See, if you try that, those ebil gold-digging bitches will declare themselves to be trans men solely for the purposes of getting their hands on your sperm…

I introduce to you John Murtari…a man fighting unrealistic child support payments and the inability to afford to travel to the other side of the country.

John is now in prison….on a hunger strike….and is protesting the way the NYS Family Court Operates….I too was a victim of the cruel and inhumane NYS Family Court System…..denied a handicapped van and a child was allowed to go to FL…..my severe disabilities prevent me from traveling there. So this child will never see his father….unless when he is a man and wants to look for me.

Here is a Family Court System that one can expect if they have to appear before it for any reason….planned or unplanned pregnancy….as in my case…a woman told me and showed me she was on the birth control pill….said DO NOT use the condoms I had in my hand….as she didn’t like them. I was set up….and in so doing…the family court doesn’t care if you have children living with you…..whom you support…and the support payments coupled with child care payments are so high you are going to lose your home where your two children grew up and have many close friends and family members. See….they Family Court only cares about the child that is subject to the court…..not any other child. And they were both told to forgo religious education so I can support this child that was born out of deceit. The NYS Family Court System is broken and needs to be addressed. Problem is the politicians have chose to close their eyes.

http://www.akidsright.org/support_jm.htm

Actually, “have sex only with people of the same gender as you” also works 100%. Funnily, while I’ve suggested this to MRAs many times, I’ve never gotten much positive response.

The thing is, the only contraception that is 100% is “keep it in your pants”. While I understand and agree with the argument that biological considerations should weigh the choice scale more heavily toward the woman’s side, I think that the legal considerations are still weighted toward the man. That is, because our legal system uses precedent so much, and because the older laws treated women and children as property of the man, we still have the vestiges of this ownership concept in dealing with child support, plus we still have a lot of the pre-contraception and pre-legal-abortion approach in framing the relationship between the mother and the father of a child. Hence, the man is required to “own up” to the child being “his” and pay for the upkeep of “his” child, even if he did his part to signal that he didn’t want a child, because in the olden days, the woman didn’t have much (if any) choice in whether or not to have sex, she didn’t have any contraception available, and she couldn’t legally abort, so a baby was literally considered “all the man’s fault”. So I’m wondering if the C4Mers do have a little tiny point in that if a man has done his best to prevent his sperm from meeting his partner’s egg (short of abstaining from sex completely, which we agree is unrealistic), and that both the man and the woman agree that he has made it clear that he doesn’t want a child, that there should be a legal way for the man to “un-father” himself?

The state can do that now. Child support and visitation are not reciprocal obligations. If your ex decided he wants to be Daddy after all, he is not barred by the fact that you did not enforce child support.

But here, I’ll bite: From now on, when I say “sex” in this thread, that’s what I mean. In fact, unless the context suggests otherwise, that’s what I mean in pretty much every thread. And I think this is reasonably common.

I think you misunderstood me or, more probably, I wasn’t being clear. My point about heterosexual rhetoric was not directed at you or the way you said what you said. My point was that insisting that male reproductive choice, C4M, ends once ejaculation inside a woman takes place is a way of engaging the whole question of the relationship between heterosexual vaginal intercourse and reproductive choice, because a very big chunk of how people on all sides of the issue approach reproductive choice, even the conventional, child-support-oriented C4M position, is predicated on a particular understanding of the place and importance of heterosexual vaginal intercourse in heterosexual relationships.

And this is also why I don’t think redirecting the idea of what male reproductive choice means towards an engagement with the specifics of the male body, rather than the question of child support, is not sidetracking. The question of who is/should be responsible for supporting a child once he or she has been born is very much connected to the question of heteronormativity and what sex means.

I guess what I am saying, in part, is that the whole C4M position when it comes to the question of child support is in itself a distraction, a way of not having to look at what it would really mean for men to live within the limitations of our own bodies.

One person supports the creation of a child through five seconds of ejaculation and the other person supports the creation of a child through nine months of gestation. The ensuing child is made up to equal parts of the two peolpe. All children have the right to an upbringing and financial support from its progenitors.

Jealousy between the progenitors that one had an easier part in the making of the child or that the other had longer time to think about their part in the creation does not relate to the child’s right to support and upbringing.

Richard Jeffrey Newman Writes:
1. There is a difference between phrasing the position in a negative way as you have done here—”men who don’t want to support shouldn’t…”—and phrasing the position in a positive way, i.e., avoiding heterosexual vaginal intercourse is an expression of male reproductive choice/autonomy.

There’s not a difference to me ;) I think you’re arguing semantics to a point where you’re forgetting the actual topic.

Yes, anything can be flipped as an exercise in semantics. But the main effect is restrictive. Representing choice which can only be exercised through abstaining from a generally-practiced activity as a “choice” like any other is technically true but realistically silly. Just like “a woman who avoids an abortion through abstinence is expressing her reproductive autonomy” is technically true but realistically silly.

…Second, I think taking this position is way of questioning the heterosexual rhetoric that underlies the whole C4M and abortion debate….

This is simply efficiency. Do you honestly expect everyone to preface every statement about “sex” with an explantation that “by which I mean heterosexual sex between a man and a woman, not including rape or other involuntary sexual acts, where both partners are fertile or at least believe themelves to be possibly fertile, and which involves either vaginal intercourse or some other activity that may realistically result in the woman becoming pregnant?”

If you were someone else, i’d think you were trolling. But here, I’ll bite: From now on, when I say “sex” in this thread, that’s what I mean. In fact, unless the context suggests otherwise, that’s what I mean in pretty much every thread. And I think this is reasonably common.

And I also think you’re deliberately side tracking. If you want to have a whole discussion about what “sex” really is/should be and what “sex” can mean, and the evils of heteronormativity, go right ahead (in a different thread, please). But come on–this is a thread about child support and c4m and other related issues, and in THIS CONTEXT I think it’s pretty damn obvious what people mean when they are talking about ’sex’. Don’t you think?

As a result, I reject the “men who don’t want to support should just avoid vaginal sex” argument. Sure, it works physically. But it’s too much risk to the prochoice fight. And it’s also not especially realistic.

Two things:

1. There is a difference between phrasing the position in a negative way as you have done here—”men who don’t want to support shouldn’t…”—and phrasing the position in a positive way, i.e., avoiding heterosexual vaginal intercourse is an expression of male reproductive choice/autonomy. More, the point of taking the position is not to make the pro-choice argument to the anti-abortion side. Rather, it seems to me, the point of taking this position is first, to give men a voice within the pro-choice discussion. It is a way for us to own our own boundaries and the limits of what we can control. Second, I think taking this position is way of questioning the heterosexual rhetoric that underlies the whole C4M and abortion debate. Robert’s assumption that I meant “keep it in your pants” when I said avoid vaginal intercourse is an example of what I am talking about.

2. While I appreciate the pragmatic motive behind the position you’ve taken, the end result of it will be to leave the centrality of vaginal intercourse to the heterosexual imagination unchallenged, which means that the heterosexual rhetoric surrounding the reproductive rights debate, including C4M, will remain unchanged, which means the debate itself will remain unchanged as well.

Ok, now I really do have to go pack.

This is incorrect. AFAIK, nobody has to pay child support for a fetus. So, to parallel your logic, a C4Mer cannot sever his relationship with the child before it is born since, legally, no child exists. A C4Mer is also not required to pay child support before the fetus is born. No responsibility, no obligation at that point, thus no way to sever his responsibilities and obligations since he has none. However, once the child is born it has moral standing (and citizenship) and rights under the law. At that point a C4Mer must pay child support if so ordered and also cannot sever his relationship (from a responsibility and obligations perspective) without agreement from the mother of the child. Not surprisingly, a woman may not sever her relationship with her child (w/o agreement from the father) at this point either.

What you (and C4M) really have problems with is who gets to make the choice and at what point the choice is made whether or not to create a child. Unfortunately for men, biology limits our choice to a pre-coitus time period. Women, biologically speaking, have a choice post-coitus as well. Morally speaking, I agree with biology in this case. Once a man has ejaculated, he experiences no physical consequences of gestation and childbirth. Since a woman is physically affected by gestation and childbirth it seems wholly proper to me that the decision is hers post-coitus as to whether or not to have a child.

One cannot simultaneously argue that conceived children have no moral standing at a point in time, and that a man owes a duty to his conceived child going forward because SOMEDAY it will have moral standing, and that women have no ongoing duty to that conceived child because SOMEDAY it will have moral standing.

Actually, this is not entirely true. In Jewish law, for example, a fetus does have moral standing–you are required to violate the Sabbath in order to save one that would otherwise die–and abortion is not murder. I have written a little bit about this here. More to the point, I have never heard any pro-choice advocate argue that a fetus has no moral standing. What I have heard them argue is that its moral standing is neither equivalent to nor superceding of the moral standing of the woman who carries it.

Beyond that, I think we have to agree to disagree. You want to apply an equivalance that simply does not exist given men’s and woman’s different biologies; I am willing to accept that the points at which men’s reproductive autonomy begins and ends are different from those at which women’s reproductive autonomy begins and ends. I think what I said about “keep it out of a woman’s vagina” addresses that point, and I note that it is a point you have not addressed at all.

I think he is referring to this:

Pretty much any time an abortion argument comes up, some prolifer will make this claim:

“women can avoid all abortions other than those from rape; all they have to do is not have voluntary vaginal intercourse with men. Therefore, there’s no need to allow or permit or encourage availability of abortions for women who were not raped. If they don’t want a pregnancy, they can merely elect not to have sex.”

Of course, this is physically true. No vaginal sex with a man = no potential for pregnancy.

And of course, it’s pretty damn problematic. The usual argument against it, which seems very widespread among feminists, is: although a heterosexual woman can in theory abstain from all vaginal sex unless she is willing to bear a child, this is doesn’t really work in practice. We all like sex too much. From what I have read, it is considered very ANTI-feminist so say “well, she just shouldn’t have sex.”

This is exactly the argument you and I got into a while ago (was it here? I’ve lost track). I think abortion is more important than either side of the C4M argument. So I’m unwilling to give the prolifers a foothold–and a pretty good one, at least in sound bite terms–by admitting that any healthy adult, in any relationship, should be willing and able to refrain from any sex with any chance of procreation.

As a result, I reject the “men who don’t want to support should just avoid vaginal sex” argument. Sure, it works physically. But it’s too much risk to the prochoice fight. And it’s also not especially realistic.

Richard - I largely agree with you regarding the responsibility of parents for their offspring. But at the point in time where the C4M man desires to sever his relationship with the child, advocates for reproductive autonomy and/or abortion believe that no child exists. One cannot simultaneously argue that conceived children have no moral standing at a point in time, and that a man owes a duty to his conceived child going forward because SOMEDAY it will have moral standing, and that women have no ongoing duty to that conceived child because SOMEDAY it will have moral standing. If its future moral standing creates an obligation, then we can’t have abortion. If its future moral standing doesn’t create an obligation, then men can opt out of parenthood, as women can. If it creates an obligation for men but not for women, then feminist claims to be seeking sexual equality and justice are hollow, and pro-choice feminism is simply a cover for female reproductive supremacy. (It should be noted that some feminists recognize this and either say “ok, I’m for female reproductive supremacy”, or “RA does mean that men can abandon their children” - props to them for intellectual honesty.)

If a woman can morally sever her relationship with her offspring at conception+X days, on the grounds that she has reproductive autonomy, and the sexes are to have equal rights, then so can a man. The consistency bind that pro-choice folks are in is that they want to keep reproductive autonomy as an argument in their quiver, because it’s one of the strongest arguments they have. But if you really believe in reproductive autonomy and equality, then you have to apply it to men too, and feminists really don’t want to do that, because it will result in real harm to women’s standing in the world. If you don’t want to extend it to men, then you have to acknowledge that “reproductive autonomy” means women’s reproductive autonomy only - and that in turn puts pressure on claims to believe in equality - “oh, so all that stuff about women and men having the same rights was crap” - which most feminists don’t want to do.

I’m glad that I don’t have to try and balance all of these contradictory claims in my own philosophy; I don’t think I could do it.

But feminists reject the argument categorically as a justification for checks against abortion in cases of consensual sex, and advance a theory of strong reproductive autonomy.

Huh? What feminism are you reading? What you wrote is a bald faced lie, or something you made up. Feminism has criticised and critiqued vaginal intercourse for 40+ years, to include how reproductive autonomy is affected by this particular practice. Many women feel the most autonomous reproductively when they can refuse to engage in vaginal intercourse — despite the high cultural cost of taking such a radical approach to heterosexual sex.

if you really believe that “keep your pants on” is a valid argument against male reproductive autonomy, then you really ought to advance it as an argument against women’s RA as well. Do you?

Just to be clear, what I was talking about was not “keep your pants on,” but rather, “keep it out of a woman’s vagina,” and that is a very different thing. And, yes, “keep it out of a woman’s vagina” is something I would advocate as a reasonable position for women to take who want to avoid, absolutely, the risk of conception. More to the point, I think that “keep it out of a woman’s vagina” is, when expressed by men, an expression of male reproductive autonomy, not an argument against it (as would “keep your pants on be,” were that what I was talking about)—because, don’t forget, a man who takes that position (”keep it out of a woman’s vagina”) is going to be asking any woman he has a sexual relationship with to respect his wishes, and if she doesn’t, well then that says something about whether he should be having a sexual relationship with her in the first place, doesn’t it?

I also would point out that your equation of my position, “keep it out of a woman’s vagina,” with “keep it in your pants” makes my point about the centrality of heterosexual intercourse in the heterosexual imagination and the way in which that centrality shapes this discussion.

As has been noted by others, C4M is (at bottom) about child support - and child support is about the relationship and obligation between the man and the child.

Yes, and the child comes to that relationship with no ability, other than the fact of her or his existence—for which the man is in no small part responsible—to advocate for her or his rights. Nor did the child choose to be there. The man, on the other hand, chose to behvae in a way that he knew might result in a child, even one he would not, on his own, have chosen to have. Absent anyone who is going to advocate for that child’s rights and absent a society in which the community, through its government, takes a true and full financial responsibility for the health and well-being of children whose biological parent(s) for whatever reaons cannot or will not support them, who else shall we hold accountable for the support of such children other than the people who conceived them?

Personally, I think that if the state did take up that responsibility, the C4M argument would hold a lot more weight. In other words, if we were all willing to say that, yes, our tax money should go to help support such children when their fathers have no desire to; if, in other words, we were willing to put our money where out mouths are, then there would be no problem with men who have conceived a child they do not want arguing that they should not have to support it just because the child’s mother wants to give birth.

I also want to say that I am about to start preparing to leave on a weeklong trip; if I do not respond after this, I am not ignoring you, I simply did not have the time.

Indeed. Women also have this capacity. But feminists reject the argument categorically as a justification for checks against abortion in cases of consensual sex, and advance a theory of strong reproductive autonomy. Just because she had sex willingly and knew that pregnancy could result is no reason she can’t abort. Accordingly, the argument as used against men’s reproductive autonomy seems disingenuous; if you really believe that “keep your pants on” is a valid argument against male reproductive autonomy, then you really ought to advance it as an argument against women’s RA as well. Do you?

More to the point, our positions are radically other to each other–they get pregnant; we don’t–and essentially unequal: if we try to control what a woman does in response to her pregnancy, we are trying to exercise power over her, to take power away from her.

Again, I agree. But C4M does not attempt to oblige a woman to terminate the life within her if that is not her desire; no control of the woman’s actions is contemplated or intended. She has reproductive autonomy: nobody is telling her to continue or abort her pregnancy. That’s her decision, about her life and her resources. As has been noted by others, C4M is (at bottom) about child support - and child support is about the relationship and obligation between the man and the child. The woman doesn’t enter into it. So arguments about controlling women’s behavior seem inappropriate; it’s not about her.