woman, so for your system to be fair and evenhanded, some equivalent kind of burden needs to be put on the man. What would you suggest?
This has been mentioned above. Dorset thinks that if a woman has a child (she doesn’t want an abortion for whatever reason) and then wishes to exercise Choice 4 Women leaving the father with sole parental responsibility, then she should be able to do so. Dorset’s also let it be known that he supports abortion unconditionally, he doesn’t think a man should be able to prevent a women aborting. It’s unfair to suggest he hasn’t mentioned either of these situations.
I think the Choice 4 Women scenario is an interesting one for those who want both parents to have obligations once the child is born – unless both disclaim them. It’s accepted (in some places) that a woman can have an abortion to avoid have a child damaging her life, or the lives of children she already has. Unless you accept C4W if there’s a father who want to keep the child, the only way a woman can avoid being damage in this fashion is to have an abortion. I’m not happy with a woman being influenced to have an abortion in that manner.
I missed that part of his post. I apologize.
Catherder,
I have not abandoned the analogy, just deflected your attempts to debunk that analogy when you started making a conflation that says penetration = ejaculation = agency = responsibility. You have no reduced your conflation to this: ejaculation = agency = responsibility.
And female’s produce lubricating secretions to facilitate deep penetration to make conception more likely, just like ejaculation makes conception more likely than if the the pre-ejaculate were the only phallic effluent (though conception can still happen with just the pre-ejaculate). That is a biological fact. Neither lubrication nor ejaculation, though they make conception more likely, indicate consent to the repercussions of conception. They do not even indicate consent to the sexual act itself. If they did indicate consent, then then we shall have to re-evaluate the claims of those rapists who said that the victim “wanted it” because of certain physical indications.
Before you at least attempted to establish that his squirting was preceded by initiating acts that he controlled “solely and exclusively,” that it was all “under the man’s control.” Since the varieties of leching behavior demonstrate that this conflation is not categorically true, the male’s ejaculation is not definitive evidence of agency, initation, or tacit acceptance of the consequences of the gamete exchange. His ejaculation does not indicate implied consent any more than does the female’s parting of her legs or her lubrication.
Your new insistence that “squirting” equates to implied consent of consequences makes the presented egregious scenarios anything but “strawmen” arguments. They are not “strawmen” but valid implications of the application of your standard (squirting = resonsibility). A male who was forcibly or unconsciously masturbated would culpable for the consequences by this standard. So too would a male who discarded semen into a refuse bin only to have it stolen. And so too would a male who was raped by managed to ejaculate. Rare these cases could be (so far as we know), so this is usually referred to as an appeal to marginal cases (like animal rights theorists being confronted with the “dog in the lifeboat”). However, I doubt you would look favorably on a proscribed abortion policy which says, “Most females consent to the acts which caused their pregnancy, and as for the ones who did not, insignificant consideration.” Or a policy which prohibited late-term abortions categorically because legitimate health reasons to procure them are considered “almost” non-existent.
Prior indications of what looks like implied consent to reproductive and child-rearing outcomes are irrelevant. Even if a female publicly acknowledges purchasing semen and inserts it into herself for the purpose of inducing pregnancy, her prior indications of her prior intentions are irrelevant and she can terminate the pregnancy, and can even take advantage of the legal abandonment laws and anonyomously deposit the child in a state location.
Acceptance of semen into the female genitals does not indicate implied consent to pregnancy on the part of the female. Ejaculation, whether into a refuse bin or into female genitals, does not indicate implied consent to pregnancy. If such things do, then discard abortion rights as well.
Charles and Lee,
Those two entitlements cannot be delineated. If a female consents to sexual encounter, a possible outcome is pregnancy and live birth. Social policy previously stated that females have the chance to uphold their bodily sovereignty before they chose to engage in potentially impregnating activity. The anti-abortion advocates stated, “It’s one thing to stay independent and avoid getting pregnant, but it’s another thing to be able to reverse the pregnancy once the child is conceived and growing.” The abortion rights movement has asserted repeatedly that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy or consent to childrearing. The right to avoid the burdens of childrearing is integral in the pro-choice movement, and the right to abort does not inhere only in a right to avoid bodily intrusion. Even a female who had no problem with the nine months of debilitation but chooses to abort solely because she does not want to be a mother or learns that her child will be retarded and too onerous to care for has her entitlement intact. Unless she consents to the pregnancy and childrearing independently, divorced from her consent to copulation, she has not consented and the pregnancy and the child presence would constitute an imposition onto her autonomy.
Whether somebody imposes upon another’s autonomy by siphoning blood and bodily sustenance or by forcing them to labor for their support, both actions constitute impositions, and if they are not consented to, they are both violations. Perhaps one is more viscerally offensive than the other, but both constitute rights’ violations. If am warned to not walk somewhere because a lifeform will set upon me, you are saying that I can only remove the lifeform’s impositions if it actually penetrates and extracts from my physical body. But if the lifeform imprisons and coerces me into laboring for its economic and other support, I have to tolerate that and if I attempt to break the lifeform’s control over me, I will be sanctioned and confined to compel me to comply. I had my chance to avoid this enslavement by choosing not to walk in this area, so it would seem. My walking into the area after being warned constituted consent to this autonomy imposition, so it would seem. You are free to assume this position of sequential consent, but I do not see how it permits freeing oneself of vampiric, bodily impositions when one was warned ahead of time that one’s activity created the risk of such an imposition being imposed.
Females have the right to avoid the responsibility or consequences of their sexual acts, bodily or laborwise, because their consent to copulation does not translate into consent to pregnancy or child-rearing. This right has long been lambasted as a right to “escape responsibility.” Perhaps it is, but I will not support a standard of culpability that translates each consentual sex act into a potential consent to pregnancy, 21 years of affirmative servitude, or death (when pregnancies are complicated). You are saying that females cannot have “implied consent” enforced upon them because it is violative, bodily imposition, a violation of autonomy. Even if the female’s previous actions would seem to indicate a consent to pregnancy and child-rearing, we cannot force the consequences to play themselves out. Males forced into child-support are forced to labor and work for a consequence that they did not directly consent to, and if they resist, they are imprisoned, their liberty taken away, until they comply. Perhaps a parasite is not being inserted into their abdomens to siphon blood, but it is an autonomy violation. It is a coercion of the autonomous entity to support consequences that it did not consent to, no more than did the female consent to pregnancy or child-rearing by having sex.
Legal abandonment laws allow the female to do exactly that unilaterally. Even if the female is required to notify the putative father, the putative father cannot legally force her to provide child support payments and cannot force her to provide affirmative, maternal support. However, the female can do exactly that to the male, even if he signs a full waiver of parental privileges. Even if the female gives birth, she is not obligated to provide 21 years of servitude, even if the female tries to proceed against her. The male is fully liable for 21 years, at the female’s discretion.
If you are distressed that couples are no longer the definitive culpable units for child production, there appears to be no stopping that. Reproductive technology and respect for individual autonomy means that the female is unilaterally responsible for the child’s birth or non-birth. Unless the male is conjugally entitled to control the conception or gestation (which he is not and should not be), then he should not have corollary duties. Though I do look forward to the day when persons are gestated in tanks, or not at all, as it will make things considerably less complicated.
The fact that one participant in copulation is more vulnerable to more medical hazards is irrelevant, if that participant freely elects to engage in copulation, and I believe I answered it with a posited scenario. If a healthy female and a male with cardiac problems contraceptively copulate, the male risks more dangerous and costly repercussions than does the female. She might only suffer some vaginal abrasions, while he is risking infarction, hazardous surgery, angioplasty, expensive medications, long convalescence, and debilitation. The female is not obliged to pay for his recovery or medical burdens inflicted as a result of copulation. He elected to risk himself and recovering from the damage inflicted by copulation is his burden.
You are suggesting that if the exercise of an autonomy right is less physically taxing or burdensome on an individual it is to be regarded less or not at all. That since the male’s exercise of this choice involves the mere signing of a waiver while the female’s exercise of this choice involves medication or abdominal suction, his right to choice ought to be disregarded. I find this suggestion shocking indeed. If a female can exercise her choice by taking RU-486, but another female has to undergo a dilation procedure, is the former female’s right to be regarded less or rescinded? Her exercise of her right involved considerably less risk and sacrifice than did the female who had to undergo the dilaton abortion. There should be no distinction in the allotment of this right because some persons can exercise it with less burden or cost.
If the male wanted to forfeit his parental duties, but agreed to undergo unnecessary abdominal surgery and take debilitating chemicals for 48 hours (to mimic the abortion recovery period), would that allay your fears of inequity?
Whatever reason it is, you have not explained it and I cannot fathom what it is. That’s a problem of perception that you and whoever else share and is no concern of mine. Why it is necessarily misogynistic when both sexes are referred to in the scientific, clinical nomenclature? I say “male” and “female” because “man” and “woman” are loaded with too much political baggage, and invite the ambiguity of meaning “social” or “physical” or “genetic” or whatever else. The terminology is to make clear that I only refer to individuals so far as their fecundity methods go.
Dorset writes:
I’ve said nothing of the sort in my analysis. All I did was show that the structure of your analogy doesn’t match the structure of pregnancy as an event.
Conception starts when the male ejaculates. I don’t care how or why he ejaculates, but if he doesn’t, there just won’t be any chance of conception occuring. Your analogy doesn’t include this initial step, or anything that comes after it, so your analogy is just plain invalid.
I’m sorry. That’s just the way analogies work. You don’t have to like that, but I don’t have to pretend your invalid analogy is somehow valid.
Really? That does not seem to be your analysis when you said this:
You objected to my analogous inclusion of ejaculation as not making the male look guilty enough. I said that when the male moves within physically proximity of the female companion and stays near her in a conjugal manner, that is what attracts the accosting children who begin attempting to latch. There was no structural omission of the male act which makes the pregnancy potential.
Your only problem with this formulation is that it does not make the male look like his is “asking for it” enough, so you decry the analogy as invalid and demand to amend it with the male shooting rogue children at the female.
“Just” is code lexicon which means “I can’t explain, but that’s how it is, so buy it.” Your complaint over the analogy is that it does not make the male look guilty enough for your preference. Not facilitating your preconceived notion of where you want blame to lie does not translate into logical fallacy. Sorry, that’s “just” the way it is.
Dorset,
It’s not a question of “guilt”. It’s a question of reproductive biology. Ignoring the non-existent instances of women dumpster-diving for used condoms, reproduction starts when a man ejaculates. It doesn’t start because they hang around each other, neck, hold hands, or take a walk in the park together.
As for logical fallacy, logic doesn’t care what’s being argued. If you want to construct an analogy, construct a valid one. Otherwise, expect me to pick it apart. Heck, I’m an equal-opportunity bogus analogy picker-aparter. It’s just one of my many talents.
It’s a talent that has atrophied and withered, so perhaps you should nourish it in the future.
You have been asserting that since the male’s involuntary expulsion of fluid is allegedly the last proximate act before conception results, then he is culpable and liable for what results and he cannot eschew the burden of the consequences. Conversely, you are implying that since the female’s allowance of the male’s genital into hers is not the last proximate act before conception results, then she is inculpable of what results and is free to eschew the burdens. When you attempt to make a delineation that establishes who can avoid a consequence and who must suffer it, it is an analysis of culpability.
Ah, so if a male withdraws or fails to ejaculate, he is inculpable of a pregnancy that might still result? I doubt that is what you are saying, as I am sure that you would still fault males when the pregnancy results solely from pre-ejaculate sperm, even though the allegedly definitive last proximate act never occured. If a male’s genitalia are exuding pre-ejaculate and the female lowers herself onto them and engulfs them with her genitalia, but then he declines to continue and withdraws without ejaculation occuring, who initiated the last proximate act that could have caused a pregnancy? Is the female to be bereft of her post-conception options because the last motion prior to the depositing of the sperm was her motion? Of course not.
What’s more is that this marker or biological responsibility is an involuntary muscle contraction. Certainly the male often brings it about by agitating his genitals against the female’s vaginal walls, but he does not consciously release the fluid anymore than the female consciously issues lubricating secretions or consciously expands the vaginal wall. And anyway, ejaculation is not the last involuntary action before reproduction begins. Reproduction begins with fertilization, or if you prefer, implantation, both of which are involuntary reactions entirely facilitated by the female. Her fallopian tubes propelled the ovum to meet the spermatozoa and her swollen uterine walls attached to the embryo. Certainly these are all involuntary processes and contractions of organs. But these are the last proximate events before reproduction is actually underway (even ejaculation does not guarantee reproduction). The female facilitated fertilization and implantation by any number of actions, parting her legs, not taking a chemical contraceptive, not wearing a diaphragm, not cleansing her genitals after the fact, not taking the morning-after-pill. Despite the female’s neglect to take all of these preventative measures and the fact that her involuntary bodily processes are the last proximate acts before reproduction begins, her engagement in copulation does not constitute implied consent to pregnancy or child-rearing and she can eschew and nullify the consequences. No matter how accepting or inviting of pregnancy the female may appear, she has the right to free herself of the burden. The male’s role is not categorically or inherently more culpable in catalyzing reproduction; he ought to have the same entitlement to free himself of the burden.
Pregnancy does not equal parenthood. Women who abort end a pregnancy, instead of avoiding parenthood like C4M advocates are proposing a right for.
Fathers don’t have any resposibilities towards their unborn children (at least legally). Both mothers and fathers have, or at least should have, equal rights and responsibilities towards born children.
Unilateral adoption “right” has been mentioned (woman giving up a child for adoption). I don’t agree with this for two reasons:
1) Right to give a child for adoption is not a right, but a privilege that exists because the supply of wannabe adoptive parents exceeds the supply of healthy newborn babies (when talking about older children with disabilities or perhaps of the “wrong” color and sex, things change. Kudos to adoptive parents who are not so picky). If the supply/demand situation were to change (less adoptive parents or more babies) this right should (and probably would in a society which professes to value children*) go away.
2)If the father is in a situation where he can support the child and wants to do so, he should be given special consideration in who should be given legal parenthood.
If it is unclear, adoption is process where the rights and responsibilities over a child are transferred from biological parent(s) to adoptive parents. It always requires the consent of the adoptive parents (thus giving a child for adoption can not be a right) and usually the consent of the biological parents.
* Not to be confused with valuing embryos and fetuses.
All this talk about vaginal walls and ejaculations is irrelevant. I have no problem about a frank discussion on human biology, but this is (IMO) not the place for that. I don’t give a shit whether the pregnancy results from a man taking some pre-stored sperm and and sending it via mail to a woman or whatever unusual methods can be devised.
It has nothing to do with the rights of a born child.
So if the female sues for financial support during the pregnancy or includes the medical expenses of the pregnancy in the paternity suit after the child’s birth, she doesn’t get a dime for that expense?
Whether a female is removing the fetus in order to avoid the physical burden of pregnancy or the post-partum burden or parenthood is irrelevant. Both of those are impositions upon autonomy and consent to them cannot be inferred by her consent to intercourse. Either reason she can employ to exercise her right to nullify the sexual consequences of her act, which before birth means for the female taking the pill to keep it from attaching, taking a pill to break the attachment, or separating and killing the fetus. For the male it means signing a paper. The pro-choice advocacy enumerated the right to avoid parental burdens as key justification for the right to terminate the pregnancy, and even after pregnancy, females still have recourse to that evasion right by abandoning the child to state custody (not the same as imposing upon an adopted family).
You are conflating the right to eschew parental burdens with some sort of power to take away children or impose them on unwilling parties, neither power which C4W or C4M advocates. When females abandon children after birth, they are handed over to initial state custody and if an adopted family is willing, the forfeited children are doled out. This is not the same as a right for unwilling parents to force adoption upon unwilling families. The fact that females can legally abandon infants does not mean that they can force other families at gunpoint to assume parental status over their discarded offspring. Even when the female is required to identify and inform the father, she still has the intact right to eschew the parental burden, and neither the state nor the father can extract child support or care from her if she willingly terminates her parental status.
Even if the male terminates his parental status and privileges, he cannot terminate his parental duties like the female can. Even after waiving parental rights, the female can forcibly extract child support from him. Whatever you think of this entitlement to eschew parental burdens after birth without any remaining duties, it is granted to females but not to males, making the situation doubly inequitous.
Catherder is the one who posited that “biological facts” were the basis for the man’s obligated status, so facts and pedantic details were necessary to examine the assertion.
Yes, state custody is first. Have no illusions over this: Such system exists because many people exist who would want to adopt a child. The state is merely a stepping stone. I’m not a big fan of legal abandonment (mildly put, whether by a man or a woman), finding new parents for an unwanted child, whether by the help of a the state or simply approval, is something I accept and support completely.
And the man, as the father, gets certain rights in return. I would have no problem with a system that would allow a man to give his duties and rights away provided the woman, and a possible new legal father would consent to that.
Sorry. I don’t know, actually. Maybe she does. I support a single-payer health-care.
They do not support your position. Your so-called examination is biased. All you are doing is providing a lenthy textbook explanation, and then taking a leap from that and saying that because of those pedantic details, C4M should exist. Classic dishonest tactic: a serious of obvious truths followed by a lie.
Let’s have an example. A newborn child exists. Whether the woman, or the man, took necessary precautions to avoid that situation (women have more to do, up and including abortion) is irrelevant to the situation. Child exists, and right and resposibilities over the child are 50% woman’s, 50% man’s.
You may think it is unfair for men, I think it is actually balanced. Pregnancy, childbirth and abortion all present health risks. Men do not have to face any of them personally to become fathers.
Serious should be series.
I don’t think this is correct. Can you document this claim that mothers have a special legal right to abandon their children on the fathers, thereby protecting themselves from being sought for child support? Or that they have a special legal right to abandon a child on the state against the father’s wishes, thereby protecting themselves from being sought for child support?
While there are now laws in most states allowing anonymous abandonment of infants to hospitals or other safe locations (intended to prevent anonymous abandonment of infants in bathrooms and dumpsters), only four states (Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee) have laws that are sex specific (New York‘s isn’t). Either parent (or a legal guardian in some states, or even a proxy in others) in possession of an infant could abandon the child to a hospital.
Furthermore, legal abandonment does not necessarily sacrifice the parental rights of either parent (it varies from state to state). Either parent can reclaim an abandoned infant (with some states explicitly granting father’s the right to reclaim infants abandoned by the mother). Furthermore, while there is no case law that I could find, I don’t see anything in the law that suggests that a mother (or father) who abandoned their infant could not later be sued for child support by the other parent if the other parent reclaimed the abandoned infant (and then gained custody), since the act of abandonment is not a legal surrender of parental rights (or responsibilities).
Furthermore, baby moses laws are in their infancy (so to speak), so it is likely that the will be modified if inequities (such as one parent abandoning the child when the other parent doesn’t want the child abandoned) are discovered to be a significant problem.
If Baby Moses laws are not what you meant, then I have no idea what laws you are talking about.
Also, a lie is quite harsh, opinion would be a better word in this case.
Tuomas,
Actually, I think the word you want is ‘non-sequitor’.
The lie is an implicit lie: the implication that the non-sequitor follows from the obvious truths.
Of course, it could simply be shoddy reasoning, and the writer believes that the non-sequitor is a logical sequitor.
Charles:
You are right, that is the correct term. Thanks.
The child biologically exists long before birth, yet not only can the female actually sever her support link, she can kill it to free herself. Do not try basing the difference in obligation on difference in capacities; born infants still lack self-awareness and cannot demonstrate rational autonomy. The pain distinction is also irrelevant because if basing the acceptability of killing an entity upon it’s capacity to feel pain permits any murder so long as the victim is anesthetized. The only relevant distinction between a born infant and a fetus is that a fetus is attached. But whether the fetus/baby is extracting physical sustenance with vascular connections or is extracting labor/economic support with the force of law, both impositions are a violation of autonomy if the provider of whatever support did not consent. The fact that a fetus is physically attached to the female gives her other means to facilitate separation and free herself of the burden.
If your position is that once children are born, the parents are obligated, it excises consent as a requirement for the assignment of support obligations. A female raped and imprisoned for nine months until birth would be obligated to support the product of the rape even though she had no consent in any phase of the child creation. And to go back to some scenarios you were lambasting, even the child produced with the male’s discarded semen. If you are going through the “implied consent” route, justification for abortion rights are hard to come by.
This objection of differential biological risk has come up before and it is irrelevant. The female knows that she faces different physical hazards upon consenting to copulation and she solely assumes them upon her consent. This objection seems to be saying that since females risk more perilous physical and health complications from copulation, then males have more obligations to support and attend to the health consequences of the female. The female elects to copulate, and she unilaterally elects how she deals with whatever post-intercourse health complications; the male is not responsible for any of that. Accepting the premise behind the different biological risk objection would give all the more physically vulnerable individuals ready-made lawsuits against any person that they had copulated with. Virgin females who bleed too much can sue the male who ruptured the hymen. Males with cardiac problems can sue the females that they copulated wtih if they have a heart attack during or after intercourse, and they’ll say, “These healthy females only have to deal with some minor vaginal abrasions, I have to deal with angioplasty, medication, and bed confinement.” Of course their claim should be ridiculous, as they elected to assume their unique risks upon consenting to copulate, just like females accept their unique risks when they consent.
I’m not seekings “justifications” for abortion. I think abortion is a right, period.
Key to understanding the pro-choice position is that it says that birth is the dividing line between human rights and no rights (thus, women have a right to abort), including a child’s right to have parents. To a pro-choicer, embryo/fetus does not equal to a child in a moral/legal sense.
“Seems to”, indeed. And do you some issues with law suits (based on the following straw man attack)? How many times I have to repeat: Child exists, and right and resposibilities over the child are 50% woman’s, 50% man’s ?
I haven’t seen caselaw on this because I have never found the scenario documented or recorded. However, once abandoned children are entered into state custody, foster care, or adoption eligibility, courts have issued terminations of parental rights of the anonymous abandoning parent(s). Judges have noted that the statute normally requires consent of biological parents but then note that obtaining such consent is impossible. Terminations have still been issued. If the male can actually proceed against the female and force her to reassume parental duties or give child support, it seems to contradict the notion of a legal, no fault abandonment.
Dorset,
Typically adoption takes time. Presumably the father would notice that his child had mysteriously disappeared, file a missing persons or contempt for interference with custody, and they might find the child in the “abandoned children” files.
Unless, of course, part of the reason women abandon children is because the father has already abandoned the mother. Do you have any sense whether or not C4M would result in more women dropping babies off at fire stations? How do you see this playing out?
Yes, parents should have an obligation to take of their children. That is my position. Conditions of creating the child are irrelevant. None of these are the child’s fault. And the mailed semen was an absurd joke, I don’t certainly spend any time lambasting such scenarios.
Yeah, and raising that distinction is only valid if it indicates relevant differences of autonomy or worth of the entity in question. You cannot say that animals should not have the same moral/legal status solely because they are animals; the axiom is usually justified on the basis that their being animals means that they do not have rationality, self-awareness, reflective self-awareness. Racists did not say that people of whatever skin color have less status solely because of the skin color, but that the skin color indicated that these individuals had less capacities or abilities. Born babies do not have self-awareness or rationality or autonomy, yet people are hell-bent to protect them, unlike fetuses, even though they both lack the relevant attributes.
A fetus is morally different from most kinds of children because it is potentially imposing upon a person without that person’s consent and the only way for the person to assert their sovereignty is usually to kill it, whereas with a non-fetal transgressor, a person could repel its trangression without lethal means. The right to repel imposition does not change if the trangressor happens to be a born human. If a child grabbed you and inserted an IV tube to obtain sustaining blood and then said, “You can’t remove it, I’ll die and I’m a born child.” Even if you were warned ahead of time not to go where the child was lurking, that did not equal consent to the child’s extracting actions. You can remove the IV, even if it means the death of the already born child. If a child is stealing from or attacking you, usually you can just shoo it away or call the police.
Yes I do have issues with lawsuits, especially when they are launched against persons who are not actually culpable for whatever damage. You do not seem to be eschewing the differential biological risk objection which says that persons of less physical vulnerability are responsible for harms befalling more physically vulnerable from activities that they undertake together, so those raised scenarios are not straw and they become valid implications of accepting your position. So accept culpability for the outcomes of such scenarios or amend your position. And it the “child exists, period” standard is binding, then even the abducted raped female forced to give birth to the rapist’s child is also liable for 21 years of servitude.
People who are poor or hungry through no fault of their own are not authorized to steal. People who have leukemia are not entitled to seize people and extract bone marrow, even if it means debilitation and death for them. If parent did not consent to baby’s creation, baby gets nothing from parent.
Yeah, it would probably would result in more such cases. The granting and exercise of more sexual and reproductive autonomy as a whole has probably contributed much to such cases. Oh well.
If there are no people who would rather raise that child. Then yes. I’m not dodging culpability here, even in your far-fetched scenarios. And of course, the man who did all that should be executed/put to prison for life (I am undecided on death penalty, but that is off-topic here) and his property handed to the woman and child, IMO.
As for the fetus/born child question: In fact, it is not known exactly when does a human being attain self-awareness. Perhaps it is before birth. I draw a line between human rights/ no rights at birth. Where do you draw it?
Of course, plenty of people, and many charity organizations would probably be willing to take the burden from the abducted ,raped, forced to give birth -woman.
And let’s not pretend that the situation is analogous to: man and woman consent to have sex-no birth control-woman gets pregnant-woman does not abort-man and woman have parental obligations.
I’m done with you. Your apathy towards human suffering is beyond pale. So what if C4M would result in more such cases?
So what if C4M would result in more such cases?
A descriptor of Dorset’s position, not mine.
When the entity in question is asked, “What are you?” and communicates that it is aware that it is a physical creature that is capable of dying, it is self-aware. I am not saying that children or whatever must necessarily be denied rights protection, but if we decide to extend it to creatures that lack those attributes, then we have to fashion a different justifications for excluding other entities that remain excluded. If we decide that non-self aware humans like born children have rights, then another explanation is needed for why unborn children can be killed, or why animals can do not have rights.
This coming from someone who is prepared to sentence raped females to care for the embodiment of their violation. Exercise of rights and human autonomy usually has socially deleterious consequences. If that repercussion is justification for rescinding the right, all rights are open for utilitarian negotiation, no sacrosanct reservations.
Okay. Breaking my word here.
How clever. If I had answered any other way, you would have accused me of hypocrisy, now I’m the big bad meanie for being consistent. I’m not responsible for the hypothetical actions of the hypothetical forcible impregnator/kidnapper. I regret for not seeing your trick for what it was, like I saw the impossibly ridiculous “If a child grabbed you and inserted an IV tube to obtain sustaining blood” (that sure is a common problem *eyeroll*).
The born child is a human being with the resulting rights first and foremost, rather than embodiment of violation. I have some faith in humanity, thus I would believe that many, many people would be sympathetic to the plight of that woman and willing to take the burden of childcare from her.
How far does your “anything against the will of a parent is slavery” -logic go? Can a person suddenly one day decide that it would be really awful to feed my child, it infringes upon my rights, decide to not feed the child?
Your ultra-libertarian ideology is something I consider troublesome.
Ability to communicate is not a requirement for self-awareness, merely one useful indicator for discerning it. You have not proven that born children are not self-aware.
Yes, they can, but if it is a child that they had previously accepted responsibility for, they cannot do it suddenly and will have make a formal renunciation and inform the state that the child is now without oversight. A person who accepts custody of a child but then abandons without formal notification is like the person who claims to attend to an emergency situation but then abandons it. Perhaps they did not have an initial obligation to attend to the situation, but announcing their intention and then abandoning it reduces the endangered or suffering person’s chance of receiving aid, because all are under the assumption that somebody is attending to it and it no longer requires attention.
It is the only conceivable method of proving or demonstrating self-awareness. If you are suggesting that self-awareness is presumed unless definitively demonstrated to be absent (proving a negative), then it will have to be presumed for any living organism. For all we know, cockroaches and snails have compact, undetectable neurological structures that make reflective self-awareness possible; they just choose not to show it.
No, I have not definitively proven that born children are not self-aware, and neither can I prove that second-trimester fetuses are not self-aware so birth-delineation cannot be used to determine possession of self-awareness.
All they have to do is formally declare:
This child is from now on someone elses problem!
I don’t accept this. I accept handing out the responsibility for your own children only when someone else is willing to take up the burden. If the state is willing, great. If not, then your complaints about being “enslaved” to the child fall on deaf ears.
Snails and cockroaches =/= newlyborn humans.
I am staunch specist, I suppose. Even if animals were smart and self-aware, I would not support same rights to them as I do with humans.
I am also aware that the drawing the line at birth is arbitrary, and I am personally relieved that third-semester abortions are rare, because they are more in the gray area. But the line has to be drawn somewhere, at birth in my case. I don’t pretend to know that self-awareness is suddenly infused upon a baby at birth. Nor do I pretend that that the fact that babies cannot speak english of any other language means that they are lower life forms.
lets say C4m is legal and a woman chooses to have a child knowing that the father already legally opted out, isn’t she then willingly accepting the burden?
If the state is ready to imprison the parent as a result of the abandonment, would it then become responsible for the child’s lack of care?
Fine, but then a person who draws the bright line at skin color or who finds infants no more sympathetic than snails is on equal footing. All that you could protest is that they have chosen different prejudices.
I would think so, and it should then provide care if no one else will. There are better/other ways to ensure no abandonment occurs than threat of imprisonment, like social programs, and demanding child support from the absent parent (notice the gender-neutral language here).
Hate infants all you want. Hate people of different race all you want. I’m not a thought police.
If you start arguing that people of different color, or infants should have no more rights than you think you, or people of your age/gender/race have, then you are my enemy.
I am not arguing that. If infants receive rights without any requisite criteria, a distinction has to be raised to justify the continued exclusion of other entities that lack that criteria. But if you are saying that rights can be granted and denied solely upon our sentimental preference of who we just think should or should not have them, a racist or ageist criterion is potentially just as legitimate. There would be no objective indictment, just a clash of prejudices.
1)Being human
2)Being born
My criteria.
C’est la vie.
My prejudices are better than your prejudices ;).
Should those who base it on skin color or sex reclaim influence, countenance accepting that explanation from them. Then again, they do still have power in a lot of places in the world, so a lot of people are already have to accept their superior prejudices ;).
Well, it isn’t.
I don’t support opt-out from parenthood for men or for women. I support a woman’s (or a pregnant man’s[?]) right to choose abortion. And I support biological parents giving up parenting rights and responsibilities to adoptive parents.
I think I have said all I have to say on the subject. I’ll just end up repeating myself from now on.
Dorset writes:
A pig is not a boy. The decision not to grant the same rights to animals that are granted to people goes back thousands of years. I don’t see it changing any time soon, unless, perhaps, some kind of Planet Of The Apes scenario occurs.
Infants of all races and classes recieve rights in these United States, and in many other civilized countries in the world, because they are human beings and because nation-states have decided that baby human beings should be protected and provided for so that they can grow up to become productive adult human beings.
To extent FurryCatHerder’s point, where boundary lines are muddy (as between clearly sentient six year olds and clearly non-sentient 20 week fetuses), bright line standards are very useful. Rather than leaving the sentience/personhood line up to individual judgment, we (as a society) have agreed that legal personhood starts at birth. Arguing otherwise requires something much, much stronger than an insistence that your dividing line is objective line and that the existing bright line will allow the racists to take over, which is all I see you providing, Dorset. Anyway, are you actually arguing for legal infanticide, or are you simply being obstreperous?
You seem to think that bodily autonomy rights would only allow women to have abortions in order to avoid further bodily autonomy violations by the fetus, and that therefore the right to have an abortion because you don’t want to have a child must be a separate right, which men could have as an equivalent to by use of contracts. However, the bodily autonomy right includes the right to decide what to do with one’s body for whatever reason, so deciding to abort because you don’t want a child is a right not because not taking care of children is a right, but because deciding what to do with your body is a right (and one shared equally by men and women to the extent that it is physically possible). The limited right to abandon a child is already available to both parents equally.
That a woman who has an abortion doesn’t have responsibility for her child because there is no child to have responsibility for inexplicably does not sway you at all. Still you insist that men should have an “equivalent” right to not support children that do exist. That you don’t see how these two rights are not equivalent is puzzling.
Also, just to be clear, am I correct that you have abandoned the claim that women have some special legal right to abandon responsibility for their children, without the consent of the father of the child, potentially forcing the father to raise the child alone without support from the mother of the child? It seems to me you admitted that you had no basis for that claim, but it wasn’t a very clear retraction.
Also, your recent analogies suggest that you believe that taxation is the equivalent of rape and enslavement. Is this actually your position?
The strength of historical precedent, which also threw it’s weight behind other infamous rights’ exclusions and limitations.
Potentiality as grounds for granting life rights. Same argument that pro-lifers make in order to enjoin females from aborting, except that they start younger.
No, I am not arguing for legal infanticide (though the position has its merits). Granting born children rights while denying them to fetuses, even though both cannot demonstrate self-awareness or rationality means that another distinction would have to be raised to justify the allowance of killing one. The distinction becomes that the fetus is potentially imposing without consent and that to stop the imposition usually requires killing the fetus. However, that justification does not stop applying to solely fetuses. Whether a person is imposed upon by a fetus, adult human, animal, or retarded person, one can use forceful or even lethal means to repel their impositions.
Yes, and before the bright line used to be (and in some places still is) at conception, skin color, or sex, and its defenders of the day concluded that it was very useful and provided societal benefit and that changing it would create social problems. Do not pretend that shifting it to birth is bereft of harmful repercussions.
There is no child to have responsibility for because of the female’s assertion of her autonomy. You are saying that the potential imposition upon the male does not justify him repelling the indirect consequences of his actions, but that the imposition upon the female justifies exactly that. The notion that 21 years of servitude is less a burden than one extra month of bodily burden (to wait for viable induced labor) is puzzling. Copulation consigns one to decades of forced labor but not to bodily burden, even though both constitute impositions upon autonomy. The fact that the impositon is bodily gives the female different means for repelling it. Appropriating somebody’s person for biological sustenance or forced labor seem to be wrong for the same reason, even though one is more skin-crawling than the other.
No, I do not think that all taxation is enslavement or rape. Individuals who accept and utilize the benefit of police, emergency care, social services, and state subsidies are announcing complicity with the extraction system. The hypothetical males in question are not accepting the “benefit” of the child, unless they start demanding to exercise parental privilege, controlling and raising the child. If they start doing that, then they appear to be more liable.
Safe Haven and Moses laws promise a safe, legal abandonment; the notion that liability and parental burdens can still be reassigned seems to fly in the face of the law. Some Michigan and Kansas caselaw agrees with you, saying that voluntary termination of parental right for either parent does not absolve that parent of support liability, so post-partum eschewing of parental burden is conjugal. Pre-partum eschewing or acceptance of the burden is unilateral.
I’m saying that if a child exists, its parents need to be responsible for taking care of it. If it doesn’t then they aren’t parents, and have no such responsibility.
Actually, I think that the financial responsibility for raising children should be shared equally across the entire population, and the financial burden should be shared equally by ability to pay. If someone doesn’t want to be a parent, they shouldn’t be forced to be. However, given that I don’t see my socialist utopia anywhere near completion here, I am unwilling to see the lives of children degraded in order to grant parents the right to abandon responsibility for the child on their partner (of either sex).
While Baby Moses Laws provide a way for a parent who doesn’t want to be a parent to unilaterally abandon responsibility to the state, if the other parent rejects that decision and tracks down the abandoned child, then the abandonment is undone. Even if that doesn’t happen, these laws don’t give one parent the power to abandon responsibility for the child onto their partner. While I can accept that there are ways in which not being able to abandon responsibility is an imposition upon parents of either sex, I think the imposition upon children of being financially abandoned by one parent is a greater wrong.
Dorset asserts again:
No, it isn’t. The “eschewing” and “acceptance” simply occur at different times based on biological differences. If “the male” keeps his semen to himself, he “eschews”, if he doesn’t, he “accepts”. At some later point in time “the female” has a turn to “eschew” or “accept”.
Also, the pre-partum decision is whether or not to create a burden. Deciding to create a burden, but deciding to unilaterally dump that burden on the other parent is not allowed for either partner.
The female had her chance to eschew before allowing the semen to enter her genitals. Even when she accepts the entry, the abortion rights notion tells us that social policy must allow her to exercise the available means to eschew the burden before birth but after conception. Females cannot safely abort at will, and only artifice makes that possible. For a while, social policy still enjoined them even though it was medically possible to eschew. Nothing biologically forces the male to be consigned to the offspring, it is only social policy that consigns. We are told that social policies cannot obstruct females from eschewing by use of artificial methods, but it can still obstruct the male who requires no medical or artificial method to eschew.
Once you invite this cost-benefit analysis to justify non-consentual impositions, I fail to see why bodily impositions (upon the female) are exempted from consideration. You are saying that the male’s property and liberty entitlements can be imposed upon to prevent a worse economic happenstance from befalling the child. Why do the females’s nine months of bodily sovereignty categorically override the child’s entire life? Pro-lifers will say, “Hey, the female only faces nine months of debilitation, the baby faces death. Raw deal, but at least the mother will usually still be alive. She usually has less to lose.”
Perhaps you might dismiss that by saying that since the fetus is never conscious or aware or whatever that its total loss of existence is not on par with the female’s conscious bodily imposition. But then there is the issue of drug-addicted pregnant females or those who knowingly give birth to children who will have Tay-Sachs, ALD, Cerebral Palsy, or Huntington’s Chorea. The mother’s assertion of bodily rights to carry a birth to term will consign a born child to months, years, or decades of conscious debilitation, pain, and misery. Would not these egregious bodily happenstances inflicted upon a child justify a mere hour-long bodily violation of the obstinate female?