Cathy Young answers Jane Galt’s argument that “the current law [on reproductive rights] strikes me as a reasonable compromise between the needs of the women and the needs of the child”:
It’s interesting that the woman and the child are the only two parties Jane seems to consider. As for the argument that other biological disparities in reproduction favor men, it is something that I have considered myself. But here’s a point to ponder: our society has, in fact, been steadily evolving toward remedying—technologically, legally, and socially—the reproductive inequalities that disadvantage women. Women can escape the burden of unwanted pregnancy by having an abortion and using birth control (there is still no “male pill”). Women who don’t want to rush into marriage because their biological clock is ticking can now have a baby on their own without being stigmatized; see, for instance, this New York Times Magazine article, published the other day, about women pursuing artificial insemination. (As I noted in my other the concern about children being born with no right to paternal support seems missing in those cases.)
But the reproductive inequalities that disadvantage men remain, and they include a few others—besides having no option to avoid the burden of unwanted parenthood once conception has occurred—that Jane overlooks. For instance, a man who wants to be a father can have his child’s existence concealed from him, for years or even forever […]. And a man who has trouble finding a mate will find it a lot more difficult than a single woman to reproduce on his own: he’s need to find a surrogate mother, not a sperm donor. The biological clock is, of course, a female disadvantage—one which I am now facing myself, as a single 43-year-old woman. But I wonder how many men who are single and childless at 43 actually go on to father children; for most, I suspect, male biology provides only about 10 more years in which they can fool themselves with the thought that it’s not too late.
This isn’t really a plea for “those poor men” [a class of aggrieved Jane couldn’t bring herself to “ get worked up about’]. I don’t believe that men in America are an oppressed class. But I do believe that, as we grapple with unprecedented changes in gender roles, we need to address the issue of equality in reproductive rights and responsibilites more seriously.
Young and Galt are two of the more impressive thinkers in the blogosphere, so the entire post is well worth reading.
Cathy also links to her Monday column in the Boston Globe, “Equal Rights for Unwed Fathers”, which contains this spot on observation:
You would think that, unlike men who seek to avoid their paternal responsibilities, fathers who want to be responsible for raising their own children would at least encounter societal sympathy and support. Sadly, that has not generally been the case. Unwed fathers who contest adoptions are often faulted for not taking affirmative steps to find out about the child’s existence, and in some cases are blamed even if they were actively deceived by the mother. Often, they’re suspected of being abusers whose real hidden motive is to control the mother.
The issues of men burdened with responsibility for unwanted pregnancies, and of men who are not allowed to be fathers to wanted children, are linked by a common thread. Biology has made men and women unequal with regard to reproduction. In recent decades, thanks to both technology and social change, we have made strides to alleviate the inequality for women, helping them avoid unwanted childbearing. But we have lagged far behind in equalizing the situation for men. We cannot ask men to be equal parents while giving virtually all the power in reproductive decisions to women.
As many of you know, I was adopted. And it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I found my biological parents (father, sadly, deceased). I met my biological mother, who still lives in Maryland, and I spoke to my biological half brother on my father’s side.
I bring this up only to note that there was some discrepancy in their stories: my biological half brother, for instance, insisted that my biological father never knew about me until many years later (and in fact, my phone call was the only affirmative evidence the family ever had)—but even had he found out and applied for my adoption, there is no assurance he would have been granted it.
As someone who describes himself as reluctantly pro-choice (though I thank goodness my biological mother felt differently about an unwanted pregnancy, and that I was conceived before Roe), I have nevertheless always felt unsatisfied, on both an intellectual and ethical level, by the state of men’s reproductive rights in this country.
And the Panglossian status quo, as promoted by many feminists, strikes me as a bit too self-interested. How we change the system I don’t know. But I am continually surprised by those women whom I respect intellectually on other issues finding no inherent flaw in our current system, and who argue that the man’s choice is to pull out or shut up—an argument similar to the one that feminists rejected out of hand when it was used by Wade to suggest that reproductive choice was already available to women (through abstinence and birth control).
At the risk of opening up another can of worms here, I invite you the anecdote about my parentage and adoption as a way to discuss what the rights of the biological father in such a situation ought to be.
Interesting in that as far as I know we don’t ask men to be “equal parents”. I use the metephorical “we” to mean society (that disembodied gargoyle that is everyone but I). I really believe that society expects not an equal parenting partnership but something like a 75/25 ratio.
Obviously that is just my opinion.
Given that nature has endowed upon women the instinct to want to take care of a child, given that women must endure nine motnhs of physical stress and pain, and given that men like Jeff who are pushing for equal reproductive rights have only a vague notion of “wanting” to be there for a child, Galt is absolutely right when she says “reproduction is never going to be fair.”
Judging from primary custody rulings, it’s more like 85/15, and that’s not opinion…
Parenting is never going to be fair with the NOW writing the feminist custody legislation that’s ruined intact families and disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of fathers, you ignorant, sexist twat. You’ve absolutely nothing factual to offer. You should be banned.
From the standpoint of an adoptive parent, I don’t want either of my kids’ biological parents in the mix. Selfish, yes, but it frigging complicates things. Where they come from, it’s nearly impossible to find out the truth, so I think we’re safe. It’s damned near impossible to even find out; there’d be legal consequences to the biological parents if we could. China, you know.
We do try to educate them as to culture and circumstance, but that’s pretty much as far as it goes. Having the (almost complete) certainty that they’ll never be able to find out…curse or blessing? It’d be interesting to hear responses from the rest of you, and then hear what Jeff has to say.
Galt is absolutely right when she says “reproduction is never going to be fair.â€Â
Whether this is cosmically accurate or not is irrelevant. We are a nation of laws not a nation of cosmic righteousness.
In a nation of laws, we are required to follow the statutes which we, in democratic manner, created for ourselves to follow and, when requested, we must match those statutes up against the constitutional principle which guides how those statutes are created and enforced.
The constitutional principle in question declares that all persons are to be treated equally under the law. This has been taken, in practice, to mean that any law which gives one person a “right” to do something must also give everyone else that same right. Is there some biological impediment? The Law doesn’t care, and we are to give [what amounts to] equivalent rights to make up for it.
Hence women’s lower strength standards for joining fire departments. E.g.
Ah, yes, then there’s always the standard, cliched rejoinder that “if you give men an opt-out of post-conception parenthood, it’ll add cost to the general public to underwrite his individual choice, and that’s not fair to the public.
Legless men can’t climb mountains—biological reality—but we can require the public to underwrite the cost of making large sections of the Appalachian Trail “handicapped accessible” [to the tune of $Billions$] for the few who choose to “walk” it.
Fairness to the public has never been an issue before; why does it start screaming when the issue is confined strictly to men?
Indeed, we have never considered impact on the general public when rationalizing the many, many divisive court cases hinging on individual rights at the expense of the public’s cost or tolerance.
The bottom line is this: if women have a post-conception “right” to opt out of reproduction [within certain limits] then men are, constitutionally required to be given same, or equivalent rights—to within the same or equivalent limits.
I adopted both of my children when they were seven and four respectively. They are now in their mid 30’s. They both knew their biological parents and my daughter even had infrequent correspondence with her bio-mom. She has now established relations with two half-brothers in the east. My son has a relationship with both his brothers. Biological parents of both children are now deceased.
I never considered the “knowledge” a problem and was always honest with the children. They knew why they were adopted. Fortunatly they turned out to be a couple of fairly competent adults – although the boy picked up a little too much of the “modern liberal” tendencies.
No incentive to any man beyond his own desire/ethical compulsion to be a responsible parent. Well, and state action.
I guess the really hard part is to figure a way to add something positive into the mix. Incentive for men to be involved more. 6gun has listed a litany of difficulties men face, so I need not retread that ground. How do you make this less so?
Is something I have no cure for. Damn.
I have posted here before that I am an adoptive parent. We were very lucky in many ways, but for the sake of keeping on topic I will just discuss one of the ways.
We were picked by the birth mother, we met her and still have distant contact (we don’t know the location of each other and communicate via the agency). She was unmarried, knew who the father was and is very much a pro-life person. When she discovered the pregnancy, the birth father suggested an abortion, which she rejected so he left. The adoption agency was able to track him down and get a release signed, but only after we and the birth mother agreed to the adoption. There was a few tense weeks there when he could not be found and the time was near. We were told the about the birth father’s rights. It was a frightening time.
In our state (at that time) the rule was he could contest the adoption up to 6 months after the birth and his name was to be placed on a list of birth fathers so he might be able to know about the birth and his rights.
There could have been a great deal less stress if he were to be allowed to sign the release before the adoption was set up, in essence the “male abortion” option discussed here recently.
Even with the signed release I am told that he would be “on the hook” for support if the birth mother were to back out in the 72 hour post birth window. I am not sure if that is ture, but seems likely.
In Vino Veritas has proven a theory of mine: he doesn’t read posts, he just looks at the topic and drops in the comments whatever contrarian garbage he thinks is likely to discredit “conservatives”.
I’ve been a stay at home father since my son was born, leaving academia to do so. By choice. I have been with him for all but maybe 15 hours of his life. In fact, my wife has been out of town on business since 6am Sunday morning.
So my notion of “wanting” to be there for a child is actually much more than a notion: I actually decided to do it.
For your part, you presume to speak for people who are very much your betters. The only reason I keep you around is that you expose how intellectually dishonest and bankrupt is the ideology you represent.
But enough for now. Must go change the kid and put him down for his afternoon nap. I have a “vague” idea it’s that time…
I frankly don’t see this as a rights issue. What constitutes a “right” is wildly distorted in any number of circumstances, attempting to justify someone’s personal preference as somehow ethically protected.
I prefer to view fatherhood as a duty, and one I have gladly undertaken. Just like it wasn’t my “right” to enlist in the Army, but it sure as heck was my duty.
We cannot ask men to be equal parents while giving virtually all the power in reproductive decisions to women.
That’s possible true. But, we can ask males to provide some support to their born and living heirs, whether their children are bastards or not.
It also does not follow that a man can revoke parenthood because of his lack of ability to be the pregnant one.
I keep saying it, though it’s obvious as daylight.
Women have an right to escape the burden of unwanted *pregnancy* because they are the one’s physically pregnant. You can not conflate pregnancy with parenthood. EVER. It’s not the same thing.
(Actually that’s only half right. Pregnant NEVER escape the burden of an unwanted pregnancy. They can escape carrying to term, and the increased morbidity and mortality associated with carrying to term. However, that’s only a mitigation of risk and burden, not an elimination of it. And even prevention of pregnancy can have very negative physical consequences. Just ask women who had heart attacks and strokes from using the pill, or became infertile as result of infection from an IUD)
It just boggles that anyone would conflate the two. Our society must demand that children are supported by the people who create them. The burden to society is too great otherwise.
And I can’t see how anyone can logically turn that to mean society has to let men off the hook, because women have a right to stop being pregnant.
Slart —
My adoption was handled privately, so it took considerable resources to find my biological parents.
I knew from the age of 4 that I was adopted and what it meant. I knew, too (or was taught) that my biological mother’s decision to give me up was a blessing; clearly, had she been able to keep me she would have.
And so for years, I respected the privacy of the transaction.
Complications occur when you start having medical problems and know nothing of your family’s medical history.
Finding my birth parents, for instance, allowed me to find out that I have a long history of diabetes on my father’s side.
In the end, your adopted children will decide for themselves if they wish to track down their biological parents. My adoptive parents (the only parents I ever knew, incidentally—I was adopted at birth) dreaded the day I asked for info, but they’d saved just enough (a single address, I believe) that allowed me do the research.
The near-certainty your adopted children won’t be able to find out anything about their birth paretnts—I think it is a curse disguised as a blessing, to be honest with you.
Of course, things are likely different now, and maybe you have more complete medical histories and the like.
The question of teaching the “culture” is a different matter entirely; I’m of a mind that culture is maleable, and your are a product of the culture that you are raised in and under. But I can see your point.
Custody awarded by panel? Five men and five women vote for a simple majority. Both parents would answer questions in front of the panel. If the panel cannot achieve a majority, compare criminal records. If criminal records are equal, flip a coin.
I think 99% of men seeking custody would take those odds any day of the week. It beats the shit out of the current syste (from a man’s perspective).
we can ask males to provide some support to their born and living heirs, whether their children are bastards or not.
Unfortunately, Sarah, you run up against reality in a great majority of “bastard” cases. Cold, hard demographic reality for ya: the vast majority—around 4-of-5—out-of-wedlock childbirths occur in the poverty class.
Another demographic reality: Prince Charming doesn’t go slumming in the ghetto to woo his conquests very often. Which means that the fathers of poverty class “bastards” are poverty class themselves. And, as the saying goes, you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip. You wanna get child support from an un-/under-educated, un-/underemploy-ed/-able man? Good luck. Most states don’t even bother because they know it can’t be done.
It also does not follow that a man can revoke parenthood because of his lack of ability to be the pregnant one.
Oddly, the same thing was being said in the 60s when the defenders of the status quo were rationalizing why miscegenation laws were acceptible. “It does not follow that because blacks and whites have an equal right to marry that they should be allowed to marry each other.”
Congratulations: bigotry seems to have come full circle.
You can not conflate pregnancy with parenthood. EVER. It’s not the same thing.
No one’s trying to. Stop committing the rhetorical fallacy of equivocation.
Our society must demand that children are supported by the people who create them. The burden to society is too great otherwise.
Society has no rights. Individuals do. Otherwise, the will of the majority to segregate Little Rock schools in the 50s would have gone unchallenged.
The problem is, in this life, no one is equal to anyone else. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the same person isn’t equal to themselves on different days of the week. This is not just natural and normal, it is inescapable: we’re all different, individuals, and thus necessarily subject to different circumstances which no guardian council or high secretariat will be able to mitigate in most cases. We are therefore better off constructing a regime of laws for ourselves based on the reality of individuality.
Now, that being said, such regimes are generally constructed based on principles of reciprocity at the individual level: rights come with responsibilities. What may be driving much of this argument isn’t so much inequality between women and men in the reealm of reproducition so much as a situation where one of the parties bears a signigicant level of responsibility in spite of having virtually no rights. If this is the case, it would suggest that the answer would involve reducing fathers’ responsibility, or, as I suspect most fathers would prefer, increasing their rights above that of zero. Something as simple as giving fathers an option to take custody of children who would otherwise be put up for adoption may be all that’s required to put things in balance.
But then again, I could be completely wrong.
yours/
peter.
Life simply isn’t fair, and nothing we do can make it so. Men can, and do, disappear from their children’s life (financially and physically) – I have a nephew in such a situation. At the same time, I really feel for those men who want to parent, but have no say regarding issues of abortion (or- at times- adoption.) It isn’t fair that a woman can choose abortion, while a man cannot.
How to reconcile the unfairness of it all? Protect yourself. Try to avoid, personally, the situation to begin with. A woman can’t force a man to parent when he isn’t interested, and a man can’t force a woman to abort (or keep) a child. I plan on educating my children on the unfairness of it all, and hope they never find themselves in such a situation.
“I have nevertheless always felt unsatisfied, on both an intellectual and ethical level, by the state of men’s reproductive rights in this country.”
Why? Women bear the far greater burden.
I think men are just mad they are finally getting “caught”.
The fact is until recent developments in computer technology, it used to be next to imposssible to track even strayed HUSBANDS down and force them to support their children. Court orders were next to unenforceable if they crossed state lines.
Men have always been several times more likely to abandon the women they have sex with and any children produces. Men leave. Men are the wanderers, in general.
And, wheras before, paternity was established only by a high degree of circumstantial evidence, that usually had to include some confession of a relationship or third party awareness (meaning in practical terms, that that you could only go after a regular “suitor”) it’s now possible with science to prove paternity with with near-irrefutable DNA evidence …and all thats needed is a way to know your name to make you submit to testing.
It used to be that if you wanted not to not be a father/provide support you could generally get away with it.
Now even the most casual partners are busted.
Women will always maintain the practical control over pregnancy, and consent to sex with women will remain consent to parenthood. BECAUSE WOMEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE PREGNANT. It isn’t equal, it isn’t the same, it isn’t ever going to be.
And allowing men to walk away from children they fathered, because they don’t have uteruses, is stupid. It’s bad for everybody.
I’m all for the perfect cork-o-matic for men that lets them shut off sperm for an undesirable receptacle. I hope science creates a man-pouch so they can grow babies like kangaroos into their eighties. But that has nothing to do with my right to weight the present risks and benefits of my own physical condition, and choose what will happen to my body (not my pocketbook, mind, my BODY).
Something as simple as giving fathers an option to take custody of children who would otherwise be put up for adoption may be all that’s required to put things in balance.
Men already have that legal right, Peter. The Uniform Adoption Act [or words similar], remember? Biological dad has first right of refusal. Unfortunately, it’s rarely enforced—women are required to name the father in adoption paperwork, but few do—and in those cases where the father found out after the fact that they were fathers, [google for Otokar Kirschner], the “system” actively attempts to interfere. Putatively to protect the woman from the claimed-but-not-proven “abuse” of the male.
We’re merely giving lip service to parenting and reproductive equality in this country, and the status quo defenders are busy saying that things are “equal enough”.
in re this subject, 9 months of gestation is “equal” to 18 years of forced wage labor.
I was intrigued by the general consensus among Jane’s female commenters that the right to abortion is more important than the right to child support payments.
If that attitude is widespread among women – as I expect it is – it’s a matter of time until some clever Men’s Rights activist tries to play the Pro-Choice & Pro-Life camps against one another:
Let’s say Mr. Manly B. Testosterone, chairman of the Council of Men Allergic to Family Court, one day decides to throw his organization’s (admittedly limited) influence behind a repeal of Roe vs. Wade. Seemingly self-defeating given his group’s agenda, yes? But suppose he makes it clear publicly that his group will do an abrupt about-face and support abortion laws in any jurisdiction which will give him his quid pro quo & limit/eliminate child support payments.
Do you think Mr. Testosterone’s group would appeal to the large number of fathers who feel strongly that they’ve been shafted by Family Court? I cannot predict exactly how well such an approach would work, but I’d bet large sums of money his group’s membership would rise dramatically.
I’m sure such a nakedly self-serving approach would appall quite a few people on both sides of the political divide, and would initially be roundly condemned. Fortunately for Mr. Testosterone, politics regularly makes for extremely bizarre bedfellows. Since I fully expect Roe vs. Wade to face serious challenges in the next few years (any moral considerations aside, it’s an atrocious overreach of Federal power), I do see an opportunity for a group like the mythical CMAFC if they can gather the political will.
Jeff:
Thanks for the response. This sort of thing can be rather personal, so I would have completely understood a brush-off.
We of course have similar concerns, but it’s almost impossible to discover anything at all about our children’s biological parents, given that they’re in China and given that it was illegal for them to have had children outside the law and to have abandoned them in the manner that they did. With the younger child that isn’t (yet) so much a concern, but being able to access any medical information at all about Emily’s coming-into-the-world might have been handy, as it took until she was about 3 to get a diagnosis that she has cerebral palsy. Unfortunately, any difficulty in labor would not have been recorded by a doctor.
I guess what I was asking was more along the lines of: would it be better to have certainty either way (that you could contact a biological parent, or that you definitely could not), or is it better to not find out? I’m really honestly curious about this, because I want to be able to address this thinking when it’s my kids doing the pondering.
We’ll work through it in any case, but other perspectives are nice to have in one’s hip pocket when having that conversation, I’d guess.
Bizarrely, I frequently get people asking me if they’re sisters. I always answer that of course they are, and then wait for the (nearly inevitable) next question, even if it’s already been made clear that they were adopted years apart and in different cities.
As for paternal rights/responsibilities, I’m not a big fan of intrusion of the law into these areas, nor am I especially eager to leap into a discussion of who gets to abort. It’s hard to separate emotion out of the argument, and I for certain cannot see logic as separate from emotion in this area, so I’m sitting out.
But as was stated in the Globe piece that Jeff posted, most states require that fathers take affirmative action before they can exercise that right; affirmative action that presumes knowledge they may or may not have. This is system issue that needs to be addressed at the system level. You don’t chuck the entire notion of automotive transport just because cars are susceptible to breaking down. You fix what fails.
:peter
This is one of the many reasons we elected to adopt overseas: the US government would be a barrier to such things in that case. In some cases, the woman giving the child up has named the wrong man as the father, and so the real biological father can step in and assert rights later on. I don’t think I could maintain any kind of equilibrium were that to happen to one of my kids.
that has nothing to do with my right to weight the present risks and benefits of my own physical condition, and choose what will happen to my body
Fine; let’s play your game.
Does that same “right to choose what will happen to my body” apply to me as well?
You’ve got two options here: “yes”, or “no”.
If “no” then you are a grade-A bigot declaring, like the pigs from Animal House, that some animals are more equal than others.
If “yes”, then I choose not to have my body used for a wage-labor device for another’s primary benefit.
As you are no doubt aware, the current situation is pointed at “no”, which is unequal. You are simply saying that unequal is good enough.
http://dblyelloline.blogspot.com/2006/03/gender-snowball.html
Women face consequences: abortion, or term. Men face the same consequences. Do they want to be able to decide what happens in a woman’s womb?
Why? I guess because for me it isn’t theoretical. If (and there is some dispute about this) my biological father never knew about me, then he missed out on the right to know he had another son in the world, and I missed out on finding a biologically-related parent.
One of the reasons I chose to stay at home with Satchel is that I had never before known anyone genetically related to me. He made me feel less adrift.
And this has nothing to do with my adoptive parents, who were wonderful. There is just a need, I think, to substantiate that genetic bond.
Your entire post presupposes that men wish to shirk their “responsibilities.” I think those men commenting here are arguing precisely the opposite: they wish to have some say—any say, really—in the fate of the child. Beyond that of being walking check books or sperm donors.
Congratulations: bigotry seems to have come full circle.
Nice try, but wht has this got to do race or miscegenation? I’m not willing to concede that it’s bigoted to state quire firmly that there is a biological difference between men and women, in that women can get pregnant, and men can’t.
Stop committing the rhetorical fallacy of equivocation.
Are you kidding me? Isn’t the whole point of this argument “Men should be able to relinquish the rights and responsibilites of parenthood, if women can end their pregnancies and get out of parenthood”
Wonderful, Jeff. It was something like this, I think, that got me through our dealing with infertility: that I already had a LOT of people genetically related to me in the world. Not offspring, but three brothers, two sisters, and about a dozen nieces/nephews.
It’s a concern for my kids, though. I’m not sure how to address that, other than to be aware of its potential.
You don’t chuck the entire notion of automotive transport just because cars are susceptible to breaking down. You fix what fails.
Bingo. And you don’t toss the notion of equal treatment under the law just because it treads uncomfortably on recently-won-and-still-contentious liberties.
It was a tad more than a generation ago that post-conception opt-out of reproductive imperative was first adopted [sorry] as a legal construct under “privacy rights”. This right was tossed into the lone bailiwick of the female, and not for inappropriate reasons.
Equal protection, being what it is, doesn’t come with implicit exemptions. Each person subject to the laws of this nation are given the presumption of equality, whether it is practical, or easy, or even palatable to the rest of society.
When there are acknowledged impediments to equality, the law creates work-arounds, and we are obliged to follow them.
Men cannot get pregnant, so therefore they have no viable reproductive right?
Equal treatment says “then neither does the woman”.
But “privacy rights” say the woman does.
Now, equal protection says “so does the man”.
Is abortion more important than equal protection? My vote is “no”.
SarahW:
As fair as you surely feel this must sound, to be complete we must of course add a corollary: Our society must demand that children are parented by the people who create them. The burden to children is too great otherwise.
And yes, the data absolutely supports the perils of fatherless children. The statistics for them are nightmarish.
Yet … not a single word, it seems, ever goes up from the feminist side about equality in parenting, or, for that matter, about not gaming no-fault divorce. In fact, we have a clear anti-father, anti-male sentiment running through American society these days, a sentiment finally getting some resistance in book stores and the press, at least to a small degree.
But we’ve had abortion choice as the central issue for years; we have established clear divisions between conception/childbirth and parenting, and now we’re even admonished to not so much as “conflate” the two:
Perhaps this means that parenting should be left on the sidelines of this new “men’s Roe v Wade” controversy, just as father’s rights had been willfully trampled by the NOW and gender feminists for decades. If so, it’s either ignorance or bias that would place it there.
The greater issue of choice, birthing, and parenting suffers from a grotesque incompleteness. I’d rewrite the salient sentence like this, and in doing so, hope to bring the perspective on the harm to parenting raging in this country into higher focus:
We can no longer deny men the right to be equal parents if we keep giving virtually all the power in reproductive and familial decisions to women.
It also has to do with by-design, by-habit gender discrimination against fathers, SarahW.
Not at all. It’s also about fathers being denied the choice to relinquish the rights and responsibilites of parenthood when women defraud or game a sexist system for autonomous reasons that violate a variety of the father’s rights.
We can argue the assumed cost to society after we argue the rights of the individual. And frankly, after we argue the impact on society of a program that for years has incentivized single parent households and epidemic anti-father bias.
Sarah,
Nobody is equating pregnancy with parenthood. Parenthood is a consequence of unabated pregnancy. That women may choose to terminate a pregnancy, while men may not, is an inequity – perhaps unavoidable, but that does not mean it is unadressable.
Nice try, but wht has this got to do race or miscegenation?
I’m sorry, but I can follow a them; it has everything to do with equal treatment. I’m sorry if I was writing too fast for you.
I’m not willing to concede that it’s bigoted to state quire firmly that there is a biological difference between men and women, in that women can get pregnant, and men can’t.
No one’s asking you to. The only thing I’m asking is that you put your convenient bigotries away and deal with this in the stated terms of the issue: women have more rights on this subject than men do, in a nation in which unequal rights is constitutional anathema.
The 1st and 14th amendments guarantees equal protection of the law, not equal protection “except in the case of biological convenience”.
Similarly situated people are treated equally. A pregnant woman is not similarly situated as the man that impregnated her.
To me the issue boils down to: Sex has consequences. For women, its term or abortion. For men, the same. Do people really want men to have a say in that decision of term/abortion?
I dunno, Jeff
If “yesâ€Â, then I choose not to have my body used for a wage-labor device for another’s primary benefit
The pocketbook seems to be a real sticking point…
If the father desparately wants to raise the child, then yes. But then, I see no difference between abortion and homocide.
Similarly situated people are treated equally.
Congratulations again. We’re reinventing the same wheel.
These are the self-same arguments used by miscegenation defenders of the 60s. Blacks are not the same as whites; they are already given the equal right to marry within their race.
You can rationalize all you want but you aren’t going to change the realities, here:
1] It is unequal;
2] the legal establishment has an uncanny ability to rationalize inequality for as long as it is politically tenable;
3] it is begining to be politically untenable to keep mouthing the same shinola in rationalization of this particular inequality.
Wish I’d said that. Thank you.
Two problems exist: (1) The highly unequal lay of the parenting landscape as regards men and women (everything from legislation to practice to conventional wisdom to final statistics) and (2) all of the above’s obvious and willful conflict with a host of constitutional rights and amendments. (Spend a few hours in legislative judiciary committee hearings once…)
Then we have a profound case of the unintended consequences of an increasingly Orwellian family government managing parenting, housing, support, medication, psychological environments and treatments, and passing the costs and hurdles on to the taxpayers.
Note I said costs and hurdles. What is their full impact on parenting?
Were I to guess, I’d say that nearly all single, disenfranchised fathers wish they weren’t single, disenfranchised or fathers. (From my experience, the only significant exception is probably the regretful walk-away father, which I doubt is any more than a small minority.) Yet those are simply not choices any of them ever get to make.
I’m just going to float this one to see where it goes, but if the answer is ‘because of the biology’ then isn’t it a double standard to allow for different physical requirements for things like the fire department or police or military?
The pocketbook seems to be a real sticking point…
First, according to many, if not most, legal deep-thinkers of liberal and conservative viewpoint alike, all rights are dependant upon the right to own property, and a wage is property.
Second, the pocketbook is a sticking point to all-ll-ll-ll-ll sides of this controversy, and don’t try to convince yourself otherwise. You can be quoted waxing poetic upon that very thing yourself.
In fact, let me quote you staking your claim to another’s pocketbook again:
Don’t add hypocrisy to selfishness.
Some analytical points:
I think that’s a more than fair assessment, but I also believe that the status quo is probably the only solution that’s really tenable—for reasons other than those typically put forward by feminists.
There seems to me to be an intractable problem of having two independent actors, each with a morally valid claim on the outcome of the pregnancy, but whose decisions can only be applied in one of two mutually exlusive ways. Either the pregnancy will be terminated, or it won’t be, and there’s not a middle ground or varying degrees of compromise (as there is custody-with-visitation-rights in the context of divorce). This necessarily entails that, where the two parents disagree on the outcome, that one will be disappointed with the decision that eventually gets made. There’s no half-a-pregnancy option that takes in account the wishes of both disagreeing parents; where one parent wants to abort and one wants to have the child, one parent will be satisfied and the other disappointed. There’s no question of alleviating that disparity, but only of allocating the authority.
Eventually, someone gets to make the final decision. Just as a logical matter, that decision either belongs (i) to the mother (as it is today), (ii) to the father, (iii) to whichever parent wants to keep the child (as it would be in a system requiring the consent of both parents to an abortion), or (iv) to whichever parent wants to abort (in a system allowing the mother to choose abortion, and father to compel her to choose abortion). Or there might be no decision at all, (v) if abortion were forbidden, or (vi) if it were mandatory).
A couple of these options don’t need to be discussed; the compulsory abortions against the mother’s wishes which are analytically possible under (ii), (iv) and (vi) means those schemes are clearly monstrous. (To some who think the father should have a say, option (ii) might seem intuitively acceptable, but on a moment’s reflection it’s probably option (iii) that they’re thinking of.) That leaves (i), (iii) and (v). Putting aside option (v) as beyond my present scope (and assuming for the sake of argument that overturning Roe and instituting a national ban on abortion is just not in the cards), that means either the mother ultimately get to decide, or the mother ultimately gets to decide unless she wants to abort and the father wants to have the child, in which case the father’s wishes trump the mother’s.
That alternative scenario to our current system is logically possible and not intuitively objectionable, but it’s not actually responsive to the men’s-reproductive-rights concerns described above. That is, this alternative isn’t about protecting the man who doesn’t want kids, it’s about protecting the one who does. The man who doesn’t want kids is worth our consideration, but practically speaking, what remedy is available to him? Compelling the abortion upon the reluctant mother?
I think that two issues are being conflated in this discussion. First, pure reproductive rights and child-bearing—the decision when and whether to have children. Second is the question about child-rearing and particularly who has to pay for that. They’re surely related, but they’re just as surely distinct. Yes, it feels unfair to require a man who didn’t want to have children to pay for their upbringing because their mother decided to keep them irrespective of his wishes. (And as clearly and wisely noted, simply to pretend that the father had any actual agency because he could have chosen not to have sex in the first place is engaging in exactly the same reasoning that pro-choicers decry when it’s applied to women.)
But this is not a question of reproductive rights, not a question of whether a coupling will result in children, but rather a later question that takes place once the decision to have children has been made. Namely, who pays? Ordinarily we’d start with the presumption that both parents should pay (ideally by their consent and because they both want to live with their child, and with each other), but we take certain other factors into account when deciding the hard cases. Should it be a factor in making that decision that the father preferred abortion? Perhaps, although you risk encouraging strategic behavior by prospective fathers. Just say you prefer abortion, whether you do or not, and get out of child support—and there’s a good chance the mother wouldn’t honor your wishes anyway.
But that’s just quibbling at the margins; the real reason I think we find this troublesome is something I hinted at before: The child support question is one that follows after (temporally and analytically) the abortion question. The question of who pays only comes up once the question of whether to abort has already been decided. And whereas the question to abort concerns a division of authority between a man and a woman (each of whom presumably had some say in the initial transaction and each of whom bear their own moral responsibility), the question about child support concerns an additional party, the new child. This is a decision left to family law, and family law is famously agnostic on matters of moral desert and unclean hands, etc., where there are the best interests of the child to consider. To pick one example: A divorced spouse’s adultery won’t persuade a court to order less child support, for instance, because child support is not about fairness, it’s about supporting the child.
So when I go through the steps of thinking about this question, I understand the feelings of unfairness, but I don’t get what Cathy Young thinks we ought to do differently. What other options are out there? I just don’t see any.
(Which isn’t to undercut my earlier point, that feminists are getting the message wrong. The grand overarching message of our current policy isn’t that men have forfeited their decisions by having sex, but rather that a scarcity of decision-making authority means that half of the population is subject to events not entirely under their control.)
Er, the legal kidnapping figures pretty highly too, SarahW. As a woman I hope you can understand that us spunk-shooters can yet engage a portion of our hindbrains and generate a tiny shard of what the rest of civilized society calls love and committment…which reminds me:
You’d said,
Cites? Statistics? Or is that just sexism?
Unless those casual partners are mothers. At which point it becomes unconstitutionally endorsed and lucrative and, if you’re a misandrist with maternal needs, even fun.
But aren’t you conflating pregnancy with parenthood? Regardless, what do you say if I rewrite this as, women maintain the practical control over parenting, property, and income, and consent to sex with women will remain consent to run the liabilities of a system decidedly anti-father?
But allowing—and paying, since you brought it up—mothers to walk away is common, “natural”, freeing, empowering, and, well, you get the drift. Except that it also damns kids to a life of relative hell. Do you also prefer dysfunctional kids? (Just a rhetorical question; I assume you do not.)
Seems we have an equality problem here to go along with our untended consequences…
More accurately stated:
“People should be treated equally. A father is not similarly situated as the woman who had his child.
“Sex has consequences. For men, it’s unavoidable risk to parenting, property, income, health, rights. For women, it’s a virtual lien on the same, enforcable by State at such time as she prefers, no recourse, no shame, no penalty.
Do people really want men to have a say in her decision?”
rwilymz,
Bravo, well said. I would add by way of asking Sarah W. if she would agree that under her reasoning it should be ok for women to be required to pass the same tests as men to become firemen, policemen and soldiers. After all there is a biological difference between men and women in that men are on average bigger, faster and stronger than women.
No reason to saddle a man with child support if the woman in question has the right to abort his child.
Aw, crap, I spent all that time writing that very long post (apologies to anyone who actually read it), and I missed when they passed out the haterade!
rwilymz, et al, there you go again.
You keep saying that men should be able to abandon born and living children, if men can’t end pregnancy like a woman can. That doesn’t make any sense, its apples and oranges.
Whether parents have to support their children are not is a separate question from whether there are rights to make decisions about our bodies that the government can’t intruse on.
I don not concede that there is any violation of 4th or 13th amendment rights because women get pregnant and men don’t. You seem to be making a rather wild disparate impact argument: “since men can’t get pregnant, woman have no right to control what happens to their bodies as a result of pregnancy. “ That makes no sense.
Biological Convenience?
What? I guess I’ve seen so many awful things happen to women as a result of pregnancy I forget a lot of people don’t understand that pregnant women face more than going up a few sizes and getting a couple of stretch marks.
Yes ,it is the female’s body which carries pregnancy to term which is why I believe we females ought to hold much more respect for our wonderous biological abilities than we currently hold. In today’s culture all we can manage to muster is how much of a victim we females are of the patriarchy parasite pregancy while wallowing in the plight of the oppressed vagina. What a grand concept of empowerment we have obtained… Medea’s power to be legally barbaric while persuing Sanger’s quest for narcissistic self-pleasure.
As a liberated female, I consider such attack against ourselves to be ruinous of Womenhood. And, hideously ugly.
“Whether parents have to support their children are not is a separate question from whether there are rights to make decisions about our bodies that the government can’t intruse on.”
No it is not. If the decision to abort or carry to term is solely the woman’s, neither the state nor the father being able to intrude, then the responsibility for that decision is her’s and her’s alone.
You can’t have rights without responsibilities and you can’t use the state to make other people responsible for your decisions.
Carl, the decision to abort or not is her decision alone. But the raising of the child isn’t only hers, is it? Could you really believe that?
“Could you really believe that?”
Sure. I don’t see any other way for the law to be equitable.
Perhaps I should clarify, I’m not saying a man shouldn’t provide for his children, I’m saying that state mandated child support is wrong. If the state holds that the decision to have a child belongs to the woman, then the state has to assign responsibility for that child to the woman.
Nothing else makes sense.
This is a novel position, to put it lightly.
What’s novel about not being held legally responsible for a decision you don’t make?
Jack Roy sez:
If you can believe that she has the ultimate right to kill the kid, then I don’t mind believing she’s got the ultimate responsibility for raising it.
Remember your Fourteenth Amendment, and the term “Equal protection under the law.”
SarahW sez:
Bullshit. It’s stage one of parenthood, and if you’ve convinced yourself otherwise, you are both exemely gullible and awfully clever at the same time.
The burden of pregnancy is a temporary thing, sort of like the burden that jalapeno burger and chili fries I had for lunch is oppressing me with until such time as I can relieve myself of it. I realize that the odds of complications are slightly higher with pregnancy, but I also note that I chose the oppressive meal. Let’s not talk about pain, ok?
I sure wish we could all dispense with the drama and just avail ourselves of a few obvious facts.
One of those facts, for instance, is that no state requires a man to support his child. Any of the forms of support a man might give a child he raises are not acceptable.
Men are ordered to pay the mothers of their children, period.
We do not pay child support, we pay mother support, which may or may not translate into a benefit for our children. There is no accountability.
It isn’t bad for men. Don’t men count as part of everybody?
Carl, child support isn’t some penalty you pay for unreasonable failure to procure an abortion; it’s payments to protect the best interests of your child. I get that you think the whole world is wrong, but that’s actually just another way of saying that what you think is, in fact, novel.
Time to take the discussion to another level.
How about a prediction: Will the Michigan case prove that the Constitution is dead in favor of neo-collectivism—these creeping costs-to-society schemes of no-fault, socialist birthings?
Second, pursuant that likely ruling, in these discussions will Americans continue to shunt a half-dozen primary constitutional rights in favor of the entirely arbitrary and highly sexist autonomous-right-to-funds argument that peppers this thread?
Let’s at least get our baseline on the table. Then we can debate the various pros and cons of the tactics used to avail someone of the proceeds that legitimize behavior damaging to at least one helpless party
Are we a nation of laws and rights (and responsibilities) or are we truly no-fault and opportunistic to the core? If this issue doesn’t convince us of a grey, emminent, meandering, encroaching collectivism, nothing will.
First, I haven’t said men ought to be able to abandon etc; that’s merely the depth of thought we’ve been able to attain thus far. I am going to say right here and right now that I do not know what the proper answer should be.
But Sarah, you are either saying, “it’s unequal and there’s nothing we can do about it because it’s biological inequality, therefore it must stand”…
… or you are saying “it’s unequal and I don’t care because I got mine and men can just go piss up a rope”…
… or you are saying “it already is equal and people saying it’s not are just…” whatever.
In the case of biological inequality, the handicapped are “biologically unequal” yet we have passed all manner of laws declaring that we must pave over all of known civilization in order to accomodate them, therefore “biological inequality is not an issue under the law.
If it’s merely a case of you not caring, then I’d advise you—once again—to not compound your selfishness with the transparent hypocrisy. Use you vote to vote against those who’d impose equality in our land and don’t open yourself up for the anklebiting you’re getting.
If it’s that you think it really is equal, then there’s a pat dismissal so common among feminists a decade or more ago I’d like to revive: You just don’t get it.
Separate but related. The issue is: a future parent is allowed to mitigate future parenthood in a post-conception manner—but only when the future parent is a woman. Equal treatment is a reality; such condition must be granted to all parties.
It’s 1st and 14th, actually. The 4th is “secure in our persons”; the 13 the is slavery and slavery-second-class: involuntary servitude. Y’know; what child support is mandated through.
And once again, the “biological inequality” argument is trumped by the ADA. Legless men cannot climb mountains, yet “equal protection” has declared that the Appalachian Trail must be as accessible to the legless as the “legful”, and large sections of it are now paved.
Well of course it makes no sense, because you are creating that [strawman] argument for me. I’ve never said anything remotely similar.
Do you live in the third world? Are you a third world volunteer? Have you perfected time travel and you can now go back to visit the early 1800s America where women’s life expectancies were actually materially affected by pregnancy and childbirth?
If not, don’t exaggerate. First-world pregnancy with routine prenatal care is among the safest undertakings we embark upon today.
Only in theory and by justification, Jack Roy. In principle (in other words, gaged by it’s application, terms, and methods) it’s pure anti-male servitude. In entails zero recourse, zero accountablilty, federal kickbacks, special interest, a type of state-level laundering, corruption, imprisonment for debt, and like all socialist schemes, it only assumes reasonable outcomes.
In other words, in practice it’s blood or mad money as often as not, and the money trail absolutely goes back to special, anti-father interests such as feminist lobbies and the legal lobbies that pocket the fees.
We can add it’s-for-the-children rhetoric about “support” to the same pyre of myths that says kids do better in single parent households because killing off dad’s memory or involvement “results in less stress”…
Look, folks, the end result is that there isn’t an ounce of rights-based, constitutionally-ethical legislation going on in the family-law arena. It is entirely based on special interest, which means that until this thing hits the SCOTUS, we’re dealing with an ampitheatre style mod democracy to see who gets what.
We can debate all week long but if you want to make a difference, do what NOW’s been doing for probably a half century and get down to your statehouse.
er, mob democracy, although mod democracy has a certain ring to it…
Whoa. Now we get to true male liberation: Fucking without consequence.
actard spewed:
acturd, are you Marcia Pappas?
Say what?
Which, unfortunately, it simply never accomplishes relative to a functional dual-parenting environment. Ah, the rhetoric.
Read: All dads are deadbeats; all moms are angels. This is our policy.
Abusive? Moneyed? How leading. How deliciously Freudian. Anyway, while a proper, joint custody presumption would cut down on feminist opportunism? Got it.
There it is, folks: Ingrained opportunism and sexism. Right from the horse’s ass.
That would be true equality.
Pardon the errant copy/paste quote in the above. Not sure where that came from.
We’re supposed to want that, right?
Except its not. Because that system is one where a woman that has a child is its sole supporter. A man never will support one.
This is somewhat related to the idiocy of the equality argument in the mens rights case. The one that claims that a man should be able to ‘terminate his responsibilities’ like a woman can terminate hers. But the thing is, she is terminating it all, not just her responsibilities.
Well then, actus, should the father be able to insist on an abortion? To “terminate it all?”
Only if she chooses to give birth, which she can opt out of.
Try again.
And what of the woman who buys sperm and concieves with it?
That is her choice, is it not? And then the “fathers” responsibility is????
hint: “contractually negated before the fact”
I fail to see any gender inequality in re sexuality and reproduction. None.
Women can get pregnant, men cannot. Women have (or should have) full control over who may have sex with them and/or impregnate them. Women understand (or should understand) the potential consequences of sex. Women (should) have the ultimate decision about whether or not to have sex, get pregnant, remain pregnant, and have a child.
If women have the absolute right to choose how to operate their reproductive machinery (I say they do), then they should bear full responsibility for the consequences, i.e. they are (by default, see below) 100% responsible for any children they produce. If a woman chooses to have sex (to be clear, this, by definition, excludes rape), get pregnant and give birth, they alone are responsible for raising the child.
This seems, on its face, to be an inequity. However, you cannot hold one person responsible for another person’s actions. The bottom line is that the biological father did not choose to have a child, the mother did. The right of women to abort their pregnancies cements this. The equity is apparent when you consider the rights of the biological father with regards to his offspring: he has (by default, see below) absolutely none.
To summarize, the fact that women may bear children and that men cannot is made equitable by giving (by default) all parental rights and responsibilities to the mother, and none to the father. The right of women to abort their pregnancy cements this, as they thus enter into the state of parenthood freely and of their own will. (The abortion debate, for me, boils down to the definition of the start of parenthood, which is also the definition of the start of childhood, and which is beyond the scope of this particular rant. Abortion should be 100% legal before the commencement of parenthood, which is sometime after conception and no later than birth).
This should be enforced absolutely. Women should not be forced into parenthood by any means at any point prior to parenthood, and men should have no part of the (default) parental equation. I would like to see it made into a constitutional ammendment.
The solution to any dilemma whatsoever derived from all this is simple. For men who wish to retain parental rights, and/or for women who wish to assign parental obligations, and for any couple whatsoever who seek to share parental rights and obligations for whatever motive, a simple contract may be executed, by which the woman agrees to assign equal parental rights and the man agrees to accept equal parental responsibilities for any and all children legally born by the woman (as fathered by the man) while the contract is in effect, and for as long as said children are alive and not adults. The incentive for men to enter into such contracts should be apparent, given the alternative of having no parental rights.
If only society could rally around such a notion… a contract to ensure that children will have two supporting parents. It’s amazing that humans haven’t thought of this sooner.
Yeah, what Eric said…
And that is truly lovely. [Smiling here.]
Naturally, marriage is the number one impediment to feminist opportunism … and sure enough, in the courtroom they’ve successfully relegated it into a social construct worthy of scorn (whaddya mean, no no-fault?! Bwaaa!) and a positive legal instrument of utter insignificance.
Eric, when your Amendment becomes law, how long do you suppose it’ll take before it too is walked all over in deference to the only right we really want: The holy right to subject everyone and everything to an arbitrary, shifting state of mob rule concerning emotionally-determined “costs to society” and the sacred right to entitlement—both devoid of constitutional principles and both failing any honest analysis whatsoever of the unintended and historical consequences of socialism?
Nice post.
ty, 6Gun.
That’s precisely why I want the heathen, secular masses of society to embrace it. I think that once we separate religion from marriage, and treat it for what it really is, then it will become an honored institution once again. It may even become more sacred for the religious, more treasured for those who do it for love. Just take away the bullshit. Marriage is for families, and families are for children. Marriage is a contract. We should have a Constitutional ammendment defining marriage as a union of two people for the purposes of equal distribution of parental rights, which may be accompanied with other terms as the couple sees fit, and giving all parental rights and obligations to women outside of wedlock.
Women, this is the ultimate in sexual freedom, but it comes with ultimate responsibility. You can’t have it both ways. You want a responsible Father? Get married. Men, you want to be more than sperm donors? Stop donating your sperm: stop fucking unprotected around outside of wedlock.
Carl said the responsibility would be hers and hers alone. That would mean if she chose to give birth, its her responsibility. I understand you’re imagining a different system, but that’s not what carl said.
In this discussion I see a glaring false premise, that people should be able to have sex without consequence.
We don’t look at sex with an appropriate sense of awe. We are more careful about driving our cars than we are about who we sleep with.
The whole reproductive rights industry which has spawned so much division is thanks to the fact that we no longer reserve sex to the institution of marriage (another institution that no longer carries with it a sense of awe). If both men and women reserved sex for a person with whom we are willing to spend their lives with, choosing with that level of care, all this would be moot.
Puritanical thoughts, but things ought to be done in their proper arena. Every problem we’ve addressed are at their core a cultural problem. Sex leads to babies, and babies have needs, among them the support of two parents. Any other construct is misguided and disastrous, which all the hairsplitting demonstrates.
You want a responsible Father? Get married. Men, you want to be more than sperm donors? Stop donating your sperm: stop fucking unprotected around outside of wedlock.
Eric, as much as I agree with that, I vehemently disagree with this:
The bottom line is that the biological father did not choose to have a child, the mother did. The right of women to abort their pregnancies cements this.
Both chose sex. Sex makes women pregnant.
Not every sex act produces a pregnancy, not every pregnant woman produces a living child. Once that child is here, though, present in the world having drawn breath, both are obligated to its care and support. Both created it.
Men never bear the burdens of pregnancy. Women have a right to mitigate them. That has NOTHING to do with whether men and women have an equal stake in the lives of their born and living children.
Avoidance of parenthood is not the legal underpinning of the right to end a pregnancy.
We don’t look at sex with an appropriate sense of awe. We are more careful about driving our cars than we are about who we sleep with.
The whole reproductive rights industry which has spawned so much division is thanks to the fact that we no longer reserve sex to the institution of marriage (another institution that no longer carries with it a sense of awe). If both men and women reserved sex for a person with whom we are willing to spend their lives with, choosing with that level of care, all this would be moot.
Tim mcnabb, I could not agree more.
SarahW
Sex is what makes someone pregnant, but it’s not the only way, and it’s not the final decision. There should be no legal difference between accepting sperm during sex, or accepting sperm from an anonymous sperm bank. And every woman has a choice, even after conception, to continue with their pregnancy or not. By giving 100% of the choice to the woman (which I posit to be the only appropriate scenario), the woman must accept 100% of the responsibility. Period.
You cannot have it both ways. If the choice to have a child occurs with the choice to have sex, then the mother has no right to recind that choice after the fact, thus abortion would be wrong. There is no way to prove that both parties indeed chose sex without a contract. If, by allowing a man to inseminate her, the man is bound to an obligation to support any resulting child, then the man has equal rights to the child, and the machinery that sustains it, notably the woman and her womb. To make it otherwise (like it is today) is an inequity in favor of women, and against men, and at the cost of both men and women’s true freedom.
Men do not create babies. Period. Women do. Women must take full responsibility over their natural power to create children, and I say they should receive full rights to the product of that power in equity for the “burdens of pregnancy”. Women have no right to mitigate the consequences of their absolute choice to anyone else against that person’s will. If they want to mitigate the responsibilitites, they must mitigate the rights as well, and nothing says mitigation like a nice legal contract, in this case freely entered to by a couple before they procreate.
Besides, if a woman can’t get a man to take responsibility for his potential offspring, why on earth would she want to fuck him? (That’s really the bottom line, in my book, but you can’t have morals without sound ethical underpinnings, thus my rants above.)
Agreed. If biology is the sole determining factor in the decision making right for carrying to term, then it must also be acknowledged as a major factor in the reason for the sex act. That is, while sex is fun, it’s primary biological purpose is reproduction.
So when you sleep with someone, it needs to be understood that the likely outcome is pregnancy.
Gay people, may of course disregard this particular bit of biology. Different set of rules.
Another point to be made is that men cannot become parents except by the invitation of a woman, where a woman can nowadays become a parent by visiting a sperm bank, and someday soon through gene splicing of two (or more!) donors into a single egg (neither of whom need be male!). The equity of the burden of pregnancy is best offset by the complete assignment of all parental rights and responsibilites to the mother, except where they are shared by contract.
A mother need not enter such a contract with a man. Two men could enter into such a contract for the purpose of adoption. Think about the issues that are potentially solved here.
Just as soon as they think they have some emancipation, boom, it disappears.
Actus sez:
How so?
SarahW sez:
Clearly, you’ve never lived with a preganant woman, nor supported one.
Including killing the jointly made child. Ah yes…mitigation. For the obscene, horrific opressive institution that is pregnancy.
Frankly. I can’t understand how such an immoral misogynistic institution has been allowed to exist in civilized society.
DOWN WITH PREGNANCY! GET YOUR FETUS OFF MY UTERUS, PIG!
Eric sez;
Wait a minute. Are you saying that rights and responsibilities should be connected somehow? What a novel idea!
Correct. That would be “privacy”. Women have the “privacy right” to do as they choose with their bodies.
It manifests itself specifically as the avoidance of [most of] pregnancy and all of parental responsibility.
Do men, in theory, have the same privacy right to do with their bodies as they choose? Remove circumstances for a minute. Circumstances, as any legal scholar will tell you, is the stuff of legal exception. We do not have the right to kill someone else, yet there are most legal exceptions to that then there is prohibition of killing.
If men have a privacy right to do with their bodies as they choose, then they have the right—manifest through reproduction—to not be made to support a child they did not want to have.
Indeed, that is the case for married men. Married men can quit their jobs at any point and refuse to support their families. Single men with no children can quit their jobs and move back into the parents’ basement.
The only people not given the opportunity to quit their jobs and refuse to support their children are divorced men—ah, but they had their marriages sanctioned by the state, so they now become beholden to the state in some ongoing manner, don’t they…?
But men fathering children out of wedlock … they don’t have any such similar reponsibility to the state, now, do they? Yet they have no “privacy right” to refuse their body be used for wage labor against their choice for 18 or more years.
Do they?
No.
It again boils down to: women have the right to choose, men do not.
That is manaifestly unequal.
Equal protection is a fact in this natino, and it will come about at some point. It’s just a matter of when, and how.
rwilymz, there you go again.
Men have a right to control their bodies as women do.
The issue of what males and females must do to support their childred after they are born is a completely seperate issue.
rwilymz, there you go again.
Men have a right to control their bodies as women do.
The issue of what males and females must do to support their children after they are born is a completely seperate issue.
You keep conflating the two.
They said all parental responsibilities would belong to a mother, as a default.
“You keep conflating the two.”
You keep issuing strawman arguments.
Eventually you’ll run out of straw.
If a man has ”a right to control their bodies as women do” then he has the right to say “get bent” when some governmental agent comes to him with a court order to work for a wage and accept a garnishment on such wage for the benefit of a third party.
But he doesn’t have the lawful ability to do so, does he? He’ll be forced into wage labor on the pain of imprisonment or other court sanction.
Women can tell the state weenie to get bent, and many, many do.
Single mothers all over the country are being investigated for providing improper or insufficient support for the children they have in their very own homes. Do these mothers go to jail? Not unless the child dies.
Dad goes to jail when the child doesn’t get nintendo.
At the very most, when a single mother fails to provide adequate support to a child in her very own home, the state will declare the parent “unfit”, toss the kid into the foster care trash bin, and eliminate the mother’s parental rights.
Shouldn’t we do the same for fathers who “fail to provide adequate support”? Declare them unfit and remove their parental rights?
Exactly how important is equality to you?
They’re inseperable. One leads to the other. Like car crashes and body shop bills. You can’t have one without the other.
Why on earth would you object to linking them in argument when they’re so obviosly connected in reality?
Silly, silly me. Single fathers have no parental rights. Do they?
Only responsibilities.
Rights without responsibilities is nobility—constitutionally prohibited in the US.
Responsibilities without rights is slavery—constitutionally prohibited in the US … unless your name is “Dad”.
I keep forgetting.
actuse sez:
She has the ability to decline them, according to the law. If she has the right, which she does, why shouldn’t she also have the responsibilities that come with it?
It’s her choice. She can’t be both oppressed and free to choose at the same time.
Dad has no say in the matter, so why should he have the responsibility? Nature made it so that the men could simply move on. There’s no biological imperative for men to raise their children.
Now, if society wants to override that and impose another standard, shouldn’t it at least be equitable? Isn’t that supposed to be a minimum requirement for social standards?
This isn’t about liberty, or choice. The feminist crowd is arguing for freedom from consequences, and only for women.
The issue of what males and females must do to support their children after they are born is a completely seperate issue.
Unilateral decision making implies unilateral responsibility. You want a woman’s choice to have a baby to be free from interference from the state or the sperm donor, but then you want to turn around and use the police power of the state to make the sperm donor responsible for your decision–that’s bogus.
That’s the kicker. The people claiming that pregnancy and childbirth is a biological reality, therefore dad has no say in mitigation, are happily willing to ignore biological reality when that biology plays out in a child.
Biological reality: a single male [single as in “unitary”, not “unmarried”] can literally impregnate a few hundred women a year. Biology, in fact, has conspired against women in this regard.
Women in the prime child-bearing years [16-25] are almost universally attracted to the “bad boy” males … those who would be, in civilization-free circumstances, impregnating several hundred females a year.
Then, biology pulls a neat little trick and makes the female desire a male for protection. Well, the guy they want to have sex with doesn’t want any part of that, but other males are willing to trade protection for sex. Hence civilization and mating pairs.
The sexual revolution® devolved us sideways; it made “uncivilized” sexual mores chic [not a good or bad thing; just reality], and our technology then made it possible for women to be the sexual aggressor, getting sex because she wants it and without the consequences.
Back to the alpha-male paradigm playing in the singles bars. Sperm competition, being what it is, more males than the strictly “alpha” were getting in on the action.
Well, consequences sometimes happen even after The Pill, and biology kicks in again: women now want their protector. But in our society, “the protector” is not some hairy guy with a club who can bash the skulls of cave bears, but a guy with prospects and a college degree who can get a middle class income.
Only … the guy doesn’t get the sex his biology is wanting him to trade for his services.
“Biology” is a convenient rationalization that is improperly used in this discussion; it is used only when convenient to justify the legal inequality we’ve created.
It’s clear from these closing remarks that the parent’s rights/responsibilities emperor is buck nekkid and the only thing keeping that corrupt status quo intact is that corrupt status quo.
There’s no ethics or principles upholding this flagrant practice of gender discrimination. Down deep everybody knows it, which is why the opposing arguments from actuse and SarahW are so laughably foolish.
rwilymz sez:
Nice post. Now, suppose said male does this. Who supports those children? One guy simply can’t do it, no matter how hard you flog him. Odds are he’s a dolt to begin with, so you’ve probably got very little to work with.
Now what? If the answer is that the mothers are SOL, and going to be raising the kids with no support from dad, then we as a society need to recognize that as an acceptable (though regrettable) outcome.
You could get more ignorant about the facts, but only if you worked at it a little.
1 in 10,000 pregnancies result in the death of the mother. Here, in the U.S. Elsewhere, the mortality rate is much higher.
Do you know anyone who died in childbirth? One of my coworkers did. A cousin’s wife did. But gee, it’s just like eating a jalapeno burger, right, Pablo?
Pregnancy can result in thromboembolic disease, anemia, and urinary tract infections.
Then there’s always the risk of Rh Incompatibility, which my sister-in-law suffered from, and which can kill the mother.
And I haven’t even touched upon the changes that a woman’s body undergoes in pregnancy–changes that often do not go away. I’m not talking about weight gain or stretch marks. I’m talking about women who have developed bodily changes that remain with them for the rest of their lives–their senses of smell and taste change, or they develop allergies they never had. Or a mother of twins whose ribs spread in order to carry the twins, and which never went back to their original shape.
Pregnancy is the most severe physical trauma that a woman’s body undergoes. I’m not saying this in terms of “pregnancy is a bad thing.” I am saying this is a scientific fact that apparently, many men simply Do. Not. Get.
Let’s not pretend that pregnancy is nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
As far as this case goes: I don’t believe it’s about equal rights. This case is about a legal walk-away clause, nothing more, nothing less. The man wants to be able to avoid his responsibilities, and get the court’s blessing to do so.
Sorry. If he didn’t want to be a father, he should have made sure his birth control method was foolproof.
There’s your men’s abortion right, right there.