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Really? what was the last time in this century that a woman was thrown in jail for getting an abortion? Men who can’t (or won’t) pay their child support are thrown in jail every day, have their licences suspended, and they have the social stigma as well.

Maybe the solution is to abolish all child support and replace it with a comprehensive children’s welfare state that would ensure all children had a fair chance at life

It would seem more sensible then forcing someone who doesn’t want to be a parent, to be a parent simply because they had sex. Children should be cared for by whoever wants to do it - any idiot can procreate, the only ones we should count as parents are the ones willing to raise the children.

[Fixed! :-) –Amp]

And also, re VK:

I believe there is a technique where one can make a man ejaculate, by pressure on the prostate. That could come from penetration without his consent. Or nothing to stop her raping him, and then sexually assualting him so she gets pregnant.

Again, you are blathering on about some ridiculous scenario that “may conceivably” happen (though I have to say I have my doubts about the prostate thing) as if the fact that it “could” happen means that OH MY GOD IT DOES HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!!! ALL THE TIME!!!! WE MUST DO SOMETHING TO STOP THIS OUTRAGE!!!!

Bollocks (once again, quite literally). It’s a little fantasy you’ve set up in order to make it seem as if men have it oh, so hard while women are getting away with murder. The problem for you is that such incidences–if they have ever occurred at all–are so rare as to be wholly unsuitable for a discussion of trends in society as a whole.

You can’t set up a couple of freak events (and hypothetical freak events, at that) as if they consituted some sort of norm.

I’m sure that many single parents without child support do fine, but still, it seems like exempting the father from child support payments because the mother got pregnant duplicitously (or, very, very, very unlikely, by raping the father) penalizes the child, who is not the perpetrator.

I think making fathers in such situations pay child support is also wrong. I don’t have a solution.

I suppose I could just toss my hands up and say, “hey, children always pay penalties and get bonuses based on the circumstances of their parents. Paying a penalty for having a mother who had you by tricking your father isn’t fair, but paying a penalty for having poor parents in crime-ridden neighborhood isn’t fair either. Tough luck.”

I guess I’d accept this, in a sorta quick-and-dirty way. It still seems far short of the ideal, though.

Maybe the solution is to abolish all child support and replace it with a comprehensive children’s welfare state that would ensure all children had a fair chance at life. I think that’s the proposal of The Stakeholder Society, by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, though I haven’t read it (I’m basing this off of a half-remembered review in the TLS, I think). Maintaining ordinary family structures while doing this would seem to require a welfare state for all families, though. I suspect a lot of people here would like a welfare state on the scale of, say, Norway, but I’m not sure that’s what I’d like.

So I still don’t have a solution.

I think the current solution is to make his parents responsible for his share of child support.

But that doesn’t apply to adult men. The definition varies in different countries and states, to be sure, but rape generally means forcibly or otherwise penetrating someone without his/her consent, whether with penis or another object. That doesn’t tend to make men pregnant.

I believe there is a technique where one can make a man ejaculate, by pressure on the prostate. That could come from penetration without his consent. Or nothing to stop her raping him, and then sexually assualting him so she gets pregnant.

Julian Elson: I’m not saying men who are fathers by deception or rape should have to pay child support, but the children should be supported somehow.

Why can’t they be supported by just the one parent? I know a lot of single parent families that manage just fine.

But that doesn’t apply to adult men. The definition varies in different countries and states, to be sure, but rape generally means forcibly or otherwise penetrating someone without his/her consent, whether with penis or another object. That doesn’t tend to make men pregnant.

No it’s certainly not impossible (though I imagine it’s rare) that a woman can force a man to have penis/vagina intercourse with her against his will, and that’s certainly a sexual assault. But calling that rape, or, more to the point, calling it the equivalent or direct analog of a man forcibly penetrating a woman…well I object to that for so many reasons I don’t know where to start.

You know, given that this is a feminist blog, why are we asking questions about children spawned by a woman’s duplicity?

Becuase that’s a major talking point of choice for men advocates, and choice for men is under discussion here?

And furthermore…children because a man got raped by a woman? Now there’s a crime wave sweeping the nation.

Well… sounds like it’s a fair solution for the man, and a fair solution for the woman, but how do we avoid screwing the child over here?

In fact, I’d even go so far as to ask that question about cases when a woman rapes a man and gets pregnant. It seems truly sick to make a victim pay to support his rapist’s baby, but the baby is innocent no matter how tainted its generation, or its mother.

I’m not saying men who are fathers by deception or rape should have to pay child support, but the children should be supported somehow.

Here are my intuitions about child support, by the way:

-As the non-custodial parent’s income rises, if the custodial parent’s income is constant, child support payments should increase.
-As the custodial parent’s income rises, if the non-custodial parent’s income is constant, child support payments should decrease.
-If incomes of both the custodial and non-costudial parents rise, child support payments should rise, and stay proportional to the income of the parents.

making this statement, I am making some assumptions. first, that “you can chose not to have sex”? doesn’t count as control, simply because we don’t accept that arguement when refering to anti-choice positions (ie “if she doesn’t want to have a baby, she shouldn’t have had sex”?)

There is a difference: the anti-choicers are of the oppinion that women who don’t wish to be pregnant should abstain from sex completely. Whereas the “choice not to have sex” mentioned in this article means the ability to refuse to have sex with someone who won’t respect your reproductive wishes. It is not a total trade-off between having sex and retaining all your reproductive rights, like the anti-choice position is. You can have sex. You can control what part you play in reproduction. You cannot control what your partner does about his or her part of reproduction. You can choose your partners based on what they are willing to do about their part of reproduction.

Many women, for example, want their partners to wear condoms. A woman who wants this cannot force a man to wear a condom, but she can refuse to sleep with him if he doesn’t. She can make condom use a requirement for those who have sex with her. If one refuses, she can find another person to have sex with. She can back up her choice with oral birth control or, if necessary, the morning-after pill or abortion.

A man, likewise, might want any partners of his to take birth control. He cannot force any woman to do so, but he can refuse to sleep with anyone who doesn’t. He can make birth control use a requirement for those who have sex with him. If one refuses, he can find another person to have sex with. He can back up his choice with a condom. And, yes, there should be a male oral contraceptive available.

And there should be a way for unwilling fathers to avoid paying child support for a child whom they didn’t want, tried to prevent, and were the result solely of the mother’s duplicity or carelessness, without letting off those men whose children were the result of their carelessness. And there should be a way for a father to carry or support a fetus whose mother doesn’t want to be pregnant. The world is still not perfect. But attacking women’s rights will not make it better.

By the way, the argument about not knowing whether women skip or forget birth control works both ways. If a woman can lie about birth control, a man can poke holes in his condoms with a needle. Or lie about having a vasectomy. And men are capable of tampering with their partners’ contraceptives and women are capable of tampering with their partners’ condoms. Find someone you can trust to have sex with.

Anyway, currently laws making it difficult for women to get abortions are much better enforced than laws making it difficult for men to not pay child support. And it’s much more difficult for women to get contraceptives (prescription, pharmacists’ refusal clauses) than it is for men to get condoms. And women often have to deal with being pregnant after having been raped. Many hospitals won’t even mention emergency contraception to them, much less offer it. But do you think that in a legitimate rape case involving a woman raping a man (or boy), that she would succeed in getting child support from him?

arguing that “real choice”? includes the right of men to decide whether or not women have abortions.

No. That would be completely anathema to the ideal condition of “real choice” because it would take away women’s right to choice regarding their own bodies. It would give men a choice that women don’t have now: the right to make reproductive choices for not only themselves but the opposite sex as well.

Real choice would be if men had the option to carry the fetuses themselves if the woman didn’t want it. As it stands everyone, male and female, has the right to have intelligent conversations with their significant other about whether and when they want children, and if an agreement is not reached everyone has the right to find someone who shares their wishes or, failing that, to make use of fertility aids like sperm banks and surrogate mothers.

Forcing any reproductive choice on another person is not choice. Ever.

It started as a commentary on an article on Salon.com.

Despite my politics, I can be pretty timid in the face of authority. I might have backed down when confronting that doctor, and I probably would have described the doctor as refusing to perform the procedure. I don’t know if I have any acquaintances who’ve tried to have the procedure done, so I have no personal experience to go on.

If you only have access to a Catholic or conservative church affiliated hospital, tubal ligations are not an option.

Then there’s describing “rights” as historically and socially contingent. In other words, you’ve got the rights you win and can defend in social struggle. As in, women have the right to abortion because of the social struggles that won that right; that right is threatened by legal restrictions and physical threats to abortion providers.

There was a discussion of vasectomies on Mousewords some months ago, and I read a few articles after that. From what I recall, doctors often refuse to perform them on men who are unmarried, don’t have children, and are below 30, and sometimes will refuse to perform vasectomies on men who are married and only have one or two children. The idea that a man getting a vasectomy was depriving his partner came up a lot as well, so a doctor insisting that a man get permission from his partner doesn’t seem so surprising.

The upshot was that it can be surprisingly difficult for a man to get a vasectomy. But they’re not legal restrictions.