Choice For Men: Do Feminists and Pro-Lifers Make The Same Argument?
| December 13th, 2005Quite a while ago, regarding the “Choice for Men” debate, Cathy Young asked me:
Yes, but the comparison is misleading; it implies that the disparity is caused by hypocrisy in the feminist position, when the disparity is actually caused by differences in male and female anatomy. (No pro-choicer would deny men the right to abortion, if men were physically capable of pregnancy.)
When pro-lifers say women’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, what they really mean is, “I want to deny you one of your medically viable options.” There’s no reason, except for pro-life laws, that women can’t get an abortion after pregnancy begins.
In contrast, when I say men’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, that’s a statement of biological fact. It’s not an argument in favor of denying men viable medical options; it’s an observation that men physically lack those options.
Although the statements look similar on the surface, the substantive difference between the two positions is enormous, and can’t fairly be overlooked.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:27 am
Although the statements look similar on the surface, the substantive difference between the two positions is enormous, and can’t fairly be overlooked.
Let me start by accepting your conclusion. (Hah! Argument judo. Take that!)
I want to go back to one of your premises.
(No pro-choicer would deny men the right to abortion, if men were physically capable of pregnancy.)
And no pro-choicer would deny men the right to bear a child, if men were physically capable of pregnancy, I (safely) assume.
But of course, men are not so capable.
What if they were to hire someone, or find a volunteer, who was so capable? Obviously that person would be a biological woman. What would be the implications?
Well, it can certainly be argued that many married and commited heterosexual couples have already reached such an arrangement, either tacitly or explicitly. Whether for fiduciary consideration, or emotional consideration, or any of a number of other arrangements, many women have in effect made a contingent womb commitment. If Jane gets pregnant, even unintentionally, she already knows she will keep the child.
And, of course, many other couples or transient heterosexual pairings do not have such an understanding.
(One wonders about the relative success rates of such varying relationships. There would certainly be a stress on women who do agree to such terms; there’s definitely a burden in knowing that another obligation (however joyous) could drop in. On the other hand, I would assume that men would be more devoted/commited to a woman who had made such a promise. Perhaps that evens it out; I don’t know.)
You could, therefore, argue from a pro-choice point of view that men’s rights types who demand the right to bear a child already have it; they merely need to exercise their prerogative in the marketplace and acquire (through whatever means) the necessary cooperation. Men of inadequate material means might console themselves with the thought that genuine kindness and attention are currency in and of themselves in the emotional marketplace.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 1:59 am
I keep thinking this:
When have you actually made your choice?
The moment that, if you get kidnapped by UFOs and never return, other people still have to deal with that choice.
Once you’ve done that, there’s no take back. Other people can’t take back the effects of your choice on them, so you don’t get a mulligan.
Rebecca
This comment was written by Rebecca Borgstrom.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 2:36 am
Well, but wouldn’t that imply that a man has absolute control over his ability to impregnate women? I mean, if it’s an “accident” for her, it is for him too, right?
This comment was written by Audrey H..Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 3:05 am
Except, Amp, that no one is suggesting that men should be allowed to force a woman to have an abortion. The point is simply that the man’s responsibility should be commensurate with his ability to make the choice. That is, he should be allowed to choose to pay for the least expensive option in return for giving up all rights toward the child.
As far as the “biolgical fact” argument, this would impress me a lot more if government wasn’t already involved in working around biolgical facts. The Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, requires business owners to go out of their way to accomodate biolgical disabilities, rather than simply never hiring disabled people under the rationale that it is a biolgical fact that it is more expensive to use them for labor. I also suspect that most of you believe that businesses where possible should be made to accomodate pregnancies, instead of firing any women who gets pregnant and declaring that it is a biolgical fact that pregnant women have a harder time, e.g., standing on their feet for long periods and they have no obligation to accomodate this.
This, by the way, is one thing I was referring to when I said that some feminists believe in feminine supremacy rather than equality. When a women gets pregnant, you want her to have all the choice, and yet be able to stick the man with a share of the financial consequences of her choice rather than of the financial consequences of what his choice would have been.
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 4:07 am
So it’s your opinion that virtually all heterosexual sex is a case of the man being raped by the woman? Because that’s the only way your argument makes sense.
If you can’t acknowledge that men have some choice (albeit not all the choices) and thus bear some responsibility, then I’m not sure there’s much for us to talk about. Someone who thinks that men never, ever volunteer to have sex does not live in anything I recognize as the real world.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 5:27 am
Audrey H: Well, but wouldn’t that imply that a man has absolute control over his ability to impregnate women? I mean, if it’s an “accident” for her, it is for him too, right?
As Ampersand points out: men have fewer choices than women because men have fewer biological abilities. A man can’t decide whether or not to have an abortion because a man can’t get pregnant. Simple as that.
Glaivester Writes:
December 13th, 2005 at 3:05 am
Except, Amp, that no one is suggesting that men should be allowed to force a woman to have an abortion. The point is simply that the man’s responsibility should be commensurate with his ability to make the choice. That is, he should be allowed to choose to pay for the least expensive option in return for giving up all rights toward the child.
Glaivester: As far as the “biolgical fact” argument, this would impress me a lot more if government wasn’t already involved in working around biolgical facts.
Not, however, by requiring people who have two kidneys to give up one to someone on dialysis: or even by ordering everyone who’s capable to be a regular blood donor.
This comment was written by Jesurgislac.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 5:46 am
I often feel a little bit , because I sympathise with the argument that either parent should be able to give up their parental rights and responsibilities in an adoption like way, whether or not the other parent wishes to do the same . While the arguments that men make a choice to risk becoming a parent when they have sex, are the truth at the moment, I don’t believe that is ideal.
But I do think this is a result of my different background. I come from New Zealand where we have a domestic purposes benefit, which isn’t much, but it’s more than you’ve got. It also means that for low-income women child support often doesn’t go to her directly, but goes to the government, which pays out the DPB.
It bothers me the way this debate is framed in absolutes. The current American system is not the only system. I understand why feminists in America now would see child support as a more viable option than a decent social welfare system, and I respect their decision to try and maintain that. But I’d understand it better if it was presented that way, and not the only alternative.
I don’t think that the parents being the sole people financially responsible for children should be our goal - I believe children deserve financial support not just from their parents, but the community as a whole. I don’t think feminists should abandon that as the long-term aim.
I wrote a little bit more about this on my blog a while back.
This comment was written by reddecca.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 7:47 am
It’s interesting that these men’s choice discussions always focus on the fairness of child support in the case of an unwanted pregnancy and never on men’s responsibility for birth control. Men have been doing medical science for centuries but they’ve never developed male contraceptive methodologies to match those they’ve developed for women (birth control pills, iuds, diaphragms, cervical caps, patches, contraceptive rings, sponges, depo-provera, female condom, tubal ligation vs. condoms and vasectomies). I guess that they just didn’t see it as their problem since men had always been able to walk away (and I’m not saying that no men stayed or were forced to stay but the fact remains that the choice to walk away was always there).
It’s the combination of DNA for proving paternity and computer systems for tracking delinquent fathers that has changed everything by making it much more difficult for men to abrogate their responsibility. But even with this change, most men seem to prefer to ignore the issue of male contraception and just talk about on how unfair women are.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 8:58 am
For the record, I’m an MRA…
The solution for men, to me, is simple: take care of your own stuff. If you don’t want to impregnate a woman, take steps to keep that from happening. Yes, this includes not having sex.
I don’t think a man can reasonably be “allowed” to have a say in whether a woman aborts or keeps a baby. Yes, this can result in the man being responsible for the child, but we all know that, don’t we, so why do we always act like it’s some big unfair thing?
And no, I don’t think a man should be allowed to “sign away” the responsibility for a baby if she decides to keep it. We MRA’s always crow about how responsible we are; well, then, be responsible.
There is no way to make this “fair”, by the standards of those in favor of choice for men. It is not “fair”. The woman has the control of the pregnancy. You help make it, you’re gonna be responsible for it if she decides to keep it.
Therefore, knowing all that, this whole discussion can be avoided if men would take care of their own outcomes and not put them in the hands of the woman.
Yes, this can leave you powerless if you want her to carry the baby to term and raise it, and she doesn’t. And vice versa. Too bad. You now know the rules of the game, and you now know what to do. Go do it.
This comment was written by Scarbo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 9:40 am
I’ve been reading these conversations for a while now, but this is my first time posting here.
I think that both Scarbo and Amp are basically saying the same thing here. The fact is that the whole situation of an unintended pregnancy is inherently “unfair.” The term unintended pregnancy sums it up- neither the man or woman was planning for a pregnancy. Ideally, we can hope that the man and the woman can agree on what is the best decision for them both, but the unfortunate reality is that often they do not agree.
Whichever decision is made- to raise the child, give it up for adoption or abort- are all decisions that will affect both of them for the rest of their lives. Though it is not “fair” that the man has little say in a decision that will effect his life, neither if is fair for the woman to have to have to make such a deeply personal and stressful, both emotionally and physically, decision, but that is the reality of the situation.
The fact that the woman is the one who is actually pregnant allows her the right to the final decision. It seems to me that these two facts facts cancel each other out on the “fairness” scale. Being biologically forced to choose vs. Having the final say in that choice.
Either way, it is hardly a situation to be envied, even for a man who wanted a different outcome.
This comment was written by Shari.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 10:15 am
Are you sure you’re an MRA? That was downright reasonable!
This comment was written by Jakobpunkt.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 10:15 am
What if they were to hire someone, or find a volunteer, who was so capable?
Then the privacy right in control of their own bodies doesn’t exist, and we’re off in contract law and assignation of parental rights. Whole different planet.
and yet be able to stick the man with a share of the financial consequences of her choice
Again and again: whether or not she has a choice, she, too, is stuck with the financial consequences of being a parent. Parental responsibility for both parties is not contingent on whether you agreed to sex or whether you had a chance to get an abortion. If a pregnant woman is kidnapped on the way to an abortion clinic by radical anti-choicers and imprisoned until she goes into labor, she is still obligated, financially and legally, as a parent.
I’ll note that fathers have zero responsibility during the pregnancy. There is no obligation for fetal child support.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 10:57 am
It doesn’t work around biological facts by trading the rights of the non-disabled for the rights of the disabled. No non-disabled person is legally required to drop everything he’s doing to push a wheelchair-bound stranger around the mall and pick up everything they want that’s out of their reach. Nor are the safety rights of everybody on the road endangered by allowing blind people to drive.
No premise of government involvement in “working around biological facts” ever provides for the abilities of a disabled group by taking those abilities away from those who already have them. For men to have the “choice” these people are advocating,
That’s business owners—you can avoid such expenses by choosing one of the many career options that do not involve owning a business.
It has been argued that it is unfair that women get “more choice.” I think it is equally unfair that women have more burdens. Consider: both men and women have the choice to abstain from sex to avoid pregnancy (rape aside). Both men and women have access to either medication or devices that greatly reduce their risk of pregnancy when they have sex. And if a baby is born, both men and women have obligations to that baby. If a man is supposed to pay child support, it is the child, and not the mother, who benefits from that money, and it is paid to the mother because she is responsible for caring for the child. If the situation is reversed and the father is the one caring for the child, he can demand child support from the mother.
The only difference is, for there to be a child, the mother has to go through pregnancy and childbirth. This is never demanded of the father, only of the mother, and therefore the mother is the only one who is entitled to make the decision. It is not right that one person should make a choice and leave all the work to the person who did not make the choice, and this would be the case if men had veto power either way over their significant other’s reproductive decisions. He could decide, baby or no baby, and she would be forced to create that baby, risk her health and possibly her life doing it, and suffer pain and/or injury to give birth to it, or to undergo a medical procedure to take away something that she wanted, a procedure she might find morally wrong, while the person who made the choice suffers not at all because of it. This is not right. Whereas, as long as the choice is firmly in the hands of the woman, the person who makes the choice, also suffers whatever consequences her choice carries. This is right.
No one demands pregnancy from men, therefore no one should demand it from women.
(It should be pointed out that the entire point of this argument is not “choice during pregnancy about whether or not to have a child and responsibility for it;” it is “choice during pregnancy about whether one wants to suffer an invasion of one’s body.” The MRA’s who push for “choice for men” are ignoring entirely the pregnancy aspect of things in order to focus on the child-and-child-support aspect. Their argument, condensed, is something along the lines of “things need to be perfectly fair for men, no matter how unfair that makes things for women.” Men don’t suffer that invasion of their bodies, women do, so women get to make the choice about which sort of invasion they want to suffer, and which they don’t.)
This comment was written by Kyra.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 11:33 am
Kyra wrote:
Bingo.
Since so many MRAs are obviously misogynists, they really don’t understand the concept of “burdens,” which gets translated in their brains to “That bitch is getting free money from me for life to sit on her ass and do nothing !”
Redecca’s post also reminds me of how many MRAs combine hostility toward women with hostility toward the welfare state– which makes no sense if you have any feel for logic. If individual MRAs don’t want to pay for the individual costs of supporting babies and children, they should, by rights, be ferocious lobbyists for the revival and expansion of our social safety net in the U.S. This would mean that all of us would help pay for raising the kids. The supposed crushing burden of child support upon the individual man would be lessened by spreading it out amongst the entire citizenry– Male and female.
I, for one, am not waiting up for them to make this mental breakthrough to the other side. :/
This comment was written by alsis39.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 11:36 am
JacobPunkt: thanks, I was hoping you’d think so. Often times I hear nothing but crickets chirping after I express my opinion. As far as being an MRA, I do find myself in agreement with many MRA issues, but after weighing this one, I find myself not agreeing with the choice for men movement.
I guess it’s because nowadays we seem to be searching for fairness and equality in EVERYTHING under the sun, as if it’s un-natural for equality to not reign everywhere. Everything HAS to be 50:50 everywhere, or so it would seem. Apparently it’s not good enough for it to be 70:30 in some places and 30:70 in others. Nope, 50:50 all around. But is that “natural”?
The structure of life balances out in the whole, but not necessarily for the individual. In the instance of pregnancy, in a natural sense, the woman rules, plain and simple. She’s carrying the thing, for Pete’s sake. In other areas (although I can’t think of any right now!!!), in a natural sense, perhaps the man rules.
Look at other species on the planet. Sometimes the male does all the work, including taking care of the eggs before they hatch. Sometimes the female does all the work (lions?). Do they stress about things being “equal”? No, they just live. Nature, even though perfectly balanced, is not necessarily perfectly equal.
Perhaps we need to look to that as we tussle with these interesting but difficult questions.
This comment was written by Scarbo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 11:40 am
Um, what about the CHILD? You think you should just be able to abandon it and force the woman to pay for everything?
Again, I don’t see a way out of this that doesn’t hurt the child. Selfish. What are you suggesting the solution be?
Also, I shall make the point that we are constantly making here, choosing abortion is NOT the same as choosing no responsibility for a child (that would be adoption), it IS choosing to not be pregnant. therefore talking about financial responsibilities after a child is in the picture seems to completely derail the subject of abortion and pregnancy, where there is no child.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 11:49 am
alsis39, your post makes excellent sense. I completely agree with you.
And Scarbo, I wish there were more MRAs like you, you seem very reasonable. Although I do think we should fight for equality where possible, but until men can be pregnant (which sounds like a great idea to me, I would rather get my boyfriend pregnant so we could have kids than have to go through it myself) there isn’t much we can do.
This passage makes me nervous, though.
Are you suggesting humans should just accept the fact that most women do all the child rearing and we shouldn’t try to balance it? Seems to me we can’t compare ourselves to lions, considering lions can’t complain about anything since they don’t really talk and they certainly aren’t writing blog posts on the subject to debate w/ other lions all around the world.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Casey wrote:
As Reddecca pointed out, another way out would be to have a generous social welfare state that guarateed that all children would have all their material needs well met.
If we had that sort of system, then I could imagine supporting “choice for men.” (However, my impression is that most C4M advocates oppose generous welfare policies.)
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
First off, I wouldn’t say I’ve got a total philosophy on this all worked out and ready to present to the masses. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately.
I just wonder if we need to work the concept of inherently unequal into our equality discussions more. Food for thought, that’s all.
Putting this another way, perhaps: doesn’t the complaint about inequality come from the assumption that inequality is wrong? So, where does that assumption come from? In some cases, it’s pretty obvious. But maybe it really doesn’t apply in all cases. Again, since men can’t get pregnant, there’s one right there. Perhaps there are more, many more.
This comment was written by Scarbo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
Yes, if we had this sort of system, I would definately support “choice” for men in terms of financial responsibility. In fact, I would prefer a generous social welfare state for many reasons.
Well, in terms of women and men, I believe women got fed up with doing all the work and not being able to get the benefits of society, like education and such, so we fought to gain equality. Not sure that inequality is “wrong” per say, but if one group of people is benefitting and ruling over another, and the second group is not happy with it and there is no obvious reason why it HAS to be that way, then that seems wrong to me. Perhaps instead of thinking of inequality being wrong we should think of it as being not the most enjoyable situation, and if we can rectify things to be more enjoyable for society, then we should. I’m all for enabling men to get pregnant if the science allowed it and a man wanted such a thing.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
I’m glad you said this. One line of feminist theory stresses the unequal treatment that women face in matters of law, medicine, employment, etc., because the delimiting factor is the male body. For example, this very argument about men’s and women’s choice is thinly posited in believing that the source of that choice is identical and the only missing ingredient is the individual’s capacity to make an autonomous choice. In reality, men do not and cannot have an equivalent choice in matters of pregnancy and abortion because they lack the capacity to be pregnant. The social inequality that feminists object to is when this fact is ignored and legal and medical decisions are made founded on a false belief that men can have an equivalent and autonomous decision-making capacity as women in terms of pregnancy. I would certainly hope that men do have the autonomy. I reject outright that they will ever have an equivalent decision-making process — and laws and medical practices should reflect this by favoring the unique nature of women’s relationship to her own pregnancy, rather than attempting to create a false equity.
My sense of equality is one in which there is no discrimination in law, medicine, economics etc., **despite** differences between men’s and women’s experiences.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
oops. Can you fix that Amp? Pretty please?
[Fixed! Hope that wasn't too wrong, I was away from the computer dealing with stuff in the meat world.... --Amp]
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
To jump back a bit,
AndiF said:
Actually, a lot of work has gone into it. The problem is, for men, a vast majority of the systems that CAUSE fertility also are requisite for normal sexual functioning. A male version of the pill would most likely result in importence, and while that would, in fact, prevent pregnancy, I personally wouldn’t want my partner to use such a method. And the relative physical complexity of the female reproductive system and the fact that much of it is easily acessed means there’s a lot more room to play, so to speak, with prevention of conception.
And it may just be that I’ve been lucky, but the vast majority of men I know are, in fact, concerned about contraception. But that may be because I am blessed to know a lot of men with a strong sense of their responsibility should one of their sexual partners get pregnant.
This comment was written by AlieraKieron.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
I’d love a male contraceptive pill, especially if it would “result in importence”!
Sorry, I just had to jump at that one…
This comment was written by Scarbo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
Of course, there is nothing in the current system to prevent some guy serving his girlfriend with legal papers regarding custody while she’s still in the hospital recovering from labor either (shades of Newt Gingrich’s divorce). Just as there is nothing to prevent a guy from hitting her up for child support after she has gone through a pregnancy with all the medical expenses and related expenses either, without the father paying for a dime to support her up until then. It may not be common, but the option exists.
This comment was written by silverside.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 2:20 pm
Certainly not. His chances of success would be at best quite slim unless he could show that she had two heads and a drug habit, of course.
Then again, how many of these fathers want custody? Of an infant? Goodbye sleep, forget having a life of your own (ha ha you were joking maybe, no?). From the father’s point of view, I’d think the biggest hazard of suing for custody would be that you might win.
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 2:21 pm
I wish Amp has bulked the post out a bit more. I’m not really sure what’s being got at.
Isn’t the suggestion that “pro-choice” activist say that a woman should have a choice over whether she becomes a mother - and this justifies abortion in order to enable her to make that choice. (For the record: I support abortion, but think this is a bad argument in favour of it.)
You could maintain that men should have the same “choice”, but since this couldn’t be effected though termination, it should be effected though being able to disclaim parental rights. I’m not sure you can say that it is a biological fact that men’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens. We could easily give them a say afterwards though insituting a new social policy (by letting them disclaim parenthood). This has been done in the past.
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
Actually, a lot of work has gone into it.
According to what I’ve read, the work is mostly quite recent (one article refers to male contraception as the “poor relation in family planning” and noted that research finally “may have acquired the critical mass needed to make the transition from academic research to pharmaceutical development.” Some new male contraceptive products have been successfully tested (at least in Australia and India).
The point is that there is no long history of attempts to develop male contraception, there is almost no coverage of any of current efforts, and there doesnt seem to be any great demand from men to have it.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
No. Pro-choice means a woman should have a choice over whether she is PREGNANT. If it meant over whether she becomes a mother, then pro-life people would be pro-choice, because even they believe in adoption.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
Scarbo,
Interesting posts. As far as your thoughts on equality/inequality, I’m wondering if what you are really getting at is sameness/difference. In other words, do you think that men and women are or might be inherently unequal in some ways (which suggests varying moral or perhaps legal status) or that men and women might be inherently different in some ways (which suggests varying natures/preferences/abilities)?
The one does not presuppose the other. For example, even though people who are more rational (stereotypically men) are different from people who are more emotional (stereotypically women) that does not mean that as a result, men or women should have different rights, which are generally premised on being a person, not on what kind of person you are. I’m good at math and logic puzzles, but I don’t think that should get me more rights even though it puts me in “rational-land.”
I’ve thought a lot about sameness/difference, and my current thought is that we don’t really know much about “inherent/natural” differences between the sexes because our culture treats men and women so differently. Also, even if the average man and the average woman are different in certain ways, there is so much more variation within the groups men and women than between the groups men and women that gender is a poor proxy.
I hope this has something to do with your posts. :)
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 3:47 pm
And here I was so excited that I had figured out how to use blockquotes… *headdesk*
This comment was written by AlieraKieron.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
Ismone,
Well, as I said, this is far from a thought-out philosophy. I’ve started and stopped at least four responses to your post and I find I just don’t know where to go with it from here.
I was just trying to expand on the thought of men and women having obvious different options when it comes to reproduction, because the system is designed for the female to be the baby oven and the male is not. And a logical person accepts that. A person searching for “fairness” won’t find it. And that person should then realize that perhaps “unfairness” can be perfectly workable in a natural system. Again, lions, bluebirds, that fish that keeps the eggs in its mouth, etc.
I was then wondering if there was perhaps reason to expand on that as we search for fairness between the human genders in all the other aspects of life. What other differences, physical or otherwise, should we acknowledge and then be satisfied that “fairness” can’t happen?
Or is reproduction the only one?
This comment was written by Scarbo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
It isn’t about the rights of the father or the mother - when a child is born it is about the rights of that kid.
Only a woman can have the right to decide whether she’ll allow her body being used to host a parasitic fetus.
When a child is born the father and the mother should have equal responsibility - even though the mother thus far has made bigger sacrifices to allow that child being born. If they feel unable to care for their child the responsible thing to do, as well as their duty to the child, is to try and find good adoptive parents.
It is all about the rights of the kid. If you don’t want to fulfill your obligations to the child you will have to either adopt it away or pay child support and leave the other parent with all the work.
Personally I, as a woman, would much rather prefer that the men had to do all the childbearing and labour. How wonderful to be able to become a parent without having to go through all the pain and bodychanges!
This comment was written by B.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
How wonderful to be able to become a parent without having to go through all the pain and bodychanges!
Be careful what you wish for, because you know darn well that the men who do this will use the pain and body changes to lord guilt over you and stick you with child support while only letting you see your kid every other weekend.
This comment was written by Scarbo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 6:53 pm
I get tired of the argument about the choice to not get pregnant. Face it. We get knocked up. For 8.6 billion reasons.
How is it best for the human race to cope with reproduction?
Women have attempted to terminate pregnancies for as long as getting knocked up existed. And died in the attempt. White Fathers had the say in the abortion then, through law, they said you couldn’t have one.
Women died trying to get them because the risk was so much better a prospect than having the child.
Abortion Saves Women and only a woman knows if it’s what she needs.
This comment was written by marsha.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Amp: There’s no reason, except for pro-life laws, that women can’t get an abortion after pregnancy begins. In contrast, when I say men’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, that’s a statement of biological fact.>>
It’s a statement of biological fact that a man can simply walk away. There’s no reason, except for child support laws, that it is otherwise.
This comment was written by Pasatiempo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 9:55 pm
After birth, women can just walk away, too. There’s no reason, except for child support laws, that it is otherwise.
In other words, in this way, the law is exactly equal. So what’s your point?
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 10:13 pm
.
AndiF wrote - The point is that there is no long history of attempts to develop male contraception, there is almost no coverage of any of current efforts, and there doesn’t seem to be any great demand from men to have it.
Not denying that the lack of male contraception is probably due, at least in part, to men (in general) finding it more convenient to let the women worry about it. HowEVER —
As a woman, if I were involved in a non-committed sexual relationship (anything from a one-nighter to a few weeks), if the man said, “Oh, don’t worry; I’m on the Pill,” no way would I feel secure . If he’s lying, and I don’t take my own precautions, I’m the one who gets pregnant. (I’m ignoring, for this argument, the benefits of condoms for preventing STDs.)
So this factor could lead to a lack of demand from women to develop a medical male contraception; if there’s no belief that it will be used, why push for its development? And if the women aren’t pushing, there’s no reason for the men to care.
This comment was written by StarWatcher.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
After birth, women can just walk away, too. There’s no reason, except for child support laws, that it is otherwise.
I don’t think so. Are there women who are emotionally capable of bearing a child for nine months, with all of the physical intimacy that is necessarily entailed in pregnancy, and then walk away? Some, no doubt (otherwise, who the heck are all these adoptees). Many? I doubt it.
I’m not making a gendered observation here. I don’t think there are (m)any men who could spend nine months in an intimate and growing bond with their unborn child and then walk away, either. My wife and I didn’t go to any particular lengths to ensure that Stephanie and I bonded while she was in utero, but it happened nonetheless. There’s no f-ing way I could have abandoned that child when she was born after having spent nine months in a steadily increasing lockstep of emotional connection - let ALONE if she had actually been in my body and with me 24/7 instead of in someone else’s body and with me physically only when I was in proximity to my wife.
But if I was a man not in an emotional bond to the mother of my child, there’s nothing that particularly would have built up that connection between me and the baby, until the baby was born. Walking away at birth (or more commonly, at the news of a pregnancy that isn’t going to be aborted) would be trivially easy.
Emotional constraints are perhaps less easy to quantify than economic or legal constraints, but they are no less real.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 11:11 pm
Robert, emotional complaints are less real than biological constraints.
The fact is, some women are capable of abandoning their children, just as some men are. Yes, there are many more such men than women (due to the factors you mention), but the women still exist - and child support laws treat them identically to male abandoners.
In contrast, no man, ever, has been capable of being pregnant.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 11:24 pm
[First, let me state that I am not actually in favor of "choice for men." I just do not believe that you can have a consistent "pro-choice ethic" without it.
If you can’t acknowledge that men have some choice (albeit not all the choices) and thus bear some responsibility,
I am not denying that men bear some responsibility. Where do people get that idea? My suggestion was that in order to be consistent with the pro-choice ethic, the man ought to be able to choose to be responsible for paying for the least expensive choice.
I have NEVER said that men should bear no responsibility under a pro-choice ethic. You just think that the level of responsibility should not be commensurate with their level of choice.
When pro-lifers say women’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, what they really mean is, “I want to deny you one of your medically viable options.” There’s no reason, except for pro-life laws, that women can’t get an abortion after pregnancy begins.
In contrast, when I say men’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, that’s a statement of biological fact. It’s not an argument in favor of denying men viable medical options; it’s an observation that men physically lack those options.
That is a misleading statement because very few people deny this in terms of biological parenthood. Very few people actually believe that the man should have a right to determine whether or not he becomes a biological parent of a born child (i.e. that he should have the ability to determine whether or not the woman brings the pregnancy to term). People who would push for spousal consent laws are usually people who are actually trying to ban abortion rather than give the man “choice.”
The hypocrisy is here:
When feminists say that a man’s choice as to whether or not to obligate himself to be partially financially responsible for a child for eighteen years is before pregnancy begins, they are echoing the pro-lifers who say that a woman’s choice to have a child should be before pregnancy begins.
When you say that the man’s choice whether or not to become partially financially responsible for another human being for eighteen years is before pregnancy begins, that is not a statement of biological fact; it is a statement that you want to deny men a viable legal option (i.e. of claiming responsibility for the option they would have chosen rather than for the option the woman chooses, and paying the woman for that option).
It’s not an argument in favor of denying men viable medical options; it’s an observation that men physically lack those options.
Because, of course, medical options are the only options where choice should be protected.
The main reason I see hypocrisy here is that I doubt that you would have the “ho-hum, the sitaution may be unfair, but life is unfair, and we don’t always have to fix that” attitude if it were women rather than men that the situation were unfair to.
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
December 13th, 2005 at 11:25 pm
[...] Amptoons points out [...]
This comment was written by Greg Prince"™s Blog » Speaking of choice....Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 1:52 am
Glaivester:
The “pro-choice ethic” you refer to isn’t an ethic of the real-life pro-choice movement. Pro-choice has never meant “she who has less choice should bear vastly, vastly less responsibility.”
The real pro-choice ethic is “my body, my choice.” Meaning that every person, male or female, has the right to control their own reproductive system.
So when you say I’m being contradictory, all you’re really saying is that I’m contradicting an “ethic” that I never subscribed to in the first place.
You wrote (emphasis added by me):
Do you understand the difference between “is” and “should be”?
No feminist is saying - and I’m certainly not saying - that a man’s choice as to whether or not to obligate himself should be before pregnancy begins. I don’t think that’s the way it should be. I didn’t create the two-sex reproduction system, and I don’t think the two-sex reproductive system is fair or just. (If it were up to me, we’d all be intersexed.)
I agree with you - in a perfect, ideal world, men and women should be able to have all the sex they want (with consenting partners) and nonetheless never risk unwanted parenthood.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world in which “choice for men” is another way of saying “screw children over, because all that matters is what’s good for dad.” As I said earlier this thread, I can’t even begin to consider C4M a reasonable policy until children’s material needs are much more fully provided for.
Even then, I have doubts about C4M, simply because I think the effect of C4M, in practice, would be to discourage men from using birth control, leading to a rise in single mother families among women and girls who aren’t really prepared to be mothers. So even if children’s material interests were covered, I’m still not certain that the increased unfairness to children would be justified by increased freedom for men.
Being pro-choice doesn’t mean being in favor of abandoning children. Saying “if you’re pro-choice, you have to favor abandoning children or you’re a hypocrite” - which is what your point boils down to, Glaivester - isn’t a fair summary of the pro-choice position.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 5:42 am
So this factor could lead to a lack of demand from women to develop a medical male contraception; if there’s no belief that it will be used, why push for its development? And if the women aren’t pushing, there’s no reason for the men to care.
That pretty much goes along with the point I was making — that men have always put the responsibility for pregnancy on women, whether it is getting pregnant or not getting pregnant. And even in a discussion about “choice for men”, male contraception never really gets on the radar because men still think in terms of a pregnancy as being the woman’s responsibility.
If C4M supporters were really concerned about causing pregnancies they don’t want, they’d be screaming for better male contraception. But they seem to care very little about avoiding pregnancy, the women they might get pregnant, or the children they might father. Instead they just want to make sure that having “gotten” someone pregnant, they won’t be “gotten” for, as Glavister wants to be sure we know, 18 years of child support.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 5:54 am
It is hypocritical to be pro-biological-choice and anti-legal-choice.
And while you’re thinking about the possible results of c4m, think about this possible result of no-c4m: some men may well feel that the best remaining option for them is to physically force miscarriage, or to murder the women they have impregnated.
This comment was written by justin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 7:26 am
And here comes the threats!
This comment was written by B.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 7:56 am
That wasn’t a threat. It was speculation based upon observation of other common human behaviors. Some people turn to terrorist actions when they feel powerless to affect change in normal political ways. I don’t think it’s such a stretch to imagine that some men might turn to violence to escape legal entanglements they feel they otherwise could not get out of.
This comment was written by justin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 8:22 am
The only reason I said “is” for males and “should be” for females is because choice for women is legally enshrined while choice for men isn’t.
The “pro-choice ethic” you refer to isn’t an ethic of the real-life pro-choice movement. Pro-choice has never meant “she who has less choice should bear vastly, vastly less responsibility.”
What I am saying is that the “pro-choice” movement is not really all that pro-choice. They are, more accurately, pro-abortion rights.
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 8:30 am
And even in a discussion about “choice for men”, male contraception never really gets on the radar because men still think in terms of a pregnancy as being the woman’s responsibility.
If C4M supporters were really concerned about causing pregnancies they don’t want, they’d be screaming for better male contraception.
To be honest, contraception has never been something I have thought about much in my personal life, because I hve abstained my whole life.
Buyt as a principle, I definitely think that male contraception is a good idea. (And when I get married (if I get married) I would love to have the option. Anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to support it?
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 9:06 am
But as a principle, I definitely think that male contraception is a good idea. (And when I get married (if I get married) I would love to have the option. Anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to support it?
This site has quite a bit of information.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 9:22 am
This assumes that a woman isn’t a “parent” when she is carrying an unborn child.
Couldn’t an advocate of abortion choice for men parrot the exact same kind of rhetoric?
“When those against allowing men to decide if a woman should have an abortion say a man’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, what they really mean is “I want to deny you your medically viable options (like forcing a woman to have an abortion).” There’s no reason except for laws against forced abortion, that a man can’t force a woman to have an abortion.”
To me it seems to assume what it is trying to prove.
This comment was written by Jivin J.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 9:40 am
Justin,
Men already kill their pregnant wives and girlfriends. Also, some women who feel that they lack the financial resources to raise children are known to kill them within 24 hours of their birth.
It simply isn’t logical for a man to be able to tell a woman to keep or abort a baby, because either option is invasive and affects her health, not his.
As far as legal rights to child support go, those rights belong to the child, not to the woman. Why should she be able to waive the child’s right to support by the simple act of giving birth?
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 9:59 am
Word, Ismone. You beat me to the punch on that point.
In fact, the more restrictions there are on abortion and the more legal tools a woman has to leav an abusive relationship, the more men murder the women who are pregnant with their (putative) children. I don’t have the stats at my fingertips right now, but the Washington Post did a series in 2003 or 2004 about the uptick in murders of pregnant women, and I think one of the stories had a timeline (availability of the pill, anti-stalking laws, etc.) on there that showed spikes after different woman-empowering events.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 11:04 am
Uh oh. Now we’ll have the prolifers coming here to tell us abortion leads to murder.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 11:16 am
Why is it that no matter how many times we say things like this
No one pays any attention and still spews out shit like this?
You are NOT paying the woman for some option she chose! Why is this so hard to understand?! You are paying CHILD SUPPORT, that is, taking care of the child you created!!!!
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 11:39 am
Part of my problem with ‘c4m’ is that I don’t believe that men/courts will actually ‘enforce’ paper abortions, and I’m not even sure the should:
What if a man chooses to have a ‘paper abortion.’ What if the woman gives birth and then he changes his mind and wants to be a father?
(And say, for the sake of argument, that he’s really a decent guy and not a complete asshole.)
Should the mother then close him out of the child’s life on principle? Even if it’s not good for the child? Would society (let alone the courts) really support her in that? What if she wants him to be involved? Would the courts force her not to let him know the child? To not accept support for the child?
The absolute most that any court could require from him is back child support. If he could afford to pay it. And say he couldn’t?
And then say the child grows up happy and strong and one day either or the child or the father seek each other out? Should that be forbidden by law?
My hunch is that all a paper abortion would end up meaning is a right to defer any form of child support (emotional/financial/logistical) until/unless the man ends up wanting to be part of the child’s life.
As opposed to a real abortion, which has real, irreversible consequences.
It just doesn’t make sense…
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December 14th, 2005 at 11:43 am
Ismone;
I wasn’t addressing the issue of men legally forcing women to get abortions.
As I understand it, that’s exactly what she does when she decides to have a baby without the involvement of a man beyond acting as a sperm donor (or at least that seems to have been the original plan, lawsuits to the contrary notwithstanding). It’s not exactly precedent, but it’s similar.
Lee;
Undoubtedly, but (A) I am not arguing in favor of restricting abortion rights or the ability of women to leave relationships (any), and (B) when it comes to pregnant women being murdered as they try to leave abusive relationships it’s not clear to me that the man murders her with the primary intent of evading child support obligations. Did he kill her because she was pegnant, or because she left? Different motivators.
This comment was written by justin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 11:52 am
Some arguments are similar to pro-life arguments, but that doesn’t meant that they are wrong. By having sex, we do accept that pregnancy is one possible result. If that is the result, then there are three options available; abortion, adoption, or raising the child. Men obviously don’t have the option of abortion, since they are not the pregnant one. I believe that, in most states, both parents have to give their consent to adoption. If the father wishes, he can deny permission, sue for custody, and then get child support from the mother.
It seems to me that the C4M argument treats this as merely a dispute between a man and a woman. It isn’t. There’s a third party involved–the child. As a society, we believe that children are entitled to support from their parents. I don’t think that the financial hardship of child support outweighs the rights of the child to support from both parents.
This comment was written by Snowe.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 1:46 pm
Justin,
Sorry if I mischaracterized your argument about men’s choice. But if the man can choose to withhold child support, that does give the woman an incentive to get an abortion because he wants one, which is also problematic if she is poor.
About the murder point, I thought you were arguing that men would murder women for not getting an abortion. Even if that is true, I don’t see why that matters. Men who murder usually do it because they want to control the woman’s actions–that is the profile of DV perpetratros–but that is a psychopathology, not a justification for social policy.
You’re right that the woman is choosing to give birth, but the child had no part in the decision. So why should the child’s right to be supported by biological parents be affected by the mother’s unilateral decision? I guess it’s an agency question.
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Amp: So what’s your point?”
In an earlier thread you stated your position more concisely (3-17-05), “Both men and women should have every reproductive choice biologically possible.” Clearly it is biologically possible for a man to walk away and clearly you don’t support that; in fact, you file the very idea under “anti-feminist zaniness.”
To answer your question, I don’t have a point but I didn’t start the thread. Society already gives you what you say you want. Was it your goal to mock the illogic of it while feigning support? Just curious.
This comment was written by Pasatiempo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 3:36 pm
I guess I think of “reproductive choices” as those that happen before the child is born; after the child is born it’s a question of caretaking choices, not reproduction.
You’re interpreting “every reproductive choice biologically possible” to include what’s done after birth takes place, but that’s a ridiculous interpretation of what I said. “Clearly it is biologically possible for a woman to murder her born child”; but it’s no contradiction to say that I support women’s rights to all their biologially possible reproductive choices, but nonetheless don’t support her right to murder her one-year-old.
A fairer reading than yours would acknowlege that I didn’t mean “every reproductive choice biologically possible” to include things done to the child post-birth. There is no contradiction in my position; you’re just playing wordgames.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
By the way, studies tend to show that women who have more options for leaving an abusive mate are less likely to be murdered. I don’t know if that’s true of pregnant women or not, however.
Studies also show that the more child support non-custodial parents have to pay, the lower the rate of single motherhood. So I wasn’t just speculating about that; it’s a known fact that reducing (or, as C4M advocates would prefer, entirely eliminating) child support will increase single motherhood.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
Ismone;
I know this will sound insensitive, but I don’t particularly see this as a problem. To me that’s like saying she has an incentive to abort if she can’t force someone to pay who never wanted the child in the first place.
Now that is problematic, in the sense that the poor have terrible health care options all around, and that health care coverage must include a full spectrum of reproductive procedures to be good enough. But that’s another issue.
Only if they could not legally avoid paying child support. And I was presenting it as something to consider, not necessarily saying that it would justify social policy.
Well as I said, the child’s rights are already affected when the father is a sperm donor. Also, I think that a unilateral decision made to have a child should not be able to force another person into being responsible for that child and therefore places the greater responsibility for the child upon the mother.
How about this: a child is entitled to be supported by any parents willing in its creation. This premise would place responsibility directly on those who make or positively contribute to the child-having decision.
It would allow for men unwilling to become fathers to opt-out of responsibility for the child, since they do not contribute positively, whereas men who willingly become fathers would continue to be responsible after the dissolution of the relationship by virtue of the fact that they did.
It covers the issue of single mothers beoming pregnant through sperm donor procedures. It’s also more gender-equitable in the case of, say, two lesbians who want to become mothers. As it stands now, the non-impregnated woman generally is not legally liable for child support, which would change under my proposal since she would have been complicit in the creation of the child, even though she did not give birth to it.
This comment was written by justin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 5:36 pm
“How about this: a child is entitled to be supported by any parents willing in its creation.”
All heterosexual intercourse carries the risk of pregnancy; we haven’t found a foolproof method of contraception yet. Given that the hypothetical men in question were willing in the creation of the child, the child is then entitled to financial support from the non-custodial parent.
This comment was written by Snowe.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
Well, at least not a reversible method.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
Justin,
Here’s sort of the inverse of your position. What if a woman could have a man sign papers before his biological child was born giving up any parental rights (visitation, custody rights, legal support obligatoins) and threaten to abort the child if he didn’t sign them? Would that be fair? (Notice I said “sort-of” inverse–it isn’t really the inverse but I’m trying to create a Hobson’s choice for the dad who wants to be a dad.)
I can see how you don’t consider the lack of social programs a problem. On the other hand, right now our society tends to put a lot of responsibility on the individual, not social services, so I don’t see why one genetic parent should be able to opt out of that responsibility if the child is born. If we wanted to change the system, such that single parents had access to affordable health and childcare, and public education was adequate, I would have much less of a problem with no child support. Basically, the buck has to stop somewhere, and I don’t see any moral reason why it should stop with pro-life women or other women who are unwilling to abort a specific pregnancy.
I’ll leave out the murder discussion b/c I think we’ve both covered that point enough.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the child’s rights are already affected when the father is a sperm donor”–if you could elaborate, I would appreciate it.
The fact is, these “sperm donor” men aren’t unwilling when it comes to having sex, and we all know children are a natural consequence of that act. If a man never wanted to become a parent, ever, and chooses not to have a vasectomy I have no sympathy for him. If a woman committed some kind of fraud to get pregnant, I don’t think the father should have to pay child support. But men shouldn’t be allowed to treat an abortion as a default position that they are entitled to (or are entitled to the financial consequences of.) Most women give birth.
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
Amp: you’re just playing wordgames>
Amp, you adamantly support a woman’s choice (as do I) but then say that a birth “takes place” as if the choice had nothing whatsoever to do with the birth. Then you suggest that murdering a one-year-old and opting out of fatherhood are both “things done to a child post-birth” and I would understand that had I given you a “fairer reading.” And you accuse me of “wordgames?”
Let’s be more thorough and complete the timeline. First conception, then the woman’s choice, then birth. True, the man is equally responsible for conception but that action is entirely superceded by the woman’s choice.
This comment was written by Pasatiempo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 6:46 pm
That’s only true if you accept abortion as the default position, and the birth of the child as some other option the woman has. I can’t believe we have to say this, but pregnancy naturally ends with the birth of a child; abortion is only an option because the woman’s bodily autonomy is at stake, and it’s only available for a limited amount of time. Even when done early in the pregnancy, it still involves physical risks for the woman. In the eyes of most people, a 12 weed old fetus is not equivalent to a child. I don’t see how it is morally defensible to abandon a child that your actions helped to create, because you “don’t feel like it”.
This comment was written by Snowe.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 8:11 pm
People have responsibility for the children they create. People should have the bodily autonomy to control their own reproductive system (including abortion, vasectomy and abstinence). This is the pro-choice position.
The right to unilaterally renege on ones responsibilities towards children one creates has nothing to do with the pro-choice position.
The right to mutually agree that one (or both) partners will be considered to have nothing to do with the child doesn’t have anything to do with the pro-choice position, but it seems like a possibly valid right. It currently exists in sperm banks (in which the father abandons all rights to any children produced, and the mother agrees to this by purchasing the sperm) and in adoption (in which both parents agree to abandon all rights and responsibilities). Having both parents agree that one parent is unfit, and that that parent will abandon their rights and responsibilities does not seem like a completely unreasonable proposal, although it would likely tend to be unfair in practice (since it would almost always be the mother who gets stuck with the child, and all it would likely require to compel agreement would be that the potential father become a sufficiently intolerable bastard that the potential mother would agree that she and the child would be better off without his further personal or financial participation). Possibly, such an agreement should only be possible if arranged prior to potentially reproductive sex (in which both partners agree before hand that any resulting children will be the sole responsibility of one or the other parent). Possibly, there are sufficient problems with that as well that it shouldn’t be allowed either. I don’t know if such a contract would currently be permissible. Presumably something similar is used in known-donor sperm donation arrangements, but those probably use the third parent adoption rules. I don’t know if you can voluntarily abandon your parental responsibilities without another party agreeing to pick them up.
A mutual agreement to deprive one parent of all rights and responsibilities already exists in sperm bank arrangements, so for consistency, one should probably be willing to support additional types of equivalent agreements so long as they are well designed and lacking in negative side effects. However, this is entirely tangential to the reproductive bodily autonomy issues involved in a pro-choice position.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
December 14th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
Justin said — To me that’s like saying she has an incentive to abort if she can’t force someone to pay who never wanted the child in the first place.
Excuse me? If a man ‘never wanted a child in the first place’, he can abstain from sex, or use a condom. True, condoms are not 100% effective - but of all the children born that the male does not want to help support, those that are the result of condom failure are probably a fraction of 1%. It takes two people to make a baby; he can damn well take steps to prevent that occurance.
And before you shout ‘entrapment’ - as in, “she claimed to be on the pill but she lied” - that can also be prevented if Mr. Not-Willing-to-be-a-Father takes a bit of responsibility and uses a condom.
You seem to be equating child support with the mother living high on the hog. Get real! It’s expensive to raise a child; both parents should share in that responsibility. Child support is not a free ride; in the best of circumstances, it barely approaches 50% of what the child will need. Which means that the woman would be better off financially not to have the child, as she wouldn’t be spending her share of the child’s necessary expenses. If she does decide to have the child, it indicates that she considered the child more important than money — but suplemental money from the father is needed to give that child the life it deserves.
she has an incentive to abort if she can’t force someone to pay
In your eyes, apparently, abortion is no more significant than a hangnail. Bull! There are a lot of factors involved, and it’s a difficult decision, whichever way the woman decides. There are also some dangers involved in either choice. But because it is her body, it’s arrogant for a man to want to make it for her, simply to avoid paying money. His choice occurred earlier - the choice NOT to use a condom - so now he can just suck it up and deal.
This comment was written by StarWatcher.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 4:07 am
If you think of it as adoption through one person giving up their parental rights, does that change your view? I don’t see why it would be any different from other forms of adoption.
I actually believe the inverse example as well, I believe women should be able to keep the child, and decide they don’t want anything to do with the biological father. Basically I don’t think biology is not that important to who parents a child.
I don’t think abortion is just about a pregnancy, I think a lot of women make decisions about whether or not to have an abortion on the basis of whether or not they can handle another child. BitchPhD makes some really good arguments that abortion is often a moral choice, one that comes from an analysis of the situation a woman lives in, including her other children, her other responsibilities, whether she feels she’d make a good parent at that time.
I think deciding that you would not be a good parent, and therefore deciding not to be a parent, whether through abortion (for women) or adoption (for either sex), can be the right decision to make, and people should be able to make that decision.
The last thing any child needs is a so-called parent who doesn’t want to parent, you raise all the emotional expectations on someone who is never going to deliver. I was randomly reading a parenting magazine while in a waiting room recently and a number of women had written in saying “the baby’s father doesn’t want anything to do with the kid, what do I do?” I couldn’t help but think the only answer was to stop raising hope now, because you can’t change people, you can’t make them what you want. You can’t make someone into a parent if they don’t want to be one.
I’m not sure it’s that big an issue, I think that once you have elected to become a parent you shouldn’t be able to give that up. The vast majority of men who don’t, or don’t want to, pay chld support make this decision after they have committed to parenting the child, and that should not be an option. I just believe that parenthood should be optional, not just for the parents’ sake, but for the child’s.
This comment was written by reddecca.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 5:11 am
Ismone;
People have the right to reproduce with anyone who is willing to reproduce with them, under whatever conditions they set on the act of reproduction, and they do not have the right to coerce another person into reproduction if that other person does not want to reproduce with them, or does not want to reproduce under those conditions. So yes, I think that situation you’ve posited is fair. The solution for the man who wants to become a father is to find a more appropriate women to have a child with.
On the issue of social support, it would be nice to have a better security net, but that’s not what my argument is based upon. The presence or lack of social assistance doesn’t make the difference for me.
As to sperm donors affecting children’s rights, if anonymous sperm donors waive rights and obligations to the children created with their sperm when they donate it (and that’s supposed to be what happens), then the fact of whether or not a child is entitled to support from two parents is a function of whether the impregnated woman is or is not married, and if she isn’t, the support the child is entitled to is halved.
Children (or to be more accurate pregnancies) are an occasional natural consequence of sex, but as we can see from the realities of abortion rights, they are not a necessary legal consequence. All contraceptive methods can fail, which is partly why I haven’t been making any references to contraception. If the argument that goes “If you didn’t want to have a child, you shouldn’t have had sex” is not valid for women, then it isn’t valid for men either.
Charles;
I’m sorry, but you are not the arbiter of what is and is not the pro-choice position. The argument you mention above is clearly a sub-class of the pro-choice pisition given that it is being made by pro-choicers. That the argument does not hinge upon personal bodily autonomy does not make it any less about choice, just less about the body. It’s to be expected considering the biology of the situation.
Starwatcher:
I don’t find the argument from contraception acceptable, as I noted above to Ismone. I don’t accept it as an anti-choice argument against women, and I don’t accept it as a sexist legal inequity when used by women against men.
No, I don’t seem to be doing that. I haven’t made any mention whatsoever of living standards of women receiving child support.
You should stop trying to look through my eyes; that’s twice now you’ve gotten my opinions wrong.
This comment was written by justin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 6:23 am
If both the man and the woman agreed beforehand that they didn’t want a child, both used contraception, a pregnancy resulted, and the woman declined to abort, then I think the man is justified in wanting to be released from child support.
But any man who doesn’t seek to control his own fertility and doesn’t determine the attitude toward an unwanted pregnancy by the woman with whom he is having sex has tacitly agreed to accept the responsibility of supporting any child that might result.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 7:56 am
AndiF: “If both the man and the woman agreed beforehand that they didn’t want a child, both used contraception, a pregnancy resulted, and the woman declined to abort, then I think the man is justified in wanting to be released from child support.”
That seems like it would result in high transaction costs. What constitutes “an agreement beforehand”? Need there be a contract to that extent before every sexual encounter? A standing one? Could it be oral? What constitutes valid consideration–some additional benefit gained or detriment suffered by each party–for the modification of that contract? Instead of prosecuting men who slack off on child support, we’d fill the courts with cases pouring over these exact details.
This comment was written by Mary.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 8:03 am
Attacking a woman to cause a miscarriage is a “reproductive choice” that occurs before birth yet I doubt that Amp supports that legality of that choice.
This comment was written by Jivin J.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 9:02 am
That seems like it would result in high transaction costs. What constitutes “an agreement beforehand”? Need there be a contract to that extent before every sexual encounter? A standing one? Could it be oral? What constitutes valid consideration”“some additional benefit gained or detriment suffered by each party”“for the modification of that contract? Instead of prosecuting men who slack off on child support, we’d fill the courts with cases pouring over these exact details.
I’m not arguing for a specific legal approach; I’m describing how I see the “opt-out” choice being just or not just. The only solution I see to the problem is for men to take more responsibility for preventing unwanted pregnancies. The more proactive men are about this, the fewer circumstances we will have where there is a pregnant woman who doesn’t want to get an abortion with a “father” who has no interest in supporting the child, financially or emotionally. If I want to encourage men to be proactive, then I should support a position which would encourage men to act in ways that I think are promote that. I don’t believe that most men entering into sexual relationships think about pregnancy at all — they continue to think that pregnancy is the woman’s problem and only concern themselves about it after the fact. Changing that attitude seems to me to be the heart of the matter.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 9:41 am
?!
This is absurd. That’s not a “reproductive choise”, that’s assault.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 9:56 am
excellent point
This comment was written by lompyville.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
Attacking a woman to cause a miscarriage is a “reproductive choice” that occurs before birth yet I doubt that Amp supports that legality of that choice.
Following your logic, we could also say that about kidnapping and castrating men, but you’ll hear no feminist support that as a viable, reasonable, or moral “choice.” Since it’s not a choice, it’s an assault.
This comment was written by Sheelzebub.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
I agree that it would be assault and should be illegal but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a “reproductive choice” if we’re using that term so loosely. For example, if we’re using the exact meaning - abortion is hardly a “reproductive choice” since the man and woman have already reproduced. The fetus has yet to be born but that doesn’t mean s/he doesn’t exist and the couple haven’t reproduced.
This comment was written by Jivin J.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
I disagree. “Reproduce”, according to my dictionary is “To produce offspring.” Until there are offspring, there is no reproduction.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 2:32 pm
Casey,
But you’ve yet to show why a fetus isn’t “offspring?” Does one not become “offspring” until one completely emerges from the womb?
Reproduction is defined by Merriam Webster as “the act or process of reproducing; specifically : the process by which plants and animals give rise to offspring and which fundamentally consists of the segregation of a portion of the parental body by a sexual or an asexual process and its subsequent growth and differentiation into a new individual”
By your definition birth would be the only act of reproduction which doesn’t seem to work.
This comment was written by Jivin J.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 2:43 pm
One more time: a man can’t veto a woman’s control over her body, and a woman can’t sign away a child’s right to child support. Courts have ruled that even fathers who were minors when they impregnated older women can’t be exempted from supporting their children. Why is this difficult to understand? It’s the old your rights end at the tip of my nose situation. You have a right to control your reproduction, but not my body. Not materially supporting your walking around on this earth offspring violates the right all children have to support from their parents. In the man-woman-child triumverate there is a conflict of interests, and certain interests trump others. Sorry, Justin, you seem like a real prince, but your interests in the situation of an unwanted pregnancy are trumped first by the woman’s bodily integrity, and then by the child’s inviolate right to support. That’s actually about as fair a thing as I can think of.
This comment was written by Elena.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
That’s the problem right there, isn’t it? “Fetuses” aren’t “individuals.” But the anti-choicers insist that they are.
This comment was written by Mary.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
Elena writes: One more time: a man can’t veto a woman’s control over her body, and a woman can’t sign away a child’s right to child support.
This is not the reality of the situation. Child support is awarded to the mother, and is most often sanctioned by the courts at the mother’s behest, i.e. she files for the support. And though the money is supposed to go to the child, the checks are made out to the mother. Ultimately, the money is hers. The same is true in the reverse when fathers receive (rarely) child support. Technically, it is his money. The child, even as a teenager, is in no position to ask for or directly receive the money. That is a legal technicality, though in principle the money “belongs” to the child.
This comment was written by jaketk.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
I don’t believe a fetus can be classified as a person (”one”) until they are born, if that is what you are asking.
Merriam-Webster defines offspring as:
1 a : the progeny of an animal or plant : YOUNG b : CHILD
Of course, whether a fetus is a person or not IS under debate, but I didn’t think that was the debate we were having here. After all, someone who thinks “Attacking a woman to cause a miscarriage is a “reproductive choice”” doesn’t sound like a pro-lifer. I could be wrong, maybe attacking women to cause miscarriages is totally acceptable because it’s the man choosing it instead of the woman…
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
Hello?! The checks are made to the parent because what would the kid do with the money?? My parents didn’t just give me money and say “take care of yourself”. The parent uses the money to care for the kid, ie, food, shelter, clothing. Unless the kid is sleeping naked and hungry on the back porch, the money given to the mother is spent on the child. The money is NOT hers or the child’s, in the end it is the landlord’s, utility company’s, grocery store’s, gas station’s, government’s, department store’s, and babysitter’s money.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
I’m not entirely sure that a father that doesn’t want to be involved is worth the effort of wringing child support from. That is just my personal position. I was a single mother before I remarried, and me ex-husband’s involvment with his daughters couldn’t even be fairly classified as “part-time”.
I’ve done fine without the nominal child support he would have been ordered to pay had I decided the expense and effort to obtain it woth the effort. The norm in the country is for the mother to take the children with her, or in the case of an unmarried couple for her to keep the child with her. I work with several single fathers, who took sole custody after their wives walked out. Only one of those pays regular child support.
I advocate choice for women, and what is in the emotional best interest of the child. I don’t think that a legal relationship with a person that truly wanted to abort you before you were born and resents his obligation makes for a good parent or male role model.
I’m not sure what the answer is, but it would seem to me that biology has decided for us. Women get pregnant, have to remain pregnant for forty weeks, go through the pain and risk of labor and delivery. A man simply passes on his sperm and semen through intercourse. I would advocate if a man knows that he doesn’t want children ever (or doesn’t want anymore children) then he should have a vasectomy. If a woman knows that she doesn’t ever want children (or want more children) then she should have a tubal ligation.
Barring those two procedures, there is a risk of impregnation that comes with sex. The best time to discuss feelings about the possibility is before intercourse.
This comment was written by Mendy.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
Not everyone is so lucky. I know motehers who even the small amount of child support the fathers reluctantly give helps, and also mothers who have to move in with THEIR mothers because they couldn’t get the father to pay child support. (and not everyone has parents willing to help like this.) Hard to have a job when you have kids and no one to take care of them while you’re at work, and hard to pay for childcare when you don’t have a job.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
December 15th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
My Mother was in that boat. She moved in with her mother when my parents divorced. I didn’t have it easy. I’ve worked three jobs at a time before, but I did take advantage of what government programs there were. These helped with childcare expenses and also paid for starting a college education.
I’ve worked as a maid where I brought my babies to work with me, and also worked the day I two days after delivering my second child. But, in my situation (and it isn’t to be considered normative) I worked harder with four to support before the divorce, than just three after the divorce. I knew if he wouldn’t work while we were married, there would be precious reason for him to do so after the divorce. So, I did what I had to do to continue to provide a decent life for my children.
It wasn’t ever easy, and a lot of what I did wasn’t fair but then I never expected life to be fair. It is a woman’s choice, because it is a woman that must bear the child. That is my belief, but my children have an “almost” father, and honestly they’d be better off without a father at all. (My personal opinion)
This comment was written by Mendy.Report this comment to the moderators
December 16th, 2005 at 8:28 am
Do you understand the difference between “is” and “should be”?
Love the little word games, Amp. When someone phrases something poorly, it’s always good to use that as the basis for your argument. (As I said before, I used “is” inb one case and “should be” in another because the C4M position is not enshrined in law as the right-to-an-abortion position is.)
No feminist is saying - and I’m certainly not saying - that a man’s choice as to whether or not to obligate himself should be before pregnancy begins.
You absolutely are saying that a man’s choice as to whether or not to obligate himself should be before pregnancy begins, in that you want this position enforced by law.
I don’t think that’s the way it should be. I didn’t create the two-sex reproduction system, and I don’t think the two-sex reproductive system is fair or just. (If it were up to me, we’d all be intersexed.)
What a conincidence! I’m all for the right to an abortion, if reality allowed the fetus to survive it. I’m all for a cradle-to-grave welfare state, too, as long as reality is such that the government can provide it without taxation of any kind.
Your statement is a nice little distraction. Your little bit about how you would rather not have a two-tier reproduction system does not address the real issue. We can all claim to take positions we don’t believe in by saying that we would support it if reality were different.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world in which “choice for men” is another way of saying “screw children over, because all that matters is what’s good for dad.”
If the father chooses the “not to pay” option before the child is born (more specifically, while the mother still has the option to have an abortion) then the women has the right to choose whether she wants to bring the child into the world without child support, or to abort it, with full knowledge of the fact that if she brings it into the world, she and the child are on their own. If the child will suffer from lack of support, why isn’t that her fault for choosing to have the child? Her choice, her responsibility, her problem.
Everyone seems to assume that “choice for men” is “abandoning the child once it is born.” Actually, I was thinking of the man choosing not to be financially obligated before the child was born, and then the female has to make her decision about the baby with knowledge of the male’s level of involvement. What you want is for the female to make her choice with the knowledge that she can force the man to pay for it.
Even [if we had a welfare state that supported children], I have doubts about C4M, simply because I think the effect of C4M, in practice, would be to discourage men from using birth control, leading to a rise in single mother families among women and girls who aren’t really prepared to be mothers. So even if children’s material interests were covered, I’m still not certain that the increased unfairness to children would be justified by increased freedom for men.
You know, you are saying that we should restrict the man’s rights in order to make him the gatekeeper of society’s morals. I don’t mind that, per se, but it seems a little inconsistent, as you always thought it was a bad idea to use gays as the gatekeepers of morality in the gay marriage debate, and I get the impression that you dislike the idea of women being restricted in order to make them the gatekeepers of morality for society (I know a lot of feminists talk about that being a bad thing, if you don’t have a problem with it, I apologize).
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
December 16th, 2005 at 2:19 pm
Elena;
I don’t know how much of your latest comment was directed at me, but at no point have I been arguing for mandated abortions or for prevention of abortion. Also, women do waive financial support rights for the child when becoming single mothers through sperm donor procedures. Nor will I accept that men who were legally raped as minors ought to be responsible for the children who result any more than I will accept that women who are raped should be. And finally, I do not accept that womemn oguht to be allowed to force men into legal fatherhood. I cannot imagine how you can consider this state of law “fair”.
This comment was written by justin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 17th, 2005 at 12:16 am
Justin,
I see your point about sperm donor conception now, and here’s how I’d distinguish it.
A woman (or couple) goes to a sperm donor with the express intention of having a child. This choice before the fact distinguishes the two cases. When a man and woman become involved in a sexual relationship, if having a child is the express purpose, both should be required to pay child support, of course. If they are just having sex, with a specific intent to NOT procreate, I don’t see why the legal/financial burden should fall on the biological mother just because she is opposed to abortion in general or in this specific case. Childbirth is a natural outcome of sex, both parties got the benefit of sex, both conceived the child, and so why can one just up and walk away. And why at or before birth? Why not at any time? Well, honey, Johnnie’s becoming a pain in the ass, so let’s give him up for foster care. Or you can just keep him and he’ll be just your kid.
I know I keep flogging social systems, and here’s why. Kids aren’t born in a vacuum–we live in a society and within a governmental system. We may want to change that system, but we presumptively don’t want to devolve into a state of nature. So it comes down to a question of values. Do we value children’s opportunities? Do we value the perpetuation of our society (again, in one form or another)? If we do, does denying children child support from biological fathers meet these goals?
Does it burden women because they happen to be the gender that carries out the biological function of giving birth? Ah, but here is where your legal argument comes in. But all the same, if continuing the species (and society and government) is valued, we want to value childbearing. We want to encourage it to be done in a manner that is safe, and that maximizes the potential of all of these children so that our society is strong. It is no accident that every first world country has a strong, fairly mobile middle class, and no third-world country does. Also, first world countries are characterized by women’s participation in the workforce as well. So if a woman, by virtue of becoming a mother at all, has to give up a decent living for herself and her child, and for those who are capable, has to give up educational opportunities so she can support the child, we create a non-sustainable system. (At least by our modern lights, especially in America, of what an acceptable standard of living is.) So her economic output is diminished, and her child’s ability to achieve is capped as well. Not so good in my world view.
Sorry if this is a bit disjointed, I’ve been studying and listening to rush and it is two in the morning and I should crash.
Ismone
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
December 17th, 2005 at 6:30 am
Ismone;
If you and I are searching around a store for a particularly hard-to-find item, and then I give up and go home, the burden does not fall upon you by any kind of mandate. It’s entirely your own choice whether or not to keep looking. Similarly, if a man extricates himself from parenthood of a jointly created fetus, then no one is forcing the woman to bear the child and become its mother. It is her choice whether or not to do so, and if she does, the only burden she is under is one which is a direct result of her decision.
But you shouldn’t be able to bill me for your time looking for that item, and women should not be able to bill men for respnsibilities that only the women are accepting.
This is an argument often used by anti-choice folks, and I don’t accept it. First of all, it’s pregnancy that is an occasional natural outcome of sex, and childbirth is only another occasional natural outcome of pregnancy. That’s a whole nother process in the mix with its own set of complications which one can accept or not. Secondly, the “natural outcome” of most activity or work is death, but does that convince you to just keep doing work until you pass out and die? No; we interfere with the natural process by eating and drinking, and thereby continuing our lives. It’s not eating that’s the natrural outcome of activity, it’s hunger. Eating is the choice. It is choice, and not slavish obediance to cause and effect, which is what life is made of.
Why can women abort their pregnancies? Women who abort are more than just walking away, they’re nullifying the whole situation. And we defend their right to do so because they are not slaves to biology, they are beings of choice which can transcend that biology. Abortion releases a woman from the biological consequences of pregnancy and childbirth, and also from the social and legal consequences of having a child. Adoption and safe harbor laws just do the latter. The men in question cannot have the right of choice over the abortion procedure, because the pregnancy is not in their bodies. However they can have the right to release themselves from the social and legal consequences of having a child if our social/legal structure is not set up to deny it of them. Currently, women have options A1(abortion, which includes A2) and A2, and men have neither. Allowing them A2 (legal disentanglement) is about as close to equality before the law as we can get in this situation, the biological factes being what they are.
Well, there are “safe harbor” laws in some places which allow women to leave their babies with approved social worker “go-betweens” if the child is under 72 hours old. So even now there’s no point of no return set at birth.
But there is a climax in the process of creating a child, and at some point the father changing his mind and backing out would be analgous to breaking a contract. I’m not sure what that point would be in legal terms, or how this affects situations where the man does not even know he impregnated someone, but that’s a civil court issue. I’m not going to think about that right now.
You’re right, it does come down to a question of values. But it is a question of relative values, not absolutes. I value children’s opportunities, but I also value adults’ freedoms. When those values clash, which prevail? Sometimes children, sometimes adults. Depends on the circumstances, and when I argue for C4M, you’re seeing the results of my value systems in this one specific instance. If we were arguing child labor laws, it would be different.
When you argue for social support of mothers, you’re not wrong, but I think the argument’s a bit too simple. Encouragement of child-rearing does not necessitate mandatory child support from unwilling fathers, encouragement of childbirth in an over populated world may be harmful to all of the children involved anyway, and lastly still no one in this argument is forcing women to give birth to and raise children on their own.
On another note, I must say I’m kind of shocked to see you bring up the issue of perpetuating society and government as factors of this issue. Personally, I do not value the continuation of civilization and government, but it had not occurred to me that my stance on them might be a foundation for my stance on C4M. It’s something I’ll have to think about, so thanks.
This comment was written by justin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 17th, 2005 at 9:14 am
Justin,
Of any society or government, or just the current one or ones?
I see where you are coming from, and I think this is just one of those “agree-to-disagree” things. I think the tie-breaker is the pregnancy–either carrying, or choosing not to carry, a child has moral and health implications for the person carrying. I think being pro-choice is not just respecting the right to abortion, but the right to give birth as well. I’m for both choices. So I don’t think the fact that the woman may choose to have an abortion means that the man may choose to give up his legal obligations.
I don’t think your shopping analogy quite holds, because we’re assuming neither person was seeking to get pregnant in the first place, so they’re not “looking” and the woman has to get abdominal surgery to get out of the situation, so she can’t just stop. I think what you are actually doing is returning biology to its historicially favored position–you got knocked up, you deal with it.
With eating, we all need to eat to live, so again, I don’t see the analogy. I’m not saying that because something is a possible natural outcome, it is morally good, I’m saying that when it is the actual natural outcome, it needs to be dealt with in the real world with law and social policy. And there is no “unfair surprise” argument to be made. Like I don’t think someone should be shocked if they stop eating and drop dead.
But yes, I think you are right that some of these arguments mirror pro-life ones. And I’m kinda okay with that, because I see where they’re coming from too. If I had the same reverence for fetal life that they do, I’d be with them. I just don’t. But I’m not thrilled about third term or late second-term abortions, either.
No, it isn’t forcing them to give birth, but it is forcing them and the child to bear the consequences of that birth alone, which I do think harms children’s ability to succeed. At the cost of the adult’s freedom? Perhaps. But again, you guys are just as smart as we are about the whole conception thing. So no unfair surprise.
And thank you for the thoughtful discussion. It’s nice to be able to have a civil argument.
Ismone
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
December 17th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
Justin, you have a very self serving and unseemly view of what is fair. You seem to think that hardship for you= unfair, no matter that much greater hardship is inflicted on a man’s own child and the child’s mother in the scenario you are advocating.
I actually believe that sperm and egg donation are unethical, but point taken, they do allow parents to waive support on behalf of their children. However, your view that a pregnant woman can choose abortion or non support according to the wishes of her partner is about the clearest example of an unethical, immoral and illogical stance as I have ever seen in the whole spectrum of reproductive polemics. With apologies to the adopted among us, you are advocating the financial, and presumably affective abandonment of a man’s own child and the child’s mother, and using a woman’s natural control of her own body as a tool to do this.
This comment was written by Elena.Report this comment to the moderators
December 17th, 2005 at 2:20 pm
Elena,
There are those among us who wishes there was a way to sever ties to our ex partners and the biological fathers of our children. My daughter’s step-father is a much better father than their biological Dad, and no amount of money can make up for the hurt he has caused them. In my mind, and in my case, it would have been easier if he could have legally disentagled himself from our children as well as our marriage. That way my husband could adopt the girls, and the ex would be free from any and all “obligation” to our family at all.
It has been my experience that a parent that doesn’t want to be involved and is forced, does more harm to the children in the long run, than those that are raised by only one parent. I’m not speaking in terms of financial difficulties, but rather in emotional damage and damage done to the child’s idea of self-worth at a young age.
This comment was written by Mendy.Report this comment to the moderators
December 17th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
By the way, I’d like to thank AndiF (comment 50).
I’ve posted about the male contraception site on my blog.
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
December 18th, 2005 at 12:16 pm
Mendy:
Fair enough. But the man is your children’s father, and that relationship is separate from you and your husband, for good or bad. This has nothing to do with your case, but I happen to agree (and I cringe to say this) with some FRA’s that many mothers don’t respect the importance of fatherhood. A woman wanting to move her children far from their father for her new husband’s job appalls me, but I know that’s not what you’re saying. Anyway, the fact that some parents are negligent doesn’t alter the underlying principle that children have a right, which is legal and moral by any decent person’s standards, to the care and support of both parents. To use another underlying principle of a woman’s bodily integrity to nullify a man’s care and support of his children is so odious that I can’t believe there’s a person out there who thinks this is a reasonable point of view.
This comment was written by Elena.Report this comment to the moderators
December 18th, 2005 at 12:25 pm
but point taken, they do allow parents to waive support on behalf of their children
No. They legally decouple biological parenthood from legal parenthood. A sperm donor was never the “father” of his children, in the eyes of the law. He never had any parental rights to waive. (You can’t waive rights you don’t have.)
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
December 18th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Elena:
I understand the argument you are making, and I think it is valid in most cases. However, there are cases like mine where the children are loved, cared for, and supported by two parents. Only, one of the parents isn’t biologically related to the child.
I don’t keep my ex from seeing the girls, and I have a wonderful relationship with his parents, but I hate having to console my daughter’s when he breaks their hearts by not keeping the simplest promise of a visit or phone call.
In issues as personal as parenthood it is hard for me to divorce my emotions sometimes from the larger picture, but I will try harder to do so in the future.
This comment was written by Mendy.Report this comment to the moderators
December 18th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
I think, unfortunately, it may be true that women devalue fatherhood (although my guess would be that this would be the most rare among feminist women). But that’s largely because *men* devalue fatherhood. One of the ways they devalue it is by *not* taking responsibility for conception and contraception.o
Also, I dare say that more of us grew up closer to our mothers than our fathers, and that’s not an experience that can be wiped out in one generation. It will take some time for fatherhood to really be valued but mostly that’s going to require work by men and by fathers.
This comment was written by Tara.Report this comment to the moderators
December 18th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
Tara:
I think you are right, though I was very close to my father. It will take the actions of men and fathers to change these attitudes.
This comment was written by Mendy.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 12:53 am
Ismone,
“I think the tie-breaker is the pregnancy”“either carrying, or choosing not to carry, a child has moral and health implications for the person carrying. ”
This alleged tie-breaker based upon the fact that the fetus is inside the female and must be expelled from the female does not hold as definitive. Females can procure abortions whether their reasons are based upon pre-partum or post-partum difficulties (i.e. whether they do not want the burden or pregnancy or the burden of child-rearing).
Imagine a female who wants to have a child, so she copulates with the purpose of becoming pregant, and she succeeds. The pregnancy develops and she suffers it burdens fully intending to complete it. However, during the second trimester, an amniocyntesis reveals that the baby has Downs Syndrome. Upon learning this, the female reverses her decision to have a child and aborts. She did not abort becauses of the physical, bodily burdens of pregnancy, which she was fully willing to accomodate, but solely because the post-partum burden (economic and laborious) of raising a retarded child was too onerous for her. Abortion law does not discriminate between pre-partum or post-partum reasons for abortion. Indeed, “health reasons” in the legalese, do not mean solely physical burdens of pregnancy, but also the socio-economic and emotional burdens that the female would face while rearing a born child. I am not basing my argument solely upon what existing statutes or case law says, but I’m just informing what the law says. States cannot deny abortion to females who initially intended to procreate, as they should not, as changing circumstances and facts during the pregnancy may cause her to change her mind. And I know of no female advocacy position or pro-choice position which says that females who initially wanted to be pregnant can be prohibited from aborting later on.
Trying to separate bodily imposition from legal/economic imposition is impossible because such impositions are unjust for the same reason, they violate the autonomy of a non-consenting person. One’s autonomy can be violated and assaulted in many ways. The person can be physically attacked, physically confined and restrained, or can be physically penetrated by an external agent (stabbing, sexual assault). I could trick somebody into a room and lock him in there, violating his liberty without even touching him. I could also assault somebody by force-feeding her a poison which enters their body and harms it from the inside, weakening and debilitating her for nine months. Are you saying that the former action is not a rights’ violation simply because I did not physically enter or penetrate the person’s body? Of course not! Both actions are a violation of a person’s autonomy, if they did not consent to stay in the room or drink the poison. The female faces nine months of bodily imposition and 21 years of rearing and servitude (unless she surrenders the child to the state). The male faces 21 years of rearing and servitude, whether or not he forfeits his parental privilege. For 21 years, the product of his labor will be extracted under force of legal sanction to support a creature whose creation he did not consent to. And if I might invoke some Lockean analysis, forcefully extracted the toil of one’s labor for an end that the person does not agree to is tantamout to forced “labor” for that end. Of course, if he refuses to hand over his income for the child’s support, he can also face criminal sanction, suffering bodily coercion as his body will be placed into confinement.
“I’m not saying that because something is a possible natural outcome, it is morally good, I’m saying that when it is the actual natural outcome, it needs to be dealt with in the real world with law and social policy. ”
And prior to 1973, females who suffered the natural outcome of pregnancy had to suffer it to its completion, and social policy changed thanks to judicial intervention based on normative principles. You are not merely giving descriptive comments of what social policy says. You are normatively supporting the current social policy (which makes each male’s sexual act a consent to the burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing, a notion which abortion rights repudiate, so far as females are concerned). The existence of abortion rights estabishes a principle, that consent to sex is only consent to sex, and is not consent to secondary outcomes of sex. Females do not have a “natural” ability to abort a pregnancy, at least not safely. Humans are not naturally immune to syphillis or chlamydia. Artificial methods allow humans to escape both of these kinds of secondary outcomes of sex. Is it okay for the state to deny people antibiotics for syphillis because they knowlingly had sex without disease barriers, because it thinks that wreckless sex should be punished and deterred and consequences should stay intact? Oh, better yet, can the state deny HIV-sufferers medication because they should have known better than to engage in wreckless behavior? Again, they knew such an outcome was possible, so there is an equal case to force them to suffer the unfettered ravages of the disease rather than waste state resources in order to cover their wreckless act.
As a side note, you should also realize that many males are consigned to paternal duty even if they did not actually consent to an overt, potentially reproductive act. If the female deliberately lies about contraception and becomes pregnant, the male is consigned. If the female steals semen from a used condom procured for her by another female and impregnates herself with the semen, the male is still consigned. Even if the male is a minor, under the age of consent (unable to appreciate the consequences of sex), the male is still consigned if his female rapist becomes pregnant. If a male put an amount of semen into a woman’s genitals, saying by soaking a tampon in semen, and she becomes pregnant, obviously she did not consent to the impregnation or to suffer nine months of parasitism and 21 years of servitude and she can abort the embryo (though I do not know if his actions constitute full-blown rape). If the female steals semen from a discarded prophylactic, the male is obliged to suffer 21 years of servitude.
Your treatment of the shopping analogy confuses me. Justin was demonstrating that if the female, on her accord, decides to proceed with an action that the male has eschewed, then she alone assumes its burdens, because it now becomes her unilateral decision. However, if you feel that the fact that neither party was intending to get pregnant must be incorporated into the analogy, then how about this. A male and female are walking through a part of the city. They have been warned that this part of the city has many orphan children who grab onto people’s legs, begging to come home with them. They are both aware of this and try to stay quick on their feet to avoid the grasping children, but one manages to latch itself onto the female’s leg. She has a change of heart and says, “This child is so cute and I might not mind having it, so let’s take it home and support it.” The male refuses, “I did not agree to take this child into my house, or devote my liberty and labor to is upbringing.” The female is allowed to remove and detach the child if she likes, but if she decides to keep a child who latched on, the male is now dually obligated to pay and devote his labor to this child that she unilaterally wants to accept. And if he moves out, she will have the courts seize his property and his body (if they arrest him to compel support) in order to subsidize her unilateral decision. Perhaps she is facing more physical burdens than he is, because the child latched onto her leg and she is carrying it back to the apartment. And according to you, this fact means that she can appropriate the male’s labor to support this child until it reaches maturity? If the male wants to support this latching street urchin, fine. But the fact that the female uniquely suffers a temporary period of direct physical burden prior to her 21 years of servitude does not empower her to consign the male to 21 years of servitude in kind.
And Justin was not defaulting to biological essentialism in his last posts, not the position of “you get knocked up, deal with it.” If that was the case, he would be spouting off how females have choice, the choice not to have sex. Medical science has given females a way of safely extricating themselves from the sexual consequence before and even after conception. For a long time, the law tried to proscribe both contraception and abortion, not so much on the grounds that babies should be saved, but because they felt females must suffer the penalty of their sexual acts, to punish and to insure their desired social order of procreative sex. Those policies violated individual rights and now females have a political right to extricate themselves from lega/sexual consequences. There is nothing that biologically forces a female to care for an infant after birth, other than laws and social policy (and even then, females can still surrender the child to the state and escape that too). There is nothing that biologically forces a male to care for a child conceived with his sperm, other than laws and social policy.
As for this question of unfairly penalizing the female if she has beliefs contrary to abortion, you seem to be saying that if a person voluntary elects not to extricate his/herself from a situation or its consequences, then another person is obligated to break their fall and blunt their obligation. To adapt Justin’s scenario, imagine a couple considers buying a house, talks to the vender and the both acknowledge that the price and burden are beyond their capacities. However, the female says, “I know that buying this house is onerous, but I have become sentimentally attached to it, and I cannot emotionally bear to decline the owner.” By your standard, the male is now economically consigned to her destructive decision simply because she had an emotional/moral compunction against acting in her best, rational interests (eschewing the burden). If after a baby is born, and both the mother and father acknowledge that raising the child is beyond their capacities, imagine a father saying “I am morally opposed to giving up a child for adoption, so you, dear, must also pay and sacrifice 21 years of your life, even though I am unilaterally deciding to keep the child.” The female today can forfeit her parental rights and duties, and the male does not have veto power to impose them upon her (I am referring to the post-partum duties, care and economic support). However, if the female unilaterally decides to keep the child for whatever moral or emotional reason, pre or post-partum, the male is forced to support that unilateral decision, against his will. A double standard indeed. I am sure that if a man had moral or hedonistic objections to contraception, that you would have no problem in forcing him to accept the outcomes of his non-contraceptive sexual acts. Yet if the female has such objections, you insist that she must be cradled and that somebody else who did not consent to her pregnancy must share the burden of her unilateral decision.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 4:29 am
Dorset, what change in the law are you suggesting, specifically?
* * *
Your language implies that you think that mothers have a right to put up children for adoption, but fathers do not. That’s not true, legally. Both parents have an equal legal right to put their children up for adoption; and, in ordinary circumstances, neither parent can legally do so without the consent of the other.
* * *
When men have sex - even using birth control - men are aware that pregnancy and childbirth is a possible result. Men are also aware that if the woman gets pregnant, it will legally be her decision to have an abortion or not.
So I’m confused. In what way is the decision to have coital hetero sex, thus leading to a chance of childbirth, a “unilateral” decision?
If you want to say that men who are raped, and thus become fathers, should not be responsible for their children, I’d agree. If you want to say that men who become fathers because of stolen semen, rather than consensual sex, then again I’d agree. But these cases are not the norm.
What you’re saying is that in all cases, the decision to have coital, hetero sex, which as we all know carries a chance of childbirth, is “unilateral.” But that makes no sense. I’ve had sex, and it was my own choice to have sex. If I didn’t want the sex, I could have easily said “no.”
But I didn’t. I didn’t say “no” because - despite the fact that I was fully aware that sex can sometimes lead to pregnancy, and despite the fact that I was fully aware that pregnancy sometimes leads to children - I wanted sex more than I wanted to absolutely guarantee that I wouldn’t become a father.
That was not a “unilateral” decision made by people I’ve had sex with, without my participation. I chose to have that sex, knowing all the risk that choice included. For you to claim otherwise is fundimentally dishonest, and in effect tries to make every man who voluntariily has hetero sex into a rape victim, someone with no ability to consent or to say “no.”
* * *
That said, I do agree that it’s unfair that men can get saddled with child support for a couple of decades due to what may have been a momentary lapse in judgement. But the alternatives are also unfair - to the mother, and even more so to the child.
Looking through your very long post, I don’t see you address - even once - the question of what’s in the best interest of the child. But surely if anyone has had a decision made for them without their consent, it’s the child, more so than the father. If - as your logic seems to indicate - we should defer the most consideration to the needs of the person who had the least choice, doesn’t that mean we should rate the child’s needs above the father’s?
It seems to me that significantly raising the child’s chance of being raised in poverty is more unfair to the child, than paying child support is unfair to the father.
Now, if you can come up with a solution that takes unfairness away from all three parties - the child, the mother, and the father - I’d endorse that. However, what “choice for men” usually does is take away all unfairness from the father, while increasing the unfairness for the child and the mother. Unless we’re prepared to say that the father’s position is the only position that matters - and I’m not prepared to say that - then that’s not a real solution.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 6:02 am
I depends on the nature of fairness. We can accept that children have a right to be supported by their parents, but it doesn’t follow that parents then should be liable to pay child support.
I think an interesting solution would be to change the nature of child support obligations. I would suggest that if a parent is willing and capable of raising and supporting their child themselves, it is unfair that they should be compelled to pay the other parent to do so. It seems that this just adds insult to the injury of someone not being able to live with their children.
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 7:58 am
The Choice For Men argument can be summed up in “women have choices long after men stop having choices, so men should have choices, too.” Everything else is said by the C4M crowd in support of that fundemental assertion.
Choice For Men, as presented, doesn’t solve that “problem” because the woman will continue to have choices. Knowing that “Slippery Slope Arguments” are fundementally invalid, there’s nothing to keep men from saying “Hey, she had another choice, so I want another one, too!”. I would argue that Choice For Men already is a “slippery slope” sort of argument — he had a plethora of choices, he made them, time’s up, sorry.
Among the “supporting arguments” are a number of arguments based on “the bee-yatch LIED to me!” and “hey, my rubber broke!” Let’s just get rid of any more remaining pointless comments — okay, so your mama’s ugly and she dresses you funny, too. Did I forget anything?
What Choice For Men conveniently ignores is that men had choices prior to coitus and those men chose to avoid or ignore those choices. For each of those arguments (”the bee-yatch LIED to me!”) men have choices before coitus. Men can choose to use additional forms of birth conrol even if the woman asserts she is on birth control. Three forms come to mind immediately –
1. Spermicidal vaginal suppositories
2. Latex condoms
3. Spermicidal gunk inside the condom
Those three forms of birth control are available to 100% of men and something any man can witness being used at the time of coitus. Which means, “the bee-yatch LIED to me!” is not a valid reason. The real situation is “It’s not my problem!” because birth control is defined, by men, to be “not my problem.” What Choice For Men, then, is really about is wanting a “do-over”, which is often pronouced “Hey, no fair! I wasn’t supposed to lose!”
Other choices exist for men that are frequently ignored. They include
• Vasectomy
• Sperm banking before Vasectomy
• Sex For One
• Coitus interruptus (oldie but a goodie)
• The Rhythm Method (heh)
• Sex during menstruation
• Watch her take the damn pills, you dope
Need I go on?
Each of those, however, requires that men acknowledge responsibility on some level for birth control. Which is very conveniently dodged by Choice For Men.
This is the FAQ for Choice For Men. Does anyone see “How can I have a vasectomy?” or for those men who want children, just not now, “If I have a vasectomy now, how hard is it to have undone later?” I looked over that website and noticed information about birth control methods which are under men’s control are completely missing. They have an entire document on Creative Solutions to Forced Fatherhood but nothing on Creative Ways to Avoid Conception.
In short, Choice For Men is about avoiding responsibility for birth control, and then avoiding responsibility for a child that’s already been born. Men have choices, men even have the ability to take some degree of control over whether or not conception occurs.
This comment was written by furrycatherder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Word, nik. It’s all about control.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 9:22 am
My understanding is that coitus interuptus can still lead to pregnancy. So can having unprotected intercourse during the menstrual cycle. One important choice men can practice during sex, of course, is simply to not have vaginal intercourse with their partner. When men get over the idea that if they can’t stick their penis inside a woman’s vagina it’s not REALLY sex and they’re not REALLY men, they’ll be able to have sex with less fear of becoming fathers.
This comment was written by alsis39.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 9:24 am
So your argument is that if the man does not prevent conception from occurring, the law ought to force him to take responsibility for the child. It’s a reasonable argument, but please do not pretend that it is substantially different from the pro-life argument that if a woman does not prevent conception from happening, the law ought to force her to take responsibility for the child (by making her carry it to term).
I mean, whenever it comes to men, you consistently bring up the issue that he consented to have sex, so he has “choice,” which you would not consider a sufficient argument that a woman has “choice” even if abortion were outlawed.
Also, a few comments:
So I’m confused. In what way is the decision to have coital hetero sex, thus leading to a chance of childbirth, a “unilateral” decision?
This is misleading. Dorset never, even said that the choice to have coital hetero sex is a unilateral decision, and it is obvious that he is not saying that. He is saying that the choice as to whether or not to carry the child to term is a “unilateral” decision.
What you’re saying is that in all cases, the decision to have coital, hetero sex, which as we all know carries a chance of childbirth, is “unilateral.” But that makes no sense. I’ve had sex, and it was my own choice to have sex. If I didn’t want the sex, I could have easily said “no.”
No, he is referring to the decision to carry a pregnancy to term as being unilateral. Why is it so bloody difficult for people to understand that?
You consistently argue that the fact that the man has the right to choose not to have sex or not to have unprotected sex is a sufficient level of “choice” for him. After he makes that choice, he should be held liable for the consequences. But woman should have choice throughout the pregnancy (or at least throughout part of it, depending on whether you believe in restrictions on late-term abortion), and then be able to stick the male with the costs of whatever choice she made.
What it comes down to in the end, but which has only been brought up by a few posters, is that you believe in a right to “control one’s body,” but not in a right to control one’s property (i.e. one’s earnings), so you have a problem with forcing someone to carry a baby they don’t want but not in forcing someone to work to support a baby they don’t want. Say that, but please stop all this nonsense about the man having “choice” when he decides to have sex, because NO ONE IS DENYING THAT.
Absolutely no one here is arguing that men do not have the choice whether or not to have sex. No one is arguing that heterosexual sex is female-on-male rape, or that the male did not have the choice as to whether or not to use a condom; in fact, the original argument that you are trying to refute:
I’m sure you’re aware that your arguments about the choices that men do have echo with an uncanny precision the arguments made by abortion rights opponents … that women have the choice not to get pregnant.
Indicates that we understand that the man has not been raped. Also, the “pro-choice” position does not rely on all heterosexual sex being male-on-female rape, so if the “choice for men” position is trying to parallel to “pro-choice” movement, obviously they are not arguing for “C4M” on the basis that the men were raped.
Men can choose to use additional forms of birth conrol even if the woman asserts she is on birth control. [i.e. so it is aall right for a woman to lie about birth control and then fore the man to pay up]
Now, in this one particular instance, it seems to me that one could argue that the man has been raped (although C4M does not depend on such a condition, so this is a side issue).
It has been argued that if a woman agrees to sex on the condition that the man use a condom, and the man penetrates her sans condom, it is rape. (I am assuming that this applies not only if the woman sees the man does not have a condom and refuses, but also if the man penetrates her sans condom before she realizes he does not have a condom). Then if a man has sex with a woman on the condition that she use birth control, and she lies about using birth control, is that not also rape?
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Alsis writes:
Just about anything, short of gonadectomy, leaves the possibility of pregnancy. My observation is that Choice For Men focuses on money and not on pregnancy reduction.
My other observation is that birth control is being forced on women with no responsiblity being taken by men, including the Choice For Men crowd. Also, emphasis is placed either on how untrustworthy women are (”the bee-yatch LIED to me!”) or on a single form of birth control. If condoms are so unreliable, how about using something else as well?
So, while coitus interruptus isn’t reliable in and of itself, it is one of many available forms of birth control. All of which are ignored by men, including Choice For Men men.
Makes more sense?
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Amen! (After all, the sponge is back!) Not to mention the all important (and, I admit, frequently idealistic) conversation that begins “If I get pregnant…”
But again, that all assumse that we homo sapiens always make the best possible decision at any given moment, and in this case, that’s a moment in which it is notoriously difficult to make even a SLIGHTLY good decision, and thus we’re left with “You did it, now ya gotta pay.”
I’d have to say I agree most with Amp here: it’s unfair to the fathers at times, but the alternative either far more unfair to the child (allowing him to not pay child support) or horrific (allowing men to demand an abortion of their partners).
One thing that distresses me, however, every time this topic comes up is the equation of children with punishment. While I understand the more complicated issues involved - pregnancy, single motherhood, and social pressure, I would have to suggest that viewing other human beings in terms of punishment for past behavior (and by “human being” I mean “outside the womb and breathing with their own lungs”) is a disturbing trend - no matter WHICH side of the debate it comes from.
This comment was written by AlieraKieron.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 11:19 am
AlieraKieron writes:
Gee, I dunno. I tend to think that people who aren’t prepared beforehand need to be avoiding sex. M.A.D.D. has done a great job at changing drinking behavior. Perhaps we need a new group — People Against Sexual Stupidity, or P.A.S.S. — to get the message out there that birth control is something to think about when getting dressed in the morning?
And, bringing this back on topic, I don’t see Choice For Men talking about that either.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Ampersand, I never said that consentual intercourse was a unilateral decision, and I do not see how you made this confusion. What I was saying, as Glaivester points out, is that the decision to continue a pregnancy is legally unilateral on the part of the female. The force of law gives the female exclusive discretion in deciding whether or not to continue the pregnancy, despite what the male says, and it should be that way. However, if the decision is unilateral and against the will of the male, he should not be obligated to finance that decision. Go back to the analogy of walking in the area of latching children.
The male and woman mutually decide to walk through the area, however the female unilaterally decides to keep and support the rogue child who clings to her leg. Just because they mutually agreed to walk together in a certain area does not mean that they mutually agreed to accept and support a latching rogue child.
As for the change in law, I am saying that once a male is informed of the existence of a pregnancy of the child, that he be giving a temporary period, say a month, to decide whether to claim parental rights and accept parental duties or to forfeit both and eschew any claim or duty to the child.
As for the adoption laws, a female can legally abandon her infant (thanks to “Baby Moses” laws) and even if the male knows and claims the child for his own, he cannot sue her for child support and he cannot force her to remain a custodian of the child. Even if the father forfeits all parental rights to the child and has no custody, he is still liable for child support if the mother proceeds against him. Though both can waive custody, the father remains liable at the discretion of the mother, while the mother is not.
“Looking through your very long post, I don’t see you address - even once - the question of what’s in the best interest of the child. But surely if anyone has had a decision made for them without their consent, it’s the child, more so than the father.”
I did not address it, because these alleged best interests are IRRELEVENT in the area of a non-consenting parent, as much as they are irrelevent when it comes to the power to divorce. If you actually believe that the best interests of the child can trump property and liberty rights, you are asking for a world of trouble. Can a female’s right to divorce be obstructed because the husband brings in accountant’s and psychologists to prove that her requested divorce will imperil the economic and mental welfare of the children? And don’t obfuscate this by saying that if divorce is initiated, then it’s always in the interests of the child. If the mother is initiating a separation that will lead to economic decline and parental separation, there is a genuine question if her acts may adversely affect the child’s interests. If the child’s best interests can trump liberty rights, then the mother can only successfully divorce if she convinces the court if her divorce is necessary to serve the child’s best interests. Of course, it is not done this way, and the female can bring about divorce for the most capricious or selfish of reasons, as she certainly has the right to do so. If the best interets of the child can justify 21 years of servitude, then why not justify the prohibition of an adult from dissolving a marriage and marrying someone else?
Better yet, imagine a person who is convicted of a serious crime, and in addition to his term of incarceration, he is also ordered to pay a huge amount of restitution to the victim’s family. Later on, new exculpatory evidence exonerates him definitively, yet the victim’s spouse says, “Even though he has been exonerated, my family and my children are economically dependent upon the restitution payments. Without them, the children shall lapse into poverty.” Using your logic, the judge will conclude that it is less unfair to fine a person for a crime that they did not commit than to leave the victim’s children in poverty. If the “best interets of the child” is controlling over individual property rights or liberty rights, such a sick demand of restitution is tenable.
You are switching justifications, before basing it upon indirect culpability of the male via sexual intercourse, and now basing it upon the more endangered and pitiable plight of an underprivileged child. Once you switch to that justification, a roughly utilitarian scheme which says that impositions upon liberty and property are acceptable so long as they do not make the violated person (the male) as worse off as the person you are trying to help (the child), then whether or not the male copulated with the female becomes irrelevant. If a female sues two males for child support, one who is caring and wealthy and the other is who is incarcerated and unemployed, the best interests of the child are clearly to have support claims upon the wealthy male, and even if the unemployed criminal is actually proven to be the biological father, the child’s best interets would still obviously be to have the wealthy male’s support and resources. If the best interests of the child are paramount and trump liberty or property rights, then judges should also be able to assign child support obligations even to males who have not sired the deprived child in question, or even ones who did not even have sexual contact with the female.
When others have posed this question of whether or not a woman can be forced to abort if raising a child in her circumstances would be harmful to the future child, you have vociferously denied this, saying that the best interests do not justify a bodily intrusion upon the female. Okay, if a destitute mother foolishly chooses to give birth to a child that she can only provide a destitute upbringing, what if the state simply waits until the child is born and seizes it immediately afterward to give it to a waiting, more affluent couple? There would be no bodily intrusion into the female. The state would simply be seizing another person, the child, and putting them into an available setting that provides more economic and other security. Why should the female’s liberty to gestate and raise the child be afforded more consideration if the child would enjoy a more secure existence in a waiting affluent home? Assume this is all done immediately after birth before any conscious bond has formed, so that you cannot object by saying that emotional separation overrides economic interests.
When we suggest potentially violating the female’s rights in the name of the best interests of the child, you reject it because that female’s body is sacrosanct, so forced contraception or forced abortion of an unfit or questionable female is off limits, so you say. This standard is problematic, and is inconsistent with your utilitarian position of allowing rights violations to keep the child from being worse off. If a female is pregnant with a child who definitely has Tay-Sachs, ALD, or cerebral palsy, and decides that kindness be damned, she wants to give birth and keep the child for as long as it lives, she is asserting that her individual bodily rights trump this future child’s bodily best interests. This child will be born and will suffer tremendous bodily pain, debilitation, immobility, being a tortured prisoner inside its own wretched body. With just one suction procedure imposed upon the female, we can prevent this future tremendous bodily suffering of this future child. Under your scale, what is more unfair? For an obstinate female to suffer a few hours of vaginal/uterine violation or for a child to suffer years or decades of tremendous bodily pain and debilitation? If a female’s decision to give birth jeopardizes a child’s future bodily welfare, I do not see how her temporary bodily integrity can trump that, under your scheme of what is “more” or “less unfair.” The only way that a person’s bodily integrity can trump a tremendous utilitarian consideration like that is if autonomy rights are inviolable. If one’s bodily integrity cannot be violated to prevent greater bodily suffering, then one’s economic autonomy cannot be violated to prevent the greater economic suffering of somebody whose birth they did not consent to.
And AlieraKieron,
Perhaps it is morbid to view other human beings as punishment, but unfortunately that is the inevitable consequence of viewing human individuals as autonomous entities with rights claims against other human beings. Let us face it, babies are a potentially onerous and burdensome consequence, otherwise abortion, the means to prevent their creation, would not be so sacrosanct to the advocates for the rights of females. When a burdensome consequence befells somebody who engaged in a hedonistic indulgence, what could it be but a sanction? Babies are an egregious demand that deprive an individual of a tremendous amount of resource and liberty and health. Without the sentimental palliation, babies are an unadulterated punishment. And there are people who do not have the sentimental palliation. The abortion rights movement tried to temper this by changing the nomenclature (baby=fetus=cells), but the implication is unavoidable in child support proceedings. Courts, when sentencing a male to child support obligations, did often use the word “penalty” and “suffer” to describe his fate. And since family courts can often back up their support sentences with incarceration, considering children as a criminal penalty is not inaccurate.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
We pray and cheer the development of a male contraceptive (a chemical pill) and tests are underway.
Choice for men does not eschew birth control or consider it unnecessary. However, we take umbrage at the notion that males are culpable for the effect of failed or absent contraception when the female has a sacrosanct right to prevent the onerous birth and child-rearing even after her contraception has failed or she has neglected to use it. Should females who neglected to use contraception or had defunct contraception be enjoined from obtaining an abortion because they should have known better? Whether the female is pregnant due to failed contraception or her outright negligence or stupidity does not negate that she has the unilateral right to procure the abortion. Consent to sex is only consent to sex, not consent to secondary outcomes, otherwise females would be consigned to pregnancy. Unless the male independently consents to the outcome of pregnancy, he is not responsible for an outcome that the female has the unilateral right to control. If the female was forced by law to stay pregnant and had not recourse to reverse the pregnancy, then the male could be liable for the failures or absences of contraception.
Should people who contract an STD because of neglecting to use prophylatic barriers be denied antibiotics, medications, or treatment?
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
By the way, Ampersand, aside from your glaring misinterpretation corrected by Glaivester, you did not address anything else in the post.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Dorset,
I think it would be a lot more considerate of women’s bodies if women weren’t expected to run off for an abortion after the man decides he’s not up for fatherhood. I don’t see Choice For Men addressing that. I think this comment of yours
is very telling. Contraception isn’t just “hers”. Considering the man is the one inserting his reproductive material into the woman’s body, I’d argue that responsibility for contraception, and contraceptive failure, is 100% that of the man.
This comment was written by furrycatherder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 7:29 pm
And your comment belies your supposed mutuality; not only are you saying that it is “not just” the female’s, you are saying that the male is totally responsible for all sexual outcomes because he is the penetrator. If copulation is a mutual decision, contraceptive burdens can be assumed or neglected by either male or female. The fact that he penetrates her does not mean that he has all the power and is controlling the encounter. If that were the case, unconscious or raped or statutorily raped males are also 100 % responsible for their encounters. If the female allows or entreats the male to penetrate her and ejaculate inside of her, she is potentially just as wreckless as the male who penetrates without whatever brand of prophylactic. If a male and female are leching, and the female says, “Don’t worry, I’m on the pill” in order to allay his fears or because she wants the encounter to happen or plans to ruin him, she has promised to him that she has attended to the contraceptive problem. If she says that and becomes pregnant, he is not responsible any more than he is responsible for contracting HIV when she told him, “Don’t worry, I don’t have HIV.” Should we deny him HIV medication because he should have been shrewd enough to assume that she is a wreckless liar?
Imagine a female with a cervical inflammatary disease and hemophilia. She knows that having sex can cause severe bleeding, injury, and even death for her. Nevertheless she copulates with a male, leading him to believe that she is fully healthy. After she almost bleeds to death as a result of the penetration, she sues him for her medical expenses. Is he actually still liable even though she misled him or assuaged his concern?
And since you are keen to point out the diversity of contraceptive or anti-birth methods, females do not simply have to endure an onerous dilation procedure for every botched copulation. They have a range of options:
-The Morning After Pill
This comment was written by Dorset.-RU-486
-Vacuum procedure
-Dilation procedure
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January 4th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Dorset,
So we’re clear, I don’t accept your “latching children” analogy. I’m not even sure I understand how that analogy relates to pregnancy.
Using contraception is the only way to have a chance at reducing the risk of pregnancy. Multiple, independent, forms of contraception is the only way to avoid “The bee-yatch LIED to me!” and “the rubber broke!” I’m not sure how this would translate into the “latching children” analogy. Perhaps greased and spiked leggings, and swinging a baseball bat in the general direction of any child who came close?
What’s the role of contraception in this scenario? Did the man, knowing he might become responsible, remove said “latching child” from the leg of the woman? Where’s the discussion about what to do if a child tries to “latch”? Where’s the man running interference if he’s unclear on whether or not the woman will choose to keep a “latching child”?
What I read, time and again, is a lack of responsibility for preventing pregnancy by men. It’s almost as if “contraceptive planning”, or that what “contraceptive planning” entails, isn’t part of men’s vocabulary. I don’t see that in your analogy, I don’t see it on the Choice For Men board, and I don’t see it in the discussions of various men.
(And, FWIW, I think that if a woman rapes a man, or somehow steals a man’s semen, and then has a child, I’d hope the child’s father would sue for custody and a court would grant it. I would not want any child of mine raised by a rapist or thief. In the oft-cited case out of Kansas, the pleadings focused on the boy’s parents avoiding financial responsibility, and not on the child’s health and welfare being raised by a rapist and/or child molester. Which confirms my belief that C4M is about money, and not about children.)
This comment was written by furrycatherder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
I see, it is the duty of the raped male or his relations to accept 21 years of burden and servitude because the male was raped? If the male decides to claim and care for the child, then that is quite a magnanimous act, but is superogatory, not obligatory. He is not obliged to accept the burden of that child anymore than a woman who was raped and kidnapped for nine months would have to accept the child that she was forced to carry and expel.
As for the analogy, a male and female mutually decide to walk in a part of the city which is known to have a multitude of orphan children who latch onto people’s legs (usually female legs because they think them more inclined to sympathize). They are mutually deciding to embark upon an activity in which it is possible that an entity may attempt to claim their bodily and economic resources. Are you seeing the parallel to pregnancy now? They have a range of options to minimize this chance.
-Not walk into the area at all (abstinence)
-Grease or spiked leggings (thanks for the idea)
-Chasing off or intercepting the child before it clings to a leg
-Mace or tasers
Now imagine that the couple walks into the area, using any or all of the above methods, both not originally intending to accept a latching child. The methods for whatever reason, fail to keep an intrepid child at bay (the male was slow to spot him, the child grabbed an arm rather than a greased leg). The female reflects and reverses her position, wanting to keep and support the child, even though she has the legal right to have the child forcibly dislodged. Under current conditions, the male is now forced to share in her 21 years of servitude. If you are still uncertain of how this analogy embodies the hazard of pregnancy, keep asking for clarification.
Whether or not the female was negligent in contraceptive concerns is irrelevant so far as her right to abortion is concerned. Her right to abort to avoid either the bodily burden or the 21 years of servitude does not shrink because she had wreckless sex. The male cannot force her into bodily burden or 21 years of servitude because she was contraceptively negligent, and neither can she the male.
The rape victim and his parents have NO OBLIGATION to regard or care for that child because it was produced in a non-consentual fashion. If someone or someone’s child were raped, do you think their concern for the product of the rape must override their outrage that the rapist thinks he/she has a further claim upon the victim’s liberty and resources.
As for your last condemnation, one could easily say that abortion rights are all about money for women or their selfish career aspirations. One’s money and property is the product of one’s labor and taking it is an infringement upon a person’s autonomy and liberty. (And you seem to find thieves to be reprehensible). This is a case of a rapist or a thief trying to steal from another person, trying to profit from the product of her initial violation. Because the family does not want to pay or subsidize the rapist’s or thief’s unilateral decisions, then they are evil and avaricious people?
If a person makes a unilateral decision to appropriate another person’s gametes for reproduction or continue a pregnancy to term, it is that person’s burden alone. Claiming the other person’s money to finance that unilateral decision is stealing and claiming that other person’s autonomy to support that decision is enslavement.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Dorset,
So, did they discuss getting a taser? Did he decide he wasn’t willing to shoot a “latching child” if it “latched” onto his female partner’s leg? Did he understand, when he decided not to shoot a potential “latching child”, that the result might be she might just change her mind?
As I wrote in one of my earlier responses, he’s had all the right choices. He could have gone to the store, bought a gun, and shot the kid. Because that’s what spermicides do — they kill sperm.
When used correctly, and in combination, contraception works. The man had his choices. Asking for yet another choice, which will be followed by another, and another, and still another, is flat out unfair. Men have the ability, on their own, and without relying on women, to prevent pregnancy.
As for child support, men have legal rights there as well. Men can sue for custody and support. That’s another choice I don’t see C4M advocating. But that would require that the man, instead of the woman, accept responsibility for raising a child he helped bring into this world.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
No, because it’s the obligation of a parent to protect their offspring from a rapist. The child’s born. This isn’t a theoretical child — it’s a real child. And if you’re going to claim the woman is a rapist, why the hell would any parent allow their child to be around a rapist for even one single second?
The entire argument is based on how evil the woman is, but the man doesn’t act like she really is evil.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
Males can and due sue for child custody (though their chances are usually dismal of prevailing). However, the legal system already allows men that avenue of recourse; it does that allow them the avenue of recourse of forfeiting parental rigths and obligations, so that is the avenue that the C4M movement advocates for.
Honestly, would you berate the pre-1973 abortion rights movement for not focusing on the female’s right to give birth and raise children. Of course not, because prior to 1973 females already had that reproductive entitlement, but they did not have the converse entitlement of terminating a pregnancy to avoid the bodily and liberty burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing. So, the movements usually agitate for rights and entitlements that the legal system does not yet recognize.
I’m sorry, I know of no contraception that is 100% effective. And your answers to the conundrums of deceptions or breaches contraception are utterly non-responsive. If the female dug the condom out of the garbage and extracted the semen, is he still liable? Should he have assumed that the female would go to such measures? If she asked for a condom from another female acquaintance of his and inseminated herself that way, is he still liable? Under the status quo, the male is categorically liable. Your response was that “he should be trying to get the baby to keep it away from a rapist or thief.” That does not answer the argument. You are still saying that even deceives or coerces the male in order to extract the gametes, he is still liable for the product of the insemination and must suffer 21 years of servitude. If you are not distinguishing such scenarios from when the male knowingly deposits his slime into the female, your basis of tacit consent is superceded by the premise of “guilty by insemination.” If the male’s sperm got into the female, even by deception or coercion, you are saying that he is categorically liable. A female who allows a male to penetrate her, knowing that there is no contraceptive device, is just as liable and wreckless as the male who is penetrating her.
Females are considered categorically unliable for the pregnancy up to two trimesters after conception (FYI: I don’t agree with the two trimester limit and I believe in abortion on demand during the entire pregnancy). Her right to avoid the burdens of pregnancy or of child-rearing are not contingent upon whether or not she took measures to prevent a pregnancy. The state cannot prohibit females from avoiding the responsibility of a pregnancy based upon indications of tacit consent to pregnancy during or before copulation. It cannot say, “Oh, you did not use contraceptives during intercourse, you were consenting to the possible pregnancy at some level, no abortion for you.” It cannot say, “Oh, you told the male that you wanted a baby before you copulated with him, no abortion for you.” Even if the male produces a contract with the female’s signature saying that the female intended to become pregnant, the state cannot obstruct her abortion. Just like a person cannot force another person to continue serving or laboring because the person previously signed a contract to be a servant. The abortion rights movement skips over this ridiculous difficulty of implied consent to pregnancy from certain previous indications (no contraception, what she might have said) by asserting that pregnancy must be agreed to, separately, on its own, not as an implied secondary consequence. Once one argues that sexual activity resulting in a pregnancy is consent to that the pregnancy, abortion rights become untenable.
The male and the female both have pre-pregnancy choices. Technology and social policy have afforded the female a post-conception choice to nullify the pregnancy burden. The female is not “naturally” capable of safely aborting a pregnancy. Artifice made it possible, but social policy stood in the way for a variety of reasons, one of the reasons being that females who consent to sexual activity also consent to pregnancy and that it was their responsibility to face the unfortunate burden of their wreckless acts. The abortion rights movement said that that was wrong, that consent to sex is only consent to sex, not consent to pregnancy, and that a person’s autonomy demands that social policy allow that person an ability to avoid the onerous consequence of a pregnancy.
This is not an issue of a slippery slope, as C4M only seeks to grant males the same autonomy entitlement that social policy allots to females, to avoid the onerous burden of a pregnancy after conception. Choices stop when they infringe upon the choices of other persons. Of course the male cannot force her to abort anymore than he can force her to give birth. The choice is unilaterally hers, and her prior non-use of contraception or allowance of semen to enter her does not nullify her choice to avoid the conclusion of the pregnancy. This is not “flat out unfair.” His decisions cannot force her into 21 years of servitude; her decisions should not be able to do the same.
One’s unilateral choices do not entitle one to the use of another person’s liberty and property. The female who decided to keep the latching child made a unilateral decision. When the male asks, “Dear, what are you going to do with that latching child?” and she says that she has suddenly decided to keep it and he says, “Well, dear, if that is your decision, you’re on your own and I want no part in it.” You would have her say, “You agreed to walk here with me, you knew these children try to latch onto couples, so you accepted the burden of whatever might result, now you have to care for this child until it reaches legal majority.”
If the male took every possible precaution, armed himself and the female with tasers and guns, latch-resistant leggings, and had her assurances that she would do everything possible to avoid a latching child, and he incapacitated every accosting child, would that make any difference to your standard? If the female, out of nowhere, obstructed his defensive measures and embraced a latching child because she suddenly decided that she wanted one, does that change anything under your precepts? I doubt it.
You still have not addressed the disparity. You are saying that failure or absence of contraception makes the male culpable for the pregnancy and offspring. That is the not the case with the female. Even if she was outright wreckless and disregarded contraception, social policy still cannot impinge her right to nullify the consequences of her wrecklessness. Her consent to copulation does not equal consent to the burdens of child-rearing. In order for her to be justly saddled with that obligation, she has to agree to it independently, on its own terms, not implied secondary consent via sex. If that is the case for the female, that should be the case for the male, who must also consent to the pregnancy idependently on its own terms. If he does not, he must be able to sign away his parental prerogative and tell the female, “Your independent decision, your independent burden.”
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 12:10 am
You have now shifted your standard of what determines responsibility to offspring. You have been repeatedly stating that males are responsible for the offpsring’s support because they consented to an act which they knew could result in the production of offspring. That is, you are saying that they indirectly consented to the offspring’s existence by having consentual sex. Offspring that are produced through rape or the theft of games are the product of a NONCONSENTUAL ACT. In such cases, the person did not knowlingly and voluntarily engage in a potentially reproductive act. Deceit and/or coercion nullifies the consent that you have been banking on.
You are now saying that the existence of a child is all that is necessary for the biological parent to be obliged to that offspring, whether or not that parent consented to the act which produced the offspring. If a female is abducted, raped, impregnated, and imprisoned for nine months by the rapist who forces her to give birth, is she then obliged to care for that child after she has been saved from the rapist’s custody? She had absolutely no consent in the copulation, impregnation, gestation, or birth process, yet her enslavement produced offspring which is biologically hers. Certainly the apprehended rapist should not have custody of the child, but should she be obligated to care for the product of a coercive act imposed upon her? If you are adhering to your new standard that parents are obligated to support their biological offspring because they are their biological offspring, this abducted and raped female would seem to be similarly obligated.
A further question. If the raped male and his relations have been denied custody and will not obtain it, but the female who raped and bore the child is still suing them for child support, does that change your former pronouncement? Even if if the raped male or his relations have no legal hope of extricating the offspring from the custody of the thief/rapist, are they still obligated to surrender their economic assets to this child(s)? Or how about this, the rape child is in neither parent’s custody and is in state custody? Are you saying that you would demand that the raped male pursue custody and assume parental duties of the product of his rape, even after it is extricated from the rapist’s custody? Same question, if it were a female rape victim and the offspring/product of her rape/abduction.
The “actuality” of the child is irrelevant. There are billions of “actual” children, none of whom that you owe a 21-year duty of assistance, because you did not consent to their creation. A raped male does not consent to the creation of offspring as result of his rape. He cannot keep the rapist or thieving female from giving birth, as her reproductive rigths are inviolable. If he did not consent to the child’s creation, he has no more obligation to this actual biological offspring than he does to all the other actual biological juveniles in the world.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 12:35 am
Dorset,
My goal isn’t to change your mind. It’s to expose C4M’s agenda — it’s all about money. Men already can prevent pregnancy and they can do it without having to rely on women. But men don’t want to be burdened with contraception, children, or being financially inconvenienced. Men just want to get their rocks off, no strings attached.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 1:01 am
If it is not your goal to change my mind, then do not respond at all.
I already addressed your accusation of avarice. Even if the C4M advocacy is overwhelmingly concerned with protected monetary interests, that is not a compelling indictment. The seizure of monetary or economic assets to support an end or decision that the individual did not consent to is still a violation of a liberty right. Not to mention that males are also directly deprived of liberty when imprisoned as a penalty for defaulting on child support payments.
If advocating for the right to avoid the onerous burdens of pregnancy is evidence of hedonistic selfishness, females can be accused of wanting “to get their rocks off, no strings attached,” just as much as the males can, and emergency contraception, abortion pills, surgical abortion, and “Baby Moses” laws allow them to do just that. You seem to have this notion that male sexual gratification is an inherently predatory, pejorative act and that any possible sanction or punishment upon that act must be maintained and bolstered. And what are females? Poor innocents who are essentially always the rape victims of lecherous males who must be afforded every entitlement to escape the consequence of what the males did “to” them?
Females, whether or not they bother with contraception, whether or not the contraception works, have the right to opt-out of the burdens of child-rearing post-conception. Her lack of bothering with contraception does not rescind her post-conception right to evade the consequences of her sexual act. The male should have the corollary post-conception right to be free of the consequence of a female’s unilateral actions. You are saying that males cannot “rely” upon females in order to prevent the consequences of a pregnancy, which they would not be doing under the C4M, anymore than an aborting female relies upon the male in order to procure the abortion to evade the consequences of her pregnancy. Yet, you are saying that the female is entitled to appropriate and rely upon the male for 21 years in order to continue her pregnancy. The male cannot “rely” upon the female to either continue or end the pregnancy, yet the female can forcibly “rely” upon him to continue it and to sustain its living outcome, for 21 years no less. Interesting.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Dorset,
You sound very angry.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it tends to result in a stream-of-feeling type post. Try to structure your arguments better, and rely less on weak analogies which convince nobody.
I’m pro-C4M, but your posts are basically unreadable as they are, and I bet I’m not the only person who feels that way.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 4:05 am
Dorset:
This is not your blog. You don’t get to decide for what reasons a person responds.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 4:27 am
FurryCatHerder:
I can’t speak to the intent of other C4M supporters, but my concern here is fairness. I have no personal dog in this race; I have no children, don’t expect ever to have sex again, and if I do, you can be damned sure that I’ll use multiple methods of birth control.
Sure they do. So do women. And unfortunately, both men and women screw up, from time to time. However thanks to the available range of post-coital birth control methods, this no longer has to result in a child. If it does, then that is the woman’s choice, for which she should be held responsible.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Daran writes:
Do you understand that under the guidelines proposed by C4M that men have zero incentive to care about birth control, and just about zero incentive to claim a child? Any “mistake” that happens becomes completely the responsibility of the woman, and many of the “solutions” to an unwanted / unplanned / boyfriend-dumped-me pregnancy threaten the health of a woman?
In theory Choice For Men isn’t a bad idea — if one is talking about, say, buying a car. Woman goes out, buys a car, tells boyfriend she is going to be making huge payments for the next 84 months (when I was younger 36 months was considered to be “forever” …), and gee, he’s going to have to help out more with the bills because she’s got this giant car note. Boyfriend says “No”, she returns vehicle under her state’s “Buyer’s Regrets” law, no harm, no foul. But pregnancy isn’t car buying, and abortion / adoption / childbirth aren’t without their problems.
Pregnancy and childbirth has a profound effect on a woman’s body. So, too, does abortion. Pregnancy can reveal health issues which make future pregnancies unwise, and abortion can create health problems which likewise affect future pregnancies, as well as long term health. Even hormonal birth control — The Pill — has health risks for women. “Fair” would be getting men on board as equals in preventing unplanned / unwanted pregnancies. The good news is that men have options — other than vasectomy — that, when used in combination, make pregnancy extremely unlikely. Men need to begin exercising those choices before shirking responsibility after pregnancy has occured.
Bill Clinton (though I’m sure he wasn’t the first) said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”, and I’m inclined to agree with him (and every unnamed woman who said it before him). Choice For Men would, I think, create more abortions rather than less. Men, based on the arguments of Dorset, would have a huge financial incentive to disown a child, and that would in turn, I think, push more women in the direction of terminating a pregnancy. Although there is a shortage of healthy and white infants available for adoption, I don’t believe that the adoption “marketplace” would be able to absorb an influx of children up for adoption that C4M proponents claim it my produce.
I also see a lot of misogyny (and whatever “mis-” refers to dislike of children) in the C4M position. Not only does C4M push all the responsibility for birth control, pregnancy and child-rearing 100% back onto women, but it also seems to profoundly devalue, or create / support a devalued attitude towards children in general.
Under C4M children are items in a ledger book — such-and-such dollars for so-and-so years, missed opportunities for doing something more personally rewarding. Nature, nuture, biological reality, irresponsible men, too many years playing with dolls, who knows — women seem to understand that children aren’t just credit and debit entries in a ledger book. C4M gives children the same status as a car — after 2 to 8 years, trade it in, get a new one. Costs too much to maintain? Sell it. Too much of a bother? Sell it. Don’t like the dealership’s mechanics? Sell it.
Dorset raised the issue of rape and raising a child who’s the product of rape. First, rape of men by women is not especially common. Yes, “Women rape, too”, but men aren’t running around terrified that some women is going to rape him, steal his sperm and run off and have a baby. Or at least outside of C4M arguments I never hear about that. In the Kansas case, were I Queen of the Universe, I’d have put the woman under the jailhouse. I don’t care how much a 12 year old boy thought having sex with his babysitter was “fun”. A 12 year old boy is likely to think binging on pizza and Coke® is “fun”, that staying up until 5AM playing “Mega Galaxy Destruction Quest” is “fun”, along with a lot of other bad ideas. This is why 12 year old boys and girls aren’t allowed to drive cars, buy alcohol, vote, or get a new VISA® Platinum card in the mail ever time a “pre-approved” letter appears in the mailbox.
The public policy that gave us the Kansas case didn’t occur in a vacuum. It occured against the backdrop of decades of men deciding not to pay for their own children and to shift that burden onto The State. So, states responded, along with the federal government, by creating laws which held both parties responsible for their off-spring. And yes, both parties are “responsible”. It’s just that for some strange reason, men seemed to have been the ones doing the “being irresponsible”. Again, could be biology, could be nurture, could be too few years playing with Barbie®, or too many nights staying up until 5AM play “Mega Galaxy Destruction Quest”.
Entirely too many times the pattern was “boy meets girl, boy and girl get busy, girl has baby, boy splits after changing too many diapers / cleaning up too much baby puke / missing out on too many nights with other boys”. It was a pattern that a lot of people, men and women, noticed and laws were given teeth. That’s the history that C4M has to acknowledge before anyone is going to think C4M is about anything more than men once again getting to dump children on women.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 9:47 am
Daran,
Please explain the weakness of my analogies. The bulk of the arguments here attempt argument by example and reductio ad absurdum, as do most authors who attempt to demonstrate the tenability of their assertions by parallel links with plausible positions. If somebody asserts or implies premises and those premises permit an absurd or egregious position, it is usually grounds for reconsidering the assertions.
I don’t see how my posts are unreadable stream-of-consciousness, when they usually directly respond to whatever previous rejoinder and beginning with the most glaring contradiction of it. My posts are no more motivated by anger than are Catherder’s posts which accuses C4M advocates of being greedy lechers. If you find them incoherent, then tell me which segment that you find impenetrable and I will try to clarify. Perhaps whatever observers find my posts and analogies unconvincing, but them and you are keeping your suspicions and refutations to yourself, making them equally useless as if they were nonexistent.
And Catherder can heed or dismiss my suggestion as Catherder pleases. Since Catherder’s post that eschewed the goal of changing my mind was brief, cursory, and considerably shorter than the previous posts, I assumed that the previous, longer posts were launched in order to dissuade or contest me. Since that is no longer the objective, there does not seem to be another purpose of responding to me. I am no more rude or presumptious for assuming that than you are for assuming what emotions motivate whatever person’s posts.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Dorset, I have been reading your posts very closely, and have spent some time thinking about them. They are internally very logical and make some good points. But there seems to me to be one fairly large hole in your basic argument, and I hope you can address it if I am successful in explaining it clearly (not always my strong point!).
IRL, the woman has the most postcoital choices because the biological connection between her and the child if the pregnancy continues to term is (almost always) indisputable, since generally there are witnesses to the birth - the exception being where the woman manages to hide both the pregnancy and the birth and abandons the newborn undetected. Therefore it is almost impossible for her to deny the connection between her and the child, and she is the person upon whom the burden of deciding what to do with the child rests, always, whether she wants that burden or not.
As for the man, IRL his postcoital choices are limited because his biological link to the child in the past has been inferential (beyond the woman saying, “He done it!”). Nowadays, we can generally figure out who the man is with DNA sampling, but unless a) his DNA profile is already available in some database or b) he’s associating with the woman, we can’t connect the dots between the DNA profile and the body that carries that profile around. So a man can decide whether or not to acknowledge his relationship to the child, which means he can choose to abandon the burden of deciding what to do with the child.
For various historical reasons, with which I’m sure you’re just as familiar as I am, this inequality of choice got legally translated into inequality of support. Given how our current society is, I would agree with you that the way the legal system treats the parent-child relationship needs some changes and there is definitely a lot of unfairness.
But the hole in your argument (I have finally gotten there) that I am having problems with is this: Absent active deception by the woman (the “stealing semen” argument), if the man does everything he can to make sure none of his genetic material goes where he doesn’t want it to go, what happens if a baby results anyway? What if the man and the woman each use two contraceptive methods (for a total of four) and the woman still gets pregnant? You seem to be arguing that the man should get a free pass if he doesn’t want the child, because he did his best not to have one. (I’m not talking about deceitful actions here, just accidents, and you don’t really talk about male contraception much.) But if the woman also did her best not to get pregnant, the only decision of hers that appears to get your goat is the one where she decides to keep the child and asks for help in raising it. (You also don’t address helping to pay for an abortion, so maybe that decision would bother you, too.) If both the man and the woman get on the train to Chicago, and they both said they didn’t actually want to get to Chicago, if they end up in Chicago anyway, who pays for the hotel? Reasonable people would share the cost, seems to me.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Ah, so all the males who have accepted fatherhood burdens in writing and via adoption are doing so solely because of legal coercion? The absence of choice for males is not an incentive to accept parenthood, it is a coercion.
The mistake of failed or absent contraception is equally the fault of the female if she voluntarily copulated with the male aware of the fact that no contraception was in use. The fact that some effects on unprotected copulation may differentially affect the participants does not mean that one participant must differentially support the consequences of the other’s voluntary negligence. If a male informs a female that he carries human papillomavirus but she decides to have unprotected intercourse with him anyway, knowing the risks, she assumes the burden of the potential infection and cannot sue him for medical costs when she voluntarily jeopardized herself. The fact that exposure to papillomavirus has greater health risks for females (cervical cancer) does not shift differential culpability or extra obligations to males. The male may merely have to take antibiotics in order to ameliorate the problem, while the female might require a pap-smear or a biopsy. That does not mean that the male is obligated to subsidize her biologically more onerous burden as a result of her voluntary risk-taking.
If a healthy person and a medically vulnerable person, both of sound mind, mutually agree to participate in a potentially hazardous activity, the healthy person is not obliged to attend to the harmful consequences that befall the vulnerable person. A male is no more obligated to pay for the pregnancy of a female than is a female obligated to pay for the angioplasty of a male with cardiac problems who had an infarction as a result of their copulation.
Females have long had the option of obtaining a tubal ligation in order to permanently be invulnerable to pregnancy (though it too has been known to fail). The fact that they had this option does not negate their right to an abortion should conception and implantation still occur.
I am glad that you seem to be coming to your senses about scenarios when the male may have been coerced or deceived. Though are you still saying that the raped male and his relations are still liable for child support or not? The uncommon status of such situations is irrelevant. The uncommon status of the need for partial-birth abortion does not justify revoking the right to the procedure. Even if sexual activity become so self-regulated and conscientious that unwanted pregnancies were unheard of, the right to contraception and abortion ought not to be rescinded. Social policy is what it is, not always just, but we are making normative assertions of political rights and what public policy ought to be.
The “items on a ledger” should also include “up to 60% of my income, therefore of my labor” and “incarceration should I default on the monetary obligation.” If money is such a petty concern, why is it so vital that the female and the offspring receive it? The absence of extraction of economic assets has integral and devastating effects on a person.
You are now asserting that a certain right (choice for males) should not exist because it has potentially deleterious social results, exactly the same kind of argument that conservative forces made against the right to use contraception, the right to consentual sexual acts, and the right to abortion. I fully support those aforementioned rights, but let us not pretend that the possession of those rights has been socially innocuous. The absence of coercive laws against contraception, fornication, and abortion has some link with a rise of abortion, the rise of unwanted births and all the ensuing dread. Since the crime rate in South Africa seems to have risen after the end of apartheid and the granting of equal legal rights to Black South Africans, does that mean that differentially stripping black South Africans of free movement and legal rights is okay if it seems to prevent social harms?
And one can easily claim that the pro-choice movement is mired in misandry and misopedia (hatred of children), because the pro-choice movement has long implied that unborn children are unwanted, deadly parasites upon females that obstruct their autonomous careers and lifeplans and that each pregnancy is quasi-violative act of colonization by a male upon a female. The C4M movement is not the one that substituted the nomenclature of “cleavage of cells” for children. What’s more, C4M does not necessarily entail the biological death of the child in question, while the abortion rights movement necessarily crusades for the right to do just that. FWIW, I absolutely support the right to abortion, but do not pretend that the culture of abortion rights advocacy has had no pejorative effect on the perception of offspring. Perhaps many advocates of the political movement of abortion rights might personally share this comprehensive and hostile outlook towards other human beings, but that is irrelevant, because they have made a political argument not contingent upon acceptance of misandry or misopedia. That argument is that consent to sex is only consent to sex and is not consent to secondary outcomes that entail bodily or laborious duties of support. Maybe pro-choice advocates dream of a world where females are totally divorced from males in all aspects, just like C4M advocates may dream of a world where females are gratification receptacles. However neither side bases their argument upon gratification of their personal aspirations, they base it upon arguments of individual autonomy and rights.
C4M is not seeking to “dump children” on females, as the females still have their pre and post-conception options to avoid childbirth or to accept it. We only want the males to have the same post-conception entitlement to avoid the burden of a child’s existence.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Dorset;
Is C4M, as forwarded by you, really about abortion at all? I get the impression it’s more about a general argument about the right to disclaim parenthood.
As a hypothetical: a woman brings a child to term (perhaps she doesn’t want an abortion which she thinks is physically invasive, or values the father’s wish for a child). If both parents want their child to be adopted few people would have a problem with this. Would you support the mothers right to exercise Choice 4 Women and leave the father with sole parenthood? Or does she instead have a moral obligation to get an abortion if she doesn’t want to be a parent? I get the feeling you would support C4W (though correct me if I’m wrong). If this is the case I suspect this issue is just about whether parents should be able to disclaim parenthood unilaterally, as opposed to bilaterally, and nothing much to do with abortion.
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Since this seems to be an honest request, I’ll explain.
Analogies are valid arguments under a very specific set of circumstances — the form of the argument (”The Analogy”) must match that of the original argument, and the truth of each part of the analogy must be the same as that of the original argument.
If you satisfy those two requirements, you have a valid analogy. Your analogy fails on both points, therefore it’s just not a valid analogy.
Structurally your analogy doesn’t match what occurs during coitus. During coitus a man “expels” his semen. What occurs with that semen remains, for some length of time, under his control, or certainly under his potential control. He can “capture” it in a condom or “kill” it with a spermicide. He can set up a “perimeter defense” so that if it escapes being killed before capture, that it’s killed outside of the capture device. Whatever the situation, he expelled semen from his body and into a woman’s body.
Your analogy looks valid because it is in the form of an argument. It’s even in the form of a valid argument. However, it’s not in the form of “what happens during coitus”, and that’s what you’re trying to argue for. What you’re actually arguing against is something called “The Unrebuttable Assumption of Paternity”. That because a man and a woman live in the same home, if she winds up with a child, he’s on the hook even if he can prove he’s not the father.
For your analogy to be valid it would have to reflect what occurs during coitus and the role of each player. It would have to include the transfer of the “latching child” from the man to the woman by a willful act on his part. Although virgin births are part of some religions mythologies, they don’t happen in real life. The man through the (virtually always) willful act of inserting his penis into a woman’s vagina, transfers semen from his body to hers.
For your analogy to be valid, it would look more like this –
Man and woman enter “latching child zone”.
Man picks up cute “latching child” and hands it to the woman saying “Gee, this one is cute! But you’d better not keep her — remember, dear, we don’t want children!”
Woman accepts child and observes that the child is, indeed, irresistably cute, and can’t seem to let go.
The man and woman would have to be aware of their choices and the rules for dealing with “latching children”. The current rules about “semen” are that a man has complete control over “semen” until it passes beyond his control and into a woman’s body. After that, he’s consented to whatever the semen, in whatever state it might be, does. Analogously, the man would know that he had the option of grabbing every “latching child” who comes close and stuffing him or her into a duffle bag (”condom”) or forcefeeding said “latching child” a large dose of poison (”spermicide”) when it comes near, or before handing it to the woman (”vaginal spermicide suppository”). The man would even have choices for dealing with latching children — “Isn’t this one cute?”, followed by putting said child back down without handing it to the woman (”withdrawal method”). He could see if the woman’s hands were tied up in such a way that she couldn’t snatch a child from his hands (”The Pill”). He could take a Polaroid photo of the child and hand it to the woman (”vasectomy”).
In this analogy, as with coitus, the initial point of control is an action performed solely and exclusively by the man. In the coitus case, the man ejects semen from his body. In the “latching child” case, the man picks up a latching child and then releases it. In both case, where the object — child or semen — goes, and the condition it’s in after released, is under the man’s control.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
(That should probably be “Irrefutable Presumption of Paternity”. It exists in a number of states where a husband is legally defined to be the father of any child conceived during the marriage, even if he can prove he is not the biological father, and even if the wife admits to an adulterous relationship. Those laws need to be repealed, in my opinion, and the biological father held responsible instead.)
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
You make a compelling advocacy for implied consent, and I am bereft to see how it leaves room for the female’s abortion rights. Unless it is rape, copulation is a mutual acceptance of events that can lead to conception. The male is countenancing the expulsion of material that could lead to conception, and the female is countenancing the acceptance of said material. To you, for the former party, this act is implied and enforceable consent to 21 years of servitude. For the latter party, you do not hold this act to be enforceable implied consent but merely consent to the proximate coitus, not to its secondary outcomes. Even the female wanted to become pregnant and actively facilitated it, she has the full right to reverse that decision. Not even an initial formal statement of consent is required to enjoin the male.
You are trying to rephrase the analogy to make the male appear as if he is welcoming and actively facilitating the entry and burden of the offspring, which he does not do, at least not anymore than the female does when she allows male genitals transmitting semen to enter her own genitals. I explained what the proximate act attracting the latching children was, which was walking in a conjugal manner. These roaming children do not target single walkers, they tend to target couples. The proximate act which makes them vulnerable to latching children is walking together in this area. The children, finding a dual unit more advantageous to accost, start jumping and begging. The male’s own body is his culpable vessel; he can decide to not walk in the area, to position himself so as to keep his distance from the female so that they do not appear as a couple, or walk next to her armed with anti-latch measures. Even though they both have prior warning that this behavior will make them vulnerable, their actions do not indicate consent to the burdens that these children shall impose. The original analogy did not exclude the symbolic act of the male’s coital complicity; it is represented by the male electing to walk with the female in the area. That did not appear guilty enough for your taste, but that does not mean that the analogy left out the mutual aspect of coitus.
And the female is mutually culpable for allowing the male to enter her genitals. Your characterization of segments of coitus as being “solely and exclusively” controlled “by the man” is disturbing and inaccurate, if you believe in such a thing as consensual copulation. You are conflating the penetrating party with agency and the penetrated party with passivity. What if the female thrusted her pelvic regions towards and upon the male genitals in order to engulf them and their effluents? What if she approached from a superior position and lowered her orifice onto the male genitals while the male stayed prostrate (He is not being raped, but has simply elected to be less physically mobile than the female). If you maintain that the agency and culpability is still the male’s because he elects to leave his genitals inside the female until he ejaculates, what if he declines to continue until ejaculation and withdraws? Of course, you would still hold him culpable if any pre-ejaculate caused pregnancy. If his “passive” acquiescence to having his genitals engulfed by this more sexually active female constitute the necessary implied consent, I fail to see why the standard female’s “passive” acquiescence to the entry of male genitals into hers do not constitute binding implied consent.
Her tacit allowance of possible conception does not translate into an enforceable obligation to suffer the consequences of conception. If accepting the gametes into the region which would facilitate conception does not constitute implied consent to child burdens, why does depositing the gametes constitute enforceable implied consent? The distinction is that one involves external material being inserted internally and the other constitutes internal organic material being expelled.
The suggestion that since the male’s role involves organic material expelled from his body makes implied consent binding means that servitude can be assigned for actions other than vaginal intercourse. If the male never penetrated the female and ejaculated somewhere else, expelling the semen, and the female then takes it and inserts it into her genitals in order to effect pregnancy, is the male still liable then. You appear to be saying exactly that. He forfeited his property claim to the semen by expelling it, but he did not willfully expel it into the female genital orifice. If voluntary expulsion of bodily material means implied consent to whatever that bodily material is used to facilitate at the discretion of another person who app, the male who externally discarded his semen would be just as liable as the male who engaged in vaginal penetration. You previously expressed disapproval towards females who lie about contraception in order to obtain semen or who obtain the semen even after the male had kept it away from her orifice discarded it. Your new assertion now means that those females are equally entitled to child support should they use the unconventionally appropriated sperm to cause pregnancy. Even a wealthy male gratifying himself is potentially liable under your standard. Is this the new clarified standard that you are establishing?
The pro-choice movement wisely eschews the hazard of trying to read indications of something that can constitute implied consent by insisting that pregnancy and child-rearing must be consented to independently on their own terms, divorced from consent to copulation. It does not matter what contraceptives the female did or did not use, or if she told the male that she wanted to be impregnated, or even if she signed a contract of motherhood. Her prior actions which may be construed as inviting child burdens do not negate her right to terminate it and avoid the parental burdens upon herself.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
At first I thought you were going to raise the bodily perview objection. Since you were hinting at it, the female’s claim to repel and reject the advances of a pregnancy and the male’s claim to repel child support claims are founded upon the same premise of individual autonomy. Their consensual sexual acts do not constitute implied consent or secondary waiver of liberty to twenty-one years of servitude, at least that’s what the pro-choice movement insists about the female. They insist that that engaging in sex is not a waiver to allow the child to claim the female’s bodily sustenance for nine months or her personal liberty for 21 years. The male’s engaging in the sex act should not equal the implied waiver which the female’s actions clearly did not.
Attempts to exclude the male from the same entitlement because the baby does not physically intrude upon his body leads to unacceptable conclusions: that infringements upon liberty are acceptable if they do not directly enter or physically penetrate the person’s body. If I put a sign on the ground which said, don’t stop on this or you will be imprisoned, and a person, out of skepticism, curiosity, or stupidity, stepped on the sign and then a cage falls on them, I have violated their autonomy. I cannot claim that I am entitled to keep the person imprisoned because I warned the person not to step on the sign. If the cage was large enough and fell from above, I can confine and imprison him without laying a finger on the person’s physical body. There is no physical penetration or handling of his body.
Reasonable and courteous, but hardly obligatory. If they both were trying to go somewhere other than Chicago, they are individually responsible for being lost and suppporting themselves in the interim. If the female elects to follow a male on the train and he misleads her, she agreed to accept the risk of his bungling. If he wants to help her with accomodations, he could, but he is not obligated. If they are romantically consigned and he says, “pay for your own room dear,” it will probably mean the dissolution of their pairing, but either partner is free to exactly that. Perhaps it is reasonable and decent for the female to inform the male, “I was pregnant with your offspring and I aborted it,” but she has absolutely no obligation to do so.
As for your question of what the male might financially owe, I’ve been meditating on this. If I damaged somebody’s fence, I would be liable to pay to repair or replace the fence. However, if the wronged owner decided to take this damage fence as an opportunity to make expensive renovations and changes to the fence or replace it with a whole new one, I certainly am not liable for those revised changes. I would be liable for what the fence was originally worth, to reasonably reconstruct the force to its status prior to my inflicted damage. If the male’s impregnation is analogous to damage upon the female, he would be liable to pay a sufficient amount to restore her to state before he inflicted his damage, that is, a sufficient amount to make her unpregnant. If she decides to use his inflicted impregnation as an opportunity to renovate herself and her life by becoming gravida and then a mother, he should not be liable for that.
I do not think the damaged property analogy applies because unlike the property owner, the male did not vandalize the female’s person. She elected to participate with him in a potentially hazardous act. It would be like the property owner inviting me to shoot targets on his fence. If the analogy did somehow apply, the male would be liable for the price of what it takes to return the female to her prior, undamaged, unpregnant state, the price of an abortion. If she decides to use his inflicted damage as an opportunity for bodily and lifestyle renovation, that is her own venture and she ought to pay the difference.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
Nik,
Yes, I absolutely defend the hypothetical mother’s right to do exactly that.
This proposed entitlement for males is usually conflated with abortion because both abortion and C4M are post-conception, pre-partum methods of avoiding the burdens of childbirth and child-rearing. I define abortion as the pre-partum right to avoid the consequences of birth and child-rearing. Males would sign a waiver of parental responsibility, females would have to consume a pill or employ a suction device. Different methods to fulfill the same entitlement.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Dorset,
First, I’ll note that you’ve abandoned your analogy, and we’re back to arguing the original point.
Semen is ejected by the man’s body regardless of what the woman does. This is a biological fact. It has nothing to do with sexual positions, practices, passivity, activity, or even whether or not either or both of them are particularly good in the sack.
Specifically, it occurs thusly –
(Male Ejaculation)
And I don’t see women running around, stealing used condoms out of trashcans, and getting pregnant that way. Constructing “Straw Man” arguments is a nice way to get a good finger workout, but it’s a lousey way to win an argument.
A good reference for logical fallacies, as well as a nice introduction to argumentation is Fallacies.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 5:28 am
Dorset,
Abortion and contraceptive rights arise out of bodily autonomy issues, not out of a right to avoid responsibility for one’s actions. That they also allow one to avoid responsibility for one’s actions is a plus, but trying to construct equivalent methods of avoiding responsibility that have nothing to do with bodily autonomy, and arguing for them on the basis that other people’s bodily autonomy allows them the chance to avoid responsibility does not make any sense. The parallelism is simply not valid.
An action that avoids responsibility for a child by preventing the child from coming into being is completely different than an action that would refuse responsibility for a child that does come into existence. For a child that does come into existence, we require that both parents agree to abandon responsibility, and don’t allow either parent to unilaterally abandon responsibility.
Also, what is up with your use of male and female rather than man and woman? For some reason, I have a very hard time reading something that talks about “the male” and “the female” doing things without reading the author as a raving misogynist nutball. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Just a style tip, if that isn’t how you want to be read. :)
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 6:46 am
Dorset:
I was not talking about physical intrusion. I was talking about being able to prove responsibility for a born child, which in your terminology represents “21 years of servitude”. In our current society, a born child legally belongs to its biological mother and a man who may or may not be the biological father, unless other arrangements are made, which means our society automatically considers both contributors of genetic material liable for 21 years of servitude (to continue using your terminology). But making other arrangements generally requires that both parents are identified and given an opportunity to contribute to the decisionmaking process. (I am deliberately excluding Baby Moses laws here.) In many states, for instance, a woman cannot give a child up for adoption without identifying the putative father and attempting to notify him of the decision. Because it’s easy to identify the mother and hard to identify the father, the woman has more postcoital choices than the man. Just because the woman is the one who has to initiate legal action for child support for a born child does not mean she’s trying to rope the man into involuntary servitude out of meanness (although it is often expressed this way) - this is the way our society has decided to go about making sure the man fulfills his legal obligation. (BTW, I don’t notice you arguing about men who want the children that women want to abort or adopt out, which I think more than a few C4M adherents are interested in.)
What I think you are aiming for is a change in society to where the basic assumption is that a born child belongs to the world or something, and the two people responsible for its existence get individual and independent opportunities to opt out of taking care of it at any point in time. On the surface, this may seem to be a more fair way of handling things, but only in a world where the child is gestated in a tank. The very real health risks for the woman involved in contraception, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, and the postpartum period put the heavier burden on the woman, so for your system to be fair and evenhanded, some equivalent kind of burden needs to be put on the man. What would you suggest?
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:14 am
This has been mentioned above. Dorset thinks that if a woman has a child (she doesn’t want an abortion for whatever reason) and then wishes to exercise Choice 4 Women leaving the father with sole parental responsibility, then she should be able to do so. Dorset’s also let it be known that he supports abortion unconditionally, he doesn’t think a man should be able to prevent a women aborting. It’s unfair to suggest he hasn’t mentioned either of these situations.
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 9:35 am
I think the Choice 4 Women scenario is an interesting one for those who want both parents to have obligations once the child is born - unless both disclaim them. It’s accepted (in some places) that a woman can have an abortion to avoid have a child damaging her life, or the lives of children she already has. Unless you accept C4W if there’s a father who want to keep the child, the only way a woman can avoid being damage in this fashion is to have an abortion. I’m not happy with a woman being influenced to have an abortion in that manner.
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 9:38 am
I missed that part of his post. I apologize.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Catherder,
I have not abandoned the analogy, just deflected your attempts to debunk that analogy when you started making a conflation that says penetration = ejaculation = agency = responsibility. You have no reduced your conflation to this: ejaculation = agency = responsibility.
And female’s produce lubricating secretions to facilitate deep penetration to make conception more likely, just like ejaculation makes conception more likely than if the the pre-ejaculate were the only phallic effluent (though conception can still happen with just the pre-ejaculate). That is a biological fact. Neither lubrication nor ejaculation, though they make conception more likely, indicate consent to the repercussions of conception. They do not even indicate consent to the sexual act itself. If they did indicate consent, then then we shall have to re-evaluate the claims of those rapists who said that the victim “wanted it” because of certain physical indications.
Before you at least attempted to establish that his squirting was preceded by initiating acts that he controlled “solely and exclusively,” that it was all “under the man’s control.” Since the varieties of leching behavior demonstrate that this conflation is not categorically true, the male’s ejaculation is not definitive evidence of agency, initation, or tacit acceptance of the consequences of the gamete exchange. His ejaculation does not indicate implied consent any more than does the female’s parting of her legs or her lubrication.
Your new insistence that “squirting” equates to implied consent of consequences makes the presented egregious scenarios anything but “strawmen” arguments. They are not “strawmen” but valid implications of the application of your standard (squirting = resonsibility). A male who was forcibly or unconsciously masturbated would culpable for the consequences by this standard. So too would a male who discarded semen into a refuse bin only to have it stolen. And so too would a male who was raped by managed to ejaculate. Rare these cases could be (so far as we know), so this is usually referred to as an appeal to marginal cases (like animal rights theorists being confronted with the “dog in the lifeboat”). However, I doubt you would look favorably on a proscribed abortion policy which says, “Most females consent to the acts which caused their pregnancy, and as for the ones who did not, insignificant consideration.” Or a policy which prohibited late-term abortions categorically because legitimate health reasons to procure them are considered “almost” non-existent.
Prior indications of what looks like implied consent to reproductive and child-rearing outcomes are irrelevant. Even if a female publicly acknowledges purchasing semen and inserts it into herself for the purpose of inducing pregnancy, her prior indications of her prior intentions are irrelevant and she can terminate the pregnancy, and can even take advantage of the legal abandonment laws and anonyomously deposit the child in a state location.
Acceptance of semen into the female genitals does not indicate implied consent to pregnancy on the part of the female. Ejaculation, whether into a refuse bin or into female genitals, does not indicate implied consent to pregnancy. If such things do, then discard abortion rights as well.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Charles and Lee,
Those two entitlements cannot be delineated. If a female consents to sexual encounter, a possible outcome is pregnancy and live birth. Social policy previously stated that females have the chance to uphold their bodily sovereignty before they chose to engage in potentially impregnating activity. The anti-abortion advocates stated, “It’s one thing to stay independent and avoid getting pregnant, but it’s another thing to be able to reverse the pregnancy once the child is conceived and growing.” The abortion rights movement has asserted repeatedly that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy or consent to childrearing. The right to avoid the burdens of childrearing is integral in the pro-choice movement, and the right to abort does not inhere only in a right to avoid bodily intrusion. Even a female who had no problem with the nine months of debilitation but chooses to abort solely because she does not want to be a mother or learns that her child will be retarded and too onerous to care for has her entitlement intact. Unless she consents to the pregnancy and childrearing independently, divorced from her consent to copulation, she has not consented and the pregnancy and the child presence would constitute an imposition onto her autonomy.
Whether somebody imposes upon another’s autonomy by siphoning blood and bodily sustenance or by forcing them to labor for their support, both actions constitute impositions, and if they are not consented to, they are both violations. Perhaps one is more viscerally offensive than the other, but both constitute rights’ violations. If am warned to not walk somewhere because a lifeform will set upon me, you are saying that I can only remove the lifeform’s impositions if it actually penetrates and extracts from my physical body. But if the lifeform imprisons and coerces me into laboring for its economic and other support, I have to tolerate that and if I attempt to break the lifeform’s control over me, I will be sanctioned and confined to compel me to comply. I had my chance to avoid this enslavement by choosing not to walk in this area, so it would seem. My walking into the area after being warned constituted consent to this autonomy imposition, so it would seem. You are free to assume this position of sequential consent, but I do not see how it permits freeing oneself of vampiric, bodily impositions when one was warned ahead of time that one’s activity created the risk of such an imposition being imposed.
Females have the right to avoid the responsibility or consequences of their sexual acts, bodily or laborwise, because their consent to copulation does not translate into consent to pregnancy or child-rearing. This right has long been lambasted as a right to “escape responsibility.” Perhaps it is, but I will not support a standard of culpability that translates each consentual sex act into a potential consent to pregnancy, 21 years of affirmative servitude, or death (when pregnancies are complicated). You are saying that females cannot have “implied consent” enforced upon them because it is violative, bodily imposition, a violation of autonomy. Even if the female’s previous actions would seem to indicate a consent to pregnancy and child-rearing, we cannot force the consequences to play themselves out. Males forced into child-support are forced to labor and work for a consequence that they did not directly consent to, and if they resist, they are imprisoned, their liberty taken away, until they comply. Perhaps a parasite is not being inserted into their abdomens to siphon blood, but it is an autonomy violation. It is a coercion of the autonomous entity to support consequences that it did not consent to, no more than did the female consent to pregnancy or child-rearing by having sex.
Legal abandonment laws allow the female to do exactly that unilaterally. Even if the female is required to notify the putative father, the putative father cannot legally force her to provide child support payments and cannot force her to provide affirmative, maternal support. However, the female can do exactly that to the male, even if he signs a full waiver of parental privileges. Even if the female gives birth, she is not obligated to provide 21 years of servitude, even if the female tries to proceed against her. The male is fully liable for 21 years, at the female’s discretion.
If you are distressed that couples are no longer the definitive culpable units for child production, there appears to be no stopping that. Reproductive technology and respect for individual autonomy means that the female is unilaterally responsible for the child’s birth or non-birth. Unless the male is conjugally entitled to control the conception or gestation (which he is not and should not be), then he should not have corollary duties. Though I do look forward to the day when persons are gestated in tanks, or not at all, as it will make things considerably less complicated.
The fact that one participant in copulation is more vulnerable to more medical hazards is irrelevant, if that participant freely elects to engage in copulation, and I believe I answered it with a posited scenario. If a healthy female and a male with cardiac problems contraceptively copulate, the male risks more dangerous and costly repercussions than does the female. She might only suffer some vaginal abrasions, while he is risking infarction, hazardous surgery, angioplasty, expensive medications, long convalescence, and debilitation. The female is not obliged to pay for his recovery or medical burdens inflicted as a result of copulation. He elected to risk himself and recovering from the damage inflicted by copulation is his burden.
You are suggesting that if the exercise of an autonomy right is less physically taxing or burdensome on an individual it is to be regarded less or not at all. That since the male’s exercise of this choice involves the mere signing of a waiver while the female’s exercise of this choice involves medication or abdominal suction, his right to choice ought to be disregarded. I find this suggestion shocking indeed. If a female can exercise her choice by taking RU-486, but another female has to undergo a dilation procedure, is the former female’s right to be regarded less or rescinded? Her exercise of her right involved considerably less risk and sacrifice than did the female who had to undergo the dilaton abortion. There should be no distinction in the allotment of this right because some persons can exercise it with less burden or cost.
If the male wanted to forfeit his parental duties, but agreed to undergo unnecessary abdominal surgery and take debilitating chemicals for 48 hours (to mimic the abortion recovery period), would that allay your fears of inequity?
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Whatever reason it is, you have not explained it and I cannot fathom what it is. That’s a problem of perception that you and whoever else share and is no concern of mine. Why it is necessarily misogynistic when both sexes are referred to in the scientific, clinical nomenclature? I say “male” and “female” because “man” and “woman” are loaded with too much political baggage, and invite the ambiguity of meaning “social” or “physical” or “genetic” or whatever else. The terminology is to make clear that I only refer to individuals so far as their fecundity methods go.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Dorset writes:
I’ve said nothing of the sort in my analysis. All I did was show that the structure of your analogy doesn’t match the structure of pregnancy as an event.
Conception starts when the male ejaculates. I don’t care how or why he ejaculates, but if he doesn’t, there just won’t be any chance of conception occuring. Your analogy doesn’t include this initial step, or anything that comes after it, so your analogy is just plain invalid.
I’m sorry. That’s just the way analogies work. You don’t have to like that, but I don’t have to pretend your invalid analogy is somehow valid.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Really? That does not seem to be your analysis when you said this:
You objected to my analogous inclusion of ejaculation as not making the male look guilty enough. I said that when the male moves within physically proximity of the female companion and stays near her in a conjugal manner, that is what attracts the accosting children who begin attempting to latch. There was no structural omission of the male act which makes the pregnancy potential.
Your only problem with this formulation is that it does not make the male look like his is “asking for it” enough, so you decry the analogy as invalid and demand to amend it with the male shooting rogue children at the female.
“Just” is code lexicon which means “I can’t explain, but that’s how it is, so buy it.” Your complaint over the analogy is that it does not make the male look guilty enough for your preference. Not facilitating your preconceived notion of where you want blame to lie does not translate into logical fallacy. Sorry, that’s “just” the way it is.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Dorset,
It’s not a question of “guilt”. It’s a question of reproductive biology. Ignoring the non-existent instances of women dumpster-diving for used condoms, reproduction starts when a man ejaculates. It doesn’t start because they hang around each other, neck, hold hands, or take a walk in the park together.
As for logical fallacy, logic doesn’t care what’s being argued. If you want to construct an analogy, construct a valid one. Otherwise, expect me to pick it apart. Heck, I’m an equal-opportunity bogus analogy picker-aparter. It’s just one of my many talents.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
It’s a talent that has atrophied and withered, so perhaps you should nourish it in the future.
You have been asserting that since the male’s involuntary expulsion of fluid is allegedly the last proximate act before conception results, then he is culpable and liable for what results and he cannot eschew the burden of the consequences. Conversely, you are implying that since the female’s allowance of the male’s genital into hers is not the last proximate act before conception results, then she is inculpable of what results and is free to eschew the burdens. When you attempt to make a delineation that establishes who can avoid a consequence and who must suffer it, it is an analysis of culpability.
Ah, so if a male withdraws or fails to ejaculate, he is inculpable of a pregnancy that might still result? I doubt that is what you are saying, as I am sure that you would still fault males when the pregnancy results solely from pre-ejaculate sperm, even though the allegedly definitive last proximate act never occured. If a male’s genitalia are exuding pre-ejaculate and the female lowers herself onto them and engulfs them with her genitalia, but then he declines to continue and withdraws without ejaculation occuring, who initiated the last proximate act that could have caused a pregnancy? Is the female to be bereft of her post-conception options because the last motion prior to the depositing of the sperm was her motion? Of course not.
What’s more is that this marker or biological responsibility is an involuntary muscle contraction. Certainly the male often brings it about by agitating his genitals against the female’s vaginal walls, but he does not consciously release the fluid anymore than the female consciously issues lubricating secretions or consciously expands the vaginal wall. And anyway, ejaculation is not the last involuntary action before reproduction begins. Reproduction begins with fertilization, or if you prefer, implantation, both of which are involuntary reactions entirely facilitated by the female. Her fallopian tubes propelled the ovum to meet the spermatozoa and her swollen uterine walls attached to the embryo. Certainly these are all involuntary processes and contractions of organs. But these are the last proximate events before reproduction is actually underway (even ejaculation does not guarantee reproduction). The female facilitated fertilization and implantation by any number of actions, parting her legs, not taking a chemical contraceptive, not wearing a diaphragm, not cleansing her genitals after the fact, not taking the morning-after-pill. Despite the female’s neglect to take all of these preventative measures and the fact that her involuntary bodily processes are the last proximate acts before reproduction begins, her engagement in copulation does not constitute implied consent to pregnancy or child-rearing and she can eschew and nullify the consequences. No matter how accepting or inviting of pregnancy the female may appear, she has the right to free herself of the burden. The male’s role is not categorically or inherently more culpable in catalyzing reproduction; he ought to have the same entitlement to free himself of the burden.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Pregnancy does not equal parenthood. Women who abort end a pregnancy, instead of avoiding parenthood like C4M advocates are proposing a right for.
Fathers don’t have any resposibilities towards their unborn children (at least legally). Both mothers and fathers have, or at least should have, equal rights and responsibilities towards born children.
Unilateral adoption “right” has been mentioned (woman giving up a child for adoption). I don’t agree with this for two reasons:
1) Right to give a child for adoption is not a right, but a privilege that exists because the supply of wannabe adoptive parents exceeds the supply of healthy newborn babies (when talking about older children with disabilities or perhaps of the “wrong” color and sex, things change. Kudos to adoptive parents who are not so picky). If the supply/demand situation were to change (less adoptive parents or more babies) this right should (and probably would in a society which professes to value children*) go away.
2)If the father is in a situation where he can support the child and wants to do so, he should be given special consideration in who should be given legal parenthood.
If it is unclear, adoption is process where the rights and responsibilities over a child are transferred from biological parent(s) to adoptive parents. It always requires the consent of the adoptive parents (thus giving a child for adoption can not be a right) and usually the consent of the biological parents.
* Not to be confused with valuing embryos and fetuses.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
All this talk about vaginal walls and ejaculations is irrelevant. I have no problem about a frank discussion on human biology, but this is (IMO) not the place for that. I don’t give a shit whether the pregnancy results from a man taking some pre-stored sperm and and sending it via mail to a woman or whatever unusual methods can be devised.
It has nothing to do with the rights of a born child.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
So if the female sues for financial support during the pregnancy or includes the medical expenses of the pregnancy in the paternity suit after the child’s birth, she doesn’t get a dime for that expense?
Whether a female is removing the fetus in order to avoid the physical burden of pregnancy or the post-partum burden or parenthood is irrelevant. Both of those are impositions upon autonomy and consent to them cannot be inferred by her consent to intercourse. Either reason she can employ to exercise her right to nullify the sexual consequences of her act, which before birth means for the female taking the pill to keep it from attaching, taking a pill to break the attachment, or separating and killing the fetus. For the male it means signing a paper. The pro-choice advocacy enumerated the right to avoid parental burdens as key justification for the right to terminate the pregnancy, and even after pregnancy, females still have recourse to that evasion right by abandoning the child to state custody (not the same as imposing upon an adopted family).
You are conflating the right to eschew parental burdens with some sort of power to take away children or impose them on unwilling parties, neither power which C4W or C4M advocates. When females abandon children after birth, they are handed over to initial state custody and if an adopted family is willing, the forfeited children are doled out. This is not the same as a right for unwilling parents to force adoption upon unwilling families. The fact that females can legally abandon infants does not mean that they can force other families at gunpoint to assume parental status over their discarded offspring. Even when the female is required to identify and inform the father, she still has the intact right to eschew the parental burden, and neither the state nor the father can extract child support or care from her if she willingly terminates her parental status.
Even if the male terminates his parental status and privileges, he cannot terminate his parental duties like the female can. Even after waiving parental rights, the female can forcibly extract child support from him. Whatever you think of this entitlement to eschew parental burdens after birth without any remaining duties, it is granted to females but not to males, making the situation doubly inequitous.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Catherder is the one who posited that “biological facts” were the basis for the man’s obligated status, so facts and pedantic details were necessary to examine the assertion.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Yes, state custody is first. Have no illusions over this: Such system exists because many people exist who would want to adopt a child. The state is merely a stepping stone. I’m not a big fan of legal abandonment (mildly put, whether by a man or a woman), finding new parents for an unwanted child, whether by the help of a the state or simply approval, is something I accept and support completely.
And the man, as the father, gets certain rights in return. I would have no problem with a system that would allow a man to give his duties and rights away provided the woman, and a possible new legal father would consent to that.
Sorry. I don’t know, actually. Maybe she does. I support a single-payer health-care.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
They do not support your position. Your so-called examination is biased. All you are doing is providing a lenthy textbook explanation, and then taking a leap from that and saying that because of those pedantic details, C4M should exist. Classic dishonest tactic: a serious of obvious truths followed by a lie.
Let’s have an example. A newborn child exists. Whether the woman, or the man, took necessary precautions to avoid that situation (women have more to do, up and including abortion) is irrelevant to the situation. Child exists, and right and resposibilities over the child are 50% woman’s, 50% man’s.
You may think it is unfair for men, I think it is actually balanced. Pregnancy, childbirth and abortion all present health risks. Men do not have to face any of them personally to become fathers.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Serious should be series.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
I don’t think this is correct. Can you document this claim that mothers have a special legal right to abandon their children on the fathers, thereby protecting themselves from being sought for child support? Or that they have a special legal right to abandon a child on the state against the father’s wishes, thereby protecting themselves from being sought for child support?
While there are now laws in most states allowing anonymous abandonment of infants to hospitals or other safe locations (intended to prevent anonymous abandonment of infants in bathrooms and dumpsters), only four states (Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee) have laws that are sex specific (New York’s isn’t). Either parent (or a legal guardian in some states, or even a proxy in others) in possession of an infant could abandon the child to a hospital.
Furthermore, legal abandonment does not necessarily sacrifice the parental rights of either parent (it varies from state to state). Either parent can reclaim an abandoned infant (with some states explicitly granting father’s the right to reclaim infants abandoned by the mother). Furthermore, while there is no case law that I could find, I don’t see anything in the law that suggests that a mother (or father) who abandoned their infant could not later be sued for child support by the other parent if the other parent reclaimed the abandoned infant (and then gained custody), since the act of abandonment is not a legal surrender of parental rights (or responsibilities).
Furthermore, baby moses laws are in their infancy (so to speak), so it is likely that the will be modified if inequities (such as one parent abandoning the child when the other parent doesn’t want the child abandoned) are discovered to be a significant problem.
If Baby Moses laws are not what you meant, then I have no idea what laws you are talking about.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
Also, a lie is quite harsh, opinion would be a better word in this case.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
Tuomas,
Actually, I think the word you want is ‘non-sequitor’.
The lie is an implicit lie: the implication that the non-sequitor follows from the obvious truths.
Of course, it could simply be shoddy reasoning, and the writer believes that the non-sequitor is a logical sequitor.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
Charles:
This comment was written by Tuomas.You are right, that is the correct term. Thanks.
Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
The child biologically exists long before birth, yet not only can the female actually sever her support link, she can kill it to free herself. Do not try basing the difference in obligation on difference in capacities; born infants still lack self-awareness and cannot demonstrate rational autonomy. The pain distinction is also irrelevant because if basing the acceptability of killing an entity upon it’s capacity to feel pain permits any murder so long as the victim is anesthetized. The only relevant distinction between a born infant and a fetus is that a fetus is attached. But whether the fetus/baby is extracting physical sustenance with vascular connections or is extracting labor/economic support with the force of law, both impositions are a violation of autonomy if the provider of whatever support did not consent. The fact that a fetus is physically attached to the female gives her other means to facilitate separation and free herself of the burden.
If your position is that once children are born, the parents are obligated, it excises consent as a requirement for the assignment of support obligations. A female raped and imprisoned for nine months until birth would be obligated to support the product of the rape even though she had no consent in any phase of the child creation. And to go back to some scenarios you were lambasting, even the child produced with the male’s discarded semen. If you are going through the “implied consent” route, justification for abortion rights are hard to come by.
This objection of differential biological risk has come up before and it is irrelevant. The female knows that she faces different physical hazards upon consenting to copulation and she solely assumes them upon her consent. This objection seems to be saying that since females risk more perilous physical and health complications from copulation, then males have more obligations to support and attend to the health consequences of the female. The female elects to copulate, and she unilaterally elects how she deals with whatever post-intercourse health complications; the male is not responsible for any of that. Accepting the premise behind the different biological risk objection would give all the more physically vulnerable individuals ready-made lawsuits against any person that they had copulated with. Virgin females who bleed too much can sue the male who ruptured the hymen. Males with cardiac problems can sue the females that they copulated wtih if they have a heart attack during or after intercourse, and they’ll say, “These healthy females only have to deal with some minor vaginal abrasions, I have to deal with angioplasty, medication, and bed confinement.” Of course their claim should be ridiculous, as they elected to assume their unique risks upon consenting to copulate, just like females accept their unique risks when they consent.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
I’m not seekings “justifications” for abortion. I think abortion is a right, period.
Key to understanding the pro-choice position is that it says that birth is the dividing line between human rights and no rights (thus, women have a right to abort), including a child’s right to have parents. To a pro-choicer, embryo/fetus does not equal to a child in a moral/legal sense.
“Seems to”, indeed. And do you some issues with law suits (based on the following straw man attack)? How many times I have to repeat: Child exists, and right and resposibilities over the child are 50% woman’s, 50% man’s ?
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
I haven’t seen caselaw on this because I have never found the scenario documented or recorded. However, once abandoned children are entered into state custody, foster care, or adoption eligibility, courts have issued terminations of parental rights of the anonymous abandoning parent(s). Judges have noted that the statute normally requires consent of biological parents but then note that obtaining such consent is impossible. Terminations have still been issued. If the male can actually proceed against the female and force her to reassume parental duties or give child support, it seems to contradict the notion of a legal, no fault abandonment.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Dorset,
Typically adoption takes time. Presumably the father would notice that his child had mysteriously disappeared, file a missing persons or contempt for interference with custody, and they might find the child in the “abandoned children” files.
Unless, of course, part of the reason women abandon children is because the father has already abandoned the mother. Do you have any sense whether or not C4M would result in more women dropping babies off at fire stations? How do you see this playing out?
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Yes, parents should have an obligation to take of their children. That is my position. Conditions of creating the child are irrelevant. None of these are the child’s fault. And the mailed semen was an absurd joke, I don’t certainly spend any time lambasting such scenarios.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Yeah, and raising that distinction is only valid if it indicates relevant differences of autonomy or worth of the entity in question. You cannot say that animals should not have the same moral/legal status solely because they are animals; the axiom is usually justified on the basis that their being animals means that they do not have rationality, self-awareness, reflective self-awareness. Racists did not say that people of whatever skin color have less status solely because of the skin color, but that the skin color indicated that these individuals had less capacities or abilities. Born babies do not have self-awareness or rationality or autonomy, yet people are hell-bent to protect them, unlike fetuses, even though they both lack the relevant attributes.
A fetus is morally different from most kinds of children because it is potentially imposing upon a person without that person’s consent and the only way for the person to assert their sovereignty is usually to kill it, whereas with a non-fetal transgressor, a person could repel its trangression without lethal means. The right to repel imposition does not change if the trangressor happens to be a born human. If a child grabbed you and inserted an IV tube to obtain sustaining blood and then said, “You can’t remove it, I’ll die and I’m a born child.” Even if you were warned ahead of time not to go where the child was lurking, that did not equal consent to the child’s extracting actions. You can remove the IV, even if it means the death of the already born child. If a child is stealing from or attacking you, usually you can just shoo it away or call the police.
Yes I do have issues with lawsuits, especially when they are launched against persons who are not actually culpable for whatever damage. You do not seem to be eschewing the differential biological risk objection which says that persons of less physical vulnerability are responsible for harms befalling more physically vulnerable from activities that they undertake together, so those raised scenarios are not straw and they become valid implications of accepting your position. So accept culpability for the outcomes of such scenarios or amend your position. And it the “child exists, period” standard is binding, then even the abducted raped female forced to give birth to the rapist’s child is also liable for 21 years of servitude.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
People who are poor or hungry through no fault of their own are not authorized to steal. People who have leukemia are not entitled to seize people and extract bone marrow, even if it means debilitation and death for them. If parent did not consent to baby’s creation, baby gets nothing from parent.
Yeah, it would probably would result in more such cases. The granting and exercise of more sexual and reproductive autonomy as a whole has probably contributed much to such cases. Oh well.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
If there are no people who would rather raise that child. Then yes. I’m not dodging culpability here, even in your far-fetched scenarios. And of course, the man who did all that should be executed/put to prison for life (I am undecided on death penalty, but that is off-topic here) and his property handed to the woman and child, IMO.
As for the fetus/born child question: In fact, it is not known exactly when does a human being attain self-awareness. Perhaps it is before birth. I draw a line between human rights/ no rights at birth. Where do you draw it?
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
Of course, plenty of people, and many charity organizations would probably be willing to take the burden from the abducted ,raped, forced to give birth -woman.
And let’s not pretend that the situation is analogous to: man and woman consent to have sex-no birth control-woman gets pregnant-woman does not abort-man and woman have parental obligations.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
I’m done with you. Your apathy towards human suffering is beyond pale. So what if C4M would result in more such cases?
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
So what if C4M would result in more such cases?
A descriptor of Dorset’s position, not mine.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
When the entity in question is asked, “What are you?” and communicates that it is aware that it is a physical creature that is capable of dying, it is self-aware. I am not saying that children or whatever must necessarily be denied rights protection, but if we decide to extend it to creatures that lack those attributes, then we have to fashion a different justifications for excluding other entities that remain excluded. If we decide that non-self aware humans like born children have rights, then another explanation is needed for why unborn children can be killed, or why animals can do not have rights.
This coming from someone who is prepared to sentence raped females to care for the embodiment of their violation. Exercise of rights and human autonomy usually has socially deleterious consequences. If that repercussion is justification for rescinding the right, all rights are open for utilitarian negotiation, no sacrosanct reservations.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
Okay. Breaking my word here.
How clever. If I had answered any other way, you would have accused me of hypocrisy, now I’m the big bad meanie for being consistent. I’m not responsible for the hypothetical actions of the hypothetical forcible impregnator/kidnapper. I regret for not seeing your trick for what it was, like I saw the impossibly ridiculous “If a child grabbed you and inserted an IV tube to obtain sustaining blood” (that sure is a common problem *eyeroll*).
The born child is a human being with the resulting rights first and foremost, rather than embodiment of violation. I have some faith in humanity, thus I would believe that many, many people would be sympathetic to the plight of that woman and willing to take the burden of childcare from her.
How far does your “anything against the will of a parent is slavery” -logic go? Can a person suddenly one day decide that it would be really awful to feed my child, it infringes upon my rights, decide to not feed the child?
Your ultra-libertarian ideology is something I consider troublesome.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Ability to communicate is not a requirement for self-awareness, merely one useful indicator for discerning it. You have not proven that born children are not self-aware.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Yes, they can, but if it is a child that they had previously accepted responsibility for, they cannot do it suddenly and will have make a formal renunciation and inform the state that the child is now without oversight. A person who accepts custody of a child but then abandons without formal notification is like the person who claims to attend to an emergency situation but then abandons it. Perhaps they did not have an initial obligation to attend to the situation, but announcing their intention and then abandoning it reduces the endangered or suffering person’s chance of receiving aid, because all are under the assumption that somebody is attending to it and it no longer requires attention.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
It is the only conceivable method of proving or demonstrating self-awareness. If you are suggesting that self-awareness is presumed unless definitively demonstrated to be absent (proving a negative), then it will have to be presumed for any living organism. For all we know, cockroaches and snails have compact, undetectable neurological structures that make reflective self-awareness possible; they just choose not to show it.
No, I have not definitively proven that born children are not self-aware, and neither can I prove that second-trimester fetuses are not self-aware so birth-delineation cannot be used to determine possession of self-awareness.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
All they have to do is formally declare:
This child is from now on someone elses problem!
I don’t accept this. I accept handing out the responsibility for your own children only when someone else is willing to take up the burden. If the state is willing, great. If not, then your complaints about being “enslaved” to the child fall on deaf ears.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
Snails and cockroaches =/= newlyborn humans.
I am staunch specist, I suppose. Even if animals were smart and self-aware, I would not support same rights to them as I do with humans.
I am also aware that the drawing the line at birth is arbitrary, and I am personally relieved that third-semester abortions are rare, because they are more in the gray area. But the line has to be drawn somewhere, at birth in my case. I don’t pretend to know that self-awareness is suddenly infused upon a baby at birth. Nor do I pretend that that the fact that babies cannot speak english of any other language means that they are lower life forms.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:03 am
lets say C4m is legal and a woman chooses to have a child knowing that the father already legally opted out, isn’t she then willingly accepting the burden?
This comment was written by Beste.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:03 am
If the state is ready to imprison the parent as a result of the abandonment, would it then become responsible for the child’s lack of care?
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:10 am
Fine, but then a person who draws the bright line at skin color or who finds infants no more sympathetic than snails is on equal footing. All that you could protest is that they have chosen different prejudices.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:11 am
I would think so, and it should then provide care if no one else will. There are better/other ways to ensure no abandonment occurs than threat of imprisonment, like social programs, and demanding child support from the absent parent (notice the gender-neutral language here).
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:16 am
Hate infants all you want. Hate people of different race all you want. I’m not a thought police.
If you start arguing that people of different color, or infants should have no more rights than you think you, or people of your age/gender/race have, then you are my enemy.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:29 am
I am not arguing that. If infants receive rights without any requisite criteria, a distinction has to be raised to justify the continued exclusion of other entities that lack that criteria. But if you are saying that rights can be granted and denied solely upon our sentimental preference of who we just think should or should not have them, a racist or ageist criterion is potentially just as legitimate. There would be no objective indictment, just a clash of prejudices.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:36 am
1)Being human
2)Being born
My criteria.
C’est la vie.
This comment was written by Tuomas.My prejudices are better than your prejudices ;).
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January 7th, 2006 at 12:47 am
Should those who base it on skin color or sex reclaim influence, countenance accepting that explanation from them. Then again, they do still have power in a lot of places in the world, so a lot of people are already have to accept their superior prejudices ;).
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:49 am
Well, it isn’t.
This comment was written by Tuomas.I don’t support opt-out from parenthood for men or for women. I support a woman’s (or a pregnant man’s[?]) right to choose abortion. And I support biological parents giving up parenting rights and responsibilities to adoptive parents.
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January 7th, 2006 at 12:57 am
I think I have said all I have to say on the subject. I’ll just end up repeating myself from now on.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Dorset writes:
A pig is not a boy. The decision not to grant the same rights to animals that are granted to people goes back thousands of years. I don’t see it changing any time soon, unless, perhaps, some kind of Planet Of The Apes scenario occurs.
Infants of all races and classes recieve rights in these United States, and in many other civilized countries in the world, because they are human beings and because nation-states have decided that baby human beings should be protected and provided for so that they can grow up to become productive adult human beings.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 8:26 am
To extent FurryCatHerder’s point, where boundary lines are muddy (as between clearly sentient six year olds and clearly non-sentient 20 week fetuses), bright line standards are very useful. Rather than leaving the sentience/personhood line up to individual judgment, we (as a society) have agreed that legal personhood starts at birth. Arguing otherwise requires something much, much stronger than an insistence that your dividing line is objective line and that the existing bright line will allow the racists to take over, which is all I see you providing, Dorset. Anyway, are you actually arguing for legal infanticide, or are you simply being obstreperous?
You seem to think that bodily autonomy rights would only allow women to have abortions in order to avoid further bodily autonomy violations by the fetus, and that therefore the right to have an abortion because you don’t want to have a child must be a separate right, which men could have as an equivalent to by use of contracts. However, the bodily autonomy right includes the right to decide what to do with one’s body for whatever reason, so deciding to abort because you don’t want a child is a right not because not taking care of children is a right, but because deciding what to do with your body is a right (and one shared equally by men and women to the extent that it is physically possible). The limited right to abandon a child is already available to both parents equally.
That a woman who has an abortion doesn’t have responsibility for her child because there is no child to have responsibility for inexplicably does not sway you at all. Still you insist that men should have an “equivalent” right to not support children that do exist. That you don’t see how these two rights are not equivalent is puzzling.
Also, just to be clear, am I correct that you have abandoned the claim that women have some special legal right to abandon responsibility for their children, without the consent of the father of the child, potentially forcing the father to raise the child alone without support from the mother of the child? It seems to me you admitted that you had no basis for that claim, but it wasn’t a very clear retraction.
Also, your recent analogies suggest that you believe that taxation is the equivalent of rape and enslavement. Is this actually your position?
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
The strength of historical precedent, which also threw it’s weight behind other infamous rights’ exclusions and limitations.
Potentiality as grounds for granting life rights. Same argument that pro-lifers make in order to enjoin females from aborting, except that they start younger.
No, I am not arguing for legal infanticide (though the position has its merits). Granting born children rights while denying them to fetuses, even though both cannot demonstrate self-awareness or rationality means that another distinction would have to be raised to justify the allowance of killing one. The distinction becomes that the fetus is potentially imposing without consent and that to stop the imposition usually requires killing the fetus. However, that justification does not stop applying to solely fetuses. Whether a person is imposed upon by a fetus, adult human, animal, or retarded person, one can use forceful or even lethal means to repel their impositions.
Yes, and before the bright line used to be (and in some places still is) at conception, skin color, or sex, and its defenders of the day concluded that it was very useful and provided societal benefit and that changing it would create social problems. Do not pretend that shifting it to birth is bereft of harmful repercussions.
There is no child to have responsibility for because of the female’s assertion of her autonomy. You are saying that the potential imposition upon the male does not justify him repelling the indirect consequences of his actions, but that the imposition upon the female justifies exactly that. The notion that 21 years of servitude is less a burden than one extra month of bodily burden (to wait for viable induced labor) is puzzling. Copulation consigns one to decades of forced labor but not to bodily burden, even though both constitute impositions upon autonomy. The fact that the impositon is bodily gives the female different means for repelling it. Appropriating somebody’s person for biological sustenance or forced labor seem to be wrong for the same reason, even though one is more skin-crawling than the other.
No, I do not think that all taxation is enslavement or rape. Individuals who accept and utilize the benefit of police, emergency care, social services, and state subsidies are announcing complicity with the extraction system. The hypothetical males in question are not accepting the “benefit” of the child, unless they start demanding to exercise parental privilege, controlling and raising the child. If they start doing that, then they appear to be more liable.
Safe Haven and Moses laws promise a safe, legal abandonment; the notion that liability and parental burdens can still be reassigned seems to fly in the face of the law. Some Michigan and Kansas caselaw agrees with you, saying that voluntary termination of parental right for either parent does not absolve that parent of support liability, so post-partum eschewing of parental burden is conjugal. Pre-partum eschewing or acceptance of the burden is unilateral.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
I’m saying that if a child exists, its parents need to be responsible for taking care of it. If it doesn’t then they aren’t parents, and have no such responsibility.
Actually, I think that the financial responsibility for raising children should be shared equally across the entire population, and the financial burden should be shared equally by ability to pay. If someone doesn’t want to be a parent, they shouldn’t be forced to be. However, given that I don’t see my socialist utopia anywhere near completion here, I am unwilling to see the lives of children degraded in order to grant parents the right to abandon responsibility for the child on their partner (of either sex).
While Baby Moses Laws provide a way for a parent who doesn’t want to be a parent to unilaterally abandon responsibility to the state, if the other parent rejects that decision and tracks down the abandoned child, then the abandonment is undone. Even if that doesn’t happen, these laws don’t give one parent the power to abandon responsibility for the child onto their partner. While I can accept that there are ways in which not being able to abandon responsibility is an imposition upon parents of either sex, I think the imposition upon children of being financially abandoned by one parent is a greater wrong.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Dorset asserts again:
No, it isn’t. The “eschewing” and “acceptance” simply occur at different times based on biological differences. If “the male” keeps his semen to himself, he “eschews”, if he doesn’t, he “accepts”. At some later point in time “the female” has a turn to “eschew” or “accept”.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Also, the pre-partum decision is whether or not to create a burden. Deciding to create a burden, but deciding to unilaterally dump that burden on the other parent is not allowed for either partner.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
The female had her chance to eschew before allowing the semen to enter her genitals. Even when she accepts the entry, the abortion rights notion tells us that social policy must allow her to exercise the available means to eschew the burden before birth but after conception. Females cannot safely abort at will, and only artifice makes that possible. For a while, social policy still enjoined them even though it was medically possible to eschew. Nothing biologically forces the male to be consigned to the offspring, it is only social policy that consigns. We are told that social policies cannot obstruct females from eschewing by use of artificial methods, but it can still obstruct the male who requires no medical or artificial method to eschew.
Once you invite this cost-benefit analysis to justify non-consentual impositions, I fail to see why bodily impositions (upon the female) are exempted from consideration. You are saying that the male’s property and liberty entitlements can be imposed upon to prevent a worse economic happenstance from befalling the child. Why do the females’s nine months of bodily sovereignty categorically override the child’s entire life? Pro-lifers will say, “Hey, the female only faces nine months of debilitation, the baby faces death. Raw deal, but at least the mother will usually still be alive. She usually has less to lose.”
Perhaps you might dismiss that by saying that since the fetus is never conscious or aware or whatever that its total loss of existence is not on par with the female’s conscious bodily imposition. But then there is the issue of drug-addicted pregnant females or those who knowingly give birth to children who will have Tay-Sachs, ALD, Cerebral Palsy, or Huntington’s Chorea. The mother’s assertion of bodily rights to carry a birth to term will consign a born child to months, years, or decades of conscious debilitation, pain, and misery. Would not these egregious bodily happenstances inflicted upon a child justify a mere hour-long bodily violation of the obstinate female?
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Yeah, the female is unilaterally deciding to carry the burden to term and consigning another person to share in it. Even if a person conjugally shares in the forced labor that he/she inflicts upon another person, it does not make it any more acceptable.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
That is the most repulsive thing you’ve yet written, and reconfirms my belief that your usage of ‘female’ is misogynist rather than “biological.”
You’ve now argued for both forced abortion and infanticide. Congratulations.
I think we are just looping at this point. Just to summarize.
I remain completely unconvinced that not supporting an existing child and not supporting a nonexistant child are the same thing. I also remain unconvinced that the biological facts of reproduction are so grossly injust that they require special protection for men from being responsible for the results of engaging in reproductive activity. That male reproductive activity ends quickly, while female reproductive activity continues for 9 months means that women have a lot more control over whether or not to reproduce, but I don’t see any reason why children should be burdened by that inequality.
Not having financial support through childhood is inarguable worse than having financial support. Never existing is not inarguably worse than existing. Likewise, existing, but having Cerebral Palsy, is not inarguable worse than not existing.
I think I’m done.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
I’d been off this thread for nearly a month. Well said, Charles, FurryCatHerder, and Tuomos. I have nothing to add, although it seems that I started this particular fight, because I couldn’t have said it better.
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
I did not argue for infanticide. As for the former, I suggested that the cost/benefit standard that you introduced does not leave autonomy rights sacrosanct and potentially justified a trade-off between bodily burdens to prevent the worse burden.
You’ll let the female’s autonomy rights (right to give birth) consign a child to a torturous, suffering existence, but you will not let the male’s autonomy rights consign the child to a destitute existence.
So you adhere to this belief that conscious existence, no matter how brief or painful or debilitated or without capability, is always assumed superior to non-existence. That’s about as supportable as the suggestion that less financial resources in life is an ennobling experience. As absurd as the that suggestion is, it has its philosophical and religious supporters, as does the suggestion that non-existence is preferable to living in debilitation and suffering.
If autonomy rights can be set aside to prevent a worse happenstance from befalling a child, and if non-existence is presumed wore than any existent state, I do not see why the female’s claim to live in a non-violated state trumps the child’s interest in living period.
But even if your assertion that rights can only be set aside to prevent “inarguably worse” conditions holds, and if having less financial support is one of those conditions, the right of low-income or destitute parents to rear their born children seems disposable when a wealthier adult volunteers him/herself. Unless living with less financial resource is not inarguably worse than having more of it.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 4:46 am
New fodder for conversation:
Charles wrote:
Dorset wrote, in response to Charles:
Does anyone think this is an accurate reading of what Charles wrote?
Accept responsibility for the social policies you are advocating. You know, I know, everyone knows that children cannot survive without care. Parents are obligated to offer that care, if no one else will*. Allowing parents to cease giving care to their children, if no one else will, is arguing for infanticide. Not active infanticide. Passive infanticide. You already brushed aside this concern with “Oh, well”, now you are pretending that it is not your position.
FYI, I don’t consider autonomy rights sacrosanct. Some autonomy rights I have, through weighting pro’s and con’s, decided to support. Like right to have an abortion.
* Including a democratically created socialist childcare system.
I think I’m done too. Perhaps this time for good.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 4:50 am
Oh, and I see you still imply/pretend that post-partum parental responsibilities are different between men and women.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 7:29 am
I was following this discussion with interest, thinking that Dorset had some interesting points although I do not agree with him, but you know what? When you use CP as an example of “a torturous, suffering existence” you lose me. I realize that this argument is not about the specifics of what makes a human life worth living. There’s an essential point you’re missing, Dorset, which sorta blows your analogy awry: if the mother were capable, with certainty, without bodily risk to herself, of ameliorating whatever deleterious condition her fetus had (CP, Down’s, Tay-Sachs, whatever the hell you choose), then you might have an argument (with which I probably still wouldn’t agree, given the different value sets we seem to be working from) that she ought to fix the problem or submit to a required abortion. The father can ameliorate the problem of poverty and lack of support in the child by simply providing the damn support.
This comment was written by Ledasmom.But honestly, Dorset, CP? I know someone who’d like to come over and teach you a lesson, just as soon as she gets someone to drive the van.
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January 8th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Dorset writes:
At this point you’re arguing to infinite regression. “The male” also had his chance when he did or didn’t use contraception. “The female” also had her chance when she did or didn’t choose (explicitly ignoring relatively small number of pregnancies caused by rape) to have sexual relations with “the male”. “The male” also had his choice when he did or didn’t initiate (since most often it’s “the male” doing the initiating within most cultures) sexual relations. “The female” also had her choice when she did or didn’t choose to use a pre-coital form of birth control such as “The Pill”, “Diaphram”, “IUD”, “Norplant” or depro-Provera.
What this shows, all the way back to “the male” and “the female” woke up that particular morning and got out of bed (or not, for the co-habitating couple) is that pregnancy is a sequence of choices. The sequence ends at different points based on differing reproductive biology. C4M seeks to change the criteria for “choice” from those choices which are biologically founded, to what amounts to coercion and extortion. C4M’s arguments are in favor of one or more (or all) of the following –
1. Forced abortion
2. Legalized infanticide
3. Unilateral abandonment
Should C4M argue that it does not support either 1 or 2, it must acknowledge that it supports 3.
Since you argue from the perspective of Libertarianism, I’ll reply in kind. (Nota Bene: I don’t embrace Libertarianism, lest anyone accuse me of doing so — I find Libertarianism morally repugnant and Libertians morally bankrupt, but I do understand the arguments and often construct arguments in ways that some feel are “libertarian”. But I digress. A lot.)
Justification for 3 arises from the Libertarian principle, that noone has the right to forcibly compel another to act, nor may the actions of any individual adversely injure another or deprive them of their inalienable rights. This is a brief summarization and I trust that it would be attacked as overly brief.
In the domain of both “Forced abortion” and “Legalized infanticide”, both violate Libertarian principles of Non-Coercion and respect for Natural Law. “Forced abortion” is unsupportable as it allows the father to coerce the mother into having a medical procedure against her will. “Legalized infanticide” is unsupportable as it violates Natural Law against murder.
In the domain of “Unilateral abandonment” there are the issue of the rights of the child to be supported in a manner consistent with a healthy future and the right of the parents not to have private property taken away. It is the right, emerging from Natural Law, of the child to be protected from harm which create the burden on the two individuals most closely related with the birth of the child. The three alternatives to “Unilateral abandonment” are “Forced abortion”, “Legalized infanticide” and “Joint obligation to provide support” (ignoring a joint decision to give the child up for adoption to a willing party). The first two are forbidden both by Libertarian principles as well as standards of conduct common to much of the civilized world.
The contract between parent and child is based on Natural Law. Given the very small number of children who are successfully raised to adulthood by wild animals, the obligation to rear children falls to parents, as it has for the past several hundred thousand years of human history. This obligation for support derives from the relative helplessness of the newborn as compared to other species in which neonates are capable of obtaining food within days, weeks or months (at the longest) after birth. Development of various parts of the brain require human interaction or else those areas, such as the language centers, becomes permanently stunted. Death or harm from abandonment, accidental and otherwise, is common. As such, failure to provide support can be considered a form of abuse or neglect and is within most civilized nations.
As for abortion and abortion rights, it was noted during Roe v. Wade that women had a Common Law right to abortion up until the point of “quickening”, at which time “life” was assumed to begin. It was not until after the middle of the 19th century that states began to intrude upon the Common Law right women had previously enjoyed. While one might argue that the American Medical Association was merely “protecting” the unborn child from harm, given its other intrusion into the practice of medicine, I believe the AMA was more interested in reserving for itself the right to perform abortion-related procedures, just as it had consolidated to itself the right to perform other medical procedures. Outside of American Law, and it’s Common Law origins, there is ample evidence that women had knowledge of, and made use of that knowledge, abortificants dating back several thousand years.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Amp,
The sentence beginning with “At this point you’re arguing …” seems to have eaten a hyperlink during posting. That sentence should be
At this point you’re arguing to infinite regression.
I’m not sure why the hyperlink was eaten. Sorry for the boo-boo.
[No prob, boo-boo fixed. I think you accidently forgot the backslash in the "/a" in the link closing bit. --Amp]
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 11:38 am
Nothing biologically forces the male to be consigned to the offspring, it is only social policy that consigns.
That’s also true of the mother, Dorset; for all the high-falutin’ words, you’re forgetting that after the birth, both mother and father are biologically separate but legally obligated to the infant. Before the birth, only the mother is biologically and legally bound; only the mother may have the option to cut that tie.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Indeed, they do. And I was not tracing them to the libertarian position, but to the position of justification of violations based upon comparative harms (which is used to violate precept 3) and the position that attributes that carry rights are not necessarily possessed by infants any more than fetuses.
First you make these new prescriptive claims based upon Naturality, but then you say that that it has origins within civilized (unnatural) settings. If this is a Natural precept that always enjoined and guided human conduct for as long as human beings were reproducing, it should have been in existence for thousands of years, and applicable and self-evident to every human being who potentially copulates. If you actually are basing it upon naturality, try again. Infanticide was practiced and accepted by human hunter-gatherer nomads, especially when the infant was thought to outstrip current resources. Native American peoples and Pacific Islanders engaged in the practice whenever the infant would be onerous or when it may have slowed the tribe’s movements. If that does not satisfy the test of naturally occuring, infanticide and abandonment are also extant among mammalian care-giving species. Even dolphins sometimes bludgeon their offspring to death (reason unknown). Other naturally occuring human practices probably included murder for resource competition, murder to establish and maintain dominance, and maybe even rape (rape appears to naturally occur in primate species).
If “Natural” is just a decorator, and you are arguing that the parental consignment is a valid principle becaues it is socially authored, you have no grounds to argue that it is superior to other socially authored precepts regarding infant care or parental responsibility. Civilizations ranging from Ancient Greece, Rome, Japan, and China engaged in infanticide, with full social permission and approval. Whether a council of elders examined an infant and then threw it into the brush, or a paterfamilias had the mother put opium on her breast to quickly poison it, the practice was extant. If you are saying that it can be condemned because superceding precepts are better because they are newer, you are committing the teleological error.
And even if only temporally current practices are up for negotiation, temporally current societies (including in Europe and the Western Hemisphere) still prohibit contraception, abortion, divorce, or consider the female and children to be the male’s chattel. If principles are valid and binding because of when they originated and what society that they originated from, what is the adjudication between confliciting but currently existing standards? Is it that some principles are better because they originate from richer, Western countries? Are the ones that disagree with reproductive rights and parental duties uncivilized? Sounds suspiciously like a neo-colonial or classist standard.
Oh, sorry, I define infanticide as actively killing the infant. But if you define the former as “passive infanticide,” then yes, I am allowing that, provided that the abandonment is done when another caregiver will not accept the burden and in a state without a support structure. Though by this logic, people who disconnect respirators and feeding tubes are also “passive murderers.” And stop pretending that this view is radically taboo. I don’t even support active infanticide, but a range of academics/ethicists from Joseph Fletcher, Michael Tooley, and Peter Singer argue compellingly for it.
The latter suggestion was posited first. The suggestion was that violating the male’s liberty and economic rights is justified to prevent a worse economic happenstance from befalling the child. This comparative analysis would potentially countenance a violation of the female’s bodily rights to save the child a longer, more miserable state of bodily suffering, should it have something like ALD or Tay-Sachs. Those who accept that, fine, they are being consistent utilitarians. Those who think that this utilitarian justification for autonomy rights violation applies to the male’s autonomy rights but not the female’s are being contradictory. The fact that the imposed abortion that the female would have to suffer carries health risks is irrelevant, as her risked health effects would pale in comparison to the the health perils that a child born with ALD, Tay-Sachs, or Cerebral Palsy will definitely suffer. Even if the imposed abortion is botched and she loses her uterus, she is still better off than a child with ALD or Tay-Sachs.
What lesson exactly would this person like to teach?
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Well, really, nearly anything, Dorset, since she’s a professional tutor and wouldn’t mind making a few extra bucks, but I admit I was sorta hoping she’d run over your foot with her wheelchair a few times.
This comment was written by Ledasmom.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
Why would she need a getaway driver for that?
Well, I hope she doesn’t try to do that, unless she wants a respirator for the rest of her life.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 12:20 am
Dorset,
I think the point is that you’re making some extremely insulting comments about people with Cerebral Palsy. The people I’ve known, and continue to know, who have Cerebral Palsy seem to have very nice lives, medical issues notwithstanding.
Tay-Sachs, on the other hand, is incompatible with life and there is no known cure or treatment.
ALD is relatively incompatible with life and treatments are under investigation. The (second) most famous case of ALD, Lorenzo Odone, is (so far as I can tell) still alive, though tragically the treatment his mother devised was found too late to prevent paralysis.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 12:37 am
The efficacy of “Lorenzo’s Oil” is disputed, even if applied before the onset of symptoms. Some of the healthy children shown at the end of the film eventually did develop symptoms and succumbed.
Lorenzo Odone is still alive, now 27, but his mother Michaela died of cancer in 2000.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 5:03 am
The point is, I think, that if you start talking about “quality of life” you get into deep ethical water very quickly. I have an 11-year-old son who will be cognitively 2 years old for the rest of his life, and in some ways less than that (he can’t walk without help, for example). On some level he knows that he’s disabled, but he’s nowhere near understanding all the implications, and he’s the world’s happiest kid.
He’s also a burden, both on my husband and me (we bargained on servitude lasting 21 years, not the rest of our lives) and on society (his public schooling costs 4 to 5 times a typical kid’s).
He became disabled at age 4. Even if I could somehow have known, I don’t think I would have aborted. I can tell you for sure that you will euthanize him (legally or not) over my mutilated corpse.
This comment was written by Lu.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 7:12 am
The point you seem to be completely unwilling to accept is that ethics and morality are, by definition, subjective (I accept this, hence the joke “my prejudices are better than your prejudices”). It is not surprising, (IIRC) considering ideological adherents of Ayn Rand descibe their position as “Objectivist”. Just because you don’t like that people call you (hard-core) libertarian, the shoe fits.
You seem to be well versed in the subject of medicine. Good for you! That does not mean that your ethics are any more “objective” or based upon “sacrosanct” values. There is a world of difference between ethics and empirical science, a point which you try to blur by mixing your positions with medical knowledge.
Yep. And I oppose them (especially the ones considering women and children chattel. Or men, if such societies existed.). Big bad bigot me ;).
I don’t give a rat’s ass whether it is “radically taboo” or not. Nor do I care if some bunch of twits who call themselves “ethicists” support infanticide. As for your definition on murder, I strongly suggest that you don’t go to a hospital and start unpluggin respirators and feeding tubes (euthanasia might be a bit diffent issue, though) or just decide to stop taking care of your own child, which I (and apparently you too) hope you will never have. You think it’s unfair? Fine. Don’t expect me to feel sympathy if you go on trial for murder.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 7:22 am
Well said, Tuomas!
This comment was written by Lu.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 7:22 am
And Dorset, it is clear that we have completely different value systems. That is why I think this conversation has a definite dead-end quality in it. It has, however (and I am not the only one who can claim credit for it) exposed that your beliefs go way beyond arguing that men should have a choice that would supposedly be equivalent to abortion.
Both the word “Pro-Choice” and “Pro-Life” are context-specific terms describing the two major sides in the abortion debate. If it is hypocritical for the side that calls itself pro-choice to not support all choices, in every context, (abandoning children, for example) it is also hypocritical for the pro-life side to not support life in every contex (would lead to compulsory vegetarism, absolute refusal of death penalty etc.)
Yet many people on both sides of the debate attack the alleged hypocrisy of the other side, pretending that the context (abortion rights) does not exist.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Thanks, Lu!
(Amp, my next comment went into moderation for some reason. Auto-moderation perhaps. Would you be kind enough to replace the word “supporting” [7th line, first word] with describing.)
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 7:57 am
One of the big problems I have with Libertarian theory is that it starts from the assumption that the norm for society is a fully autonomous adult prime-of-life human being. The many people in our society are who are infants (entirely dependent on others), children (mostly dependent on others), elderly (varying degrees of dependency on others), sick (varying degrees of dependency on others) or disabled in some way (varying degrees of dependency on others) are therefore automatically burdens and “not normal”. I didn’t become a fully autonomous adult prime-of-life human being all by myself, nor did anyone else posting on this thread. What happens to the debt we owe the people who assumed the “21 years of servitude” for us? Strictly speaking, we owe them “21 years of servitude” right back, but frequently this isn’t possible. (And oog, think of paying back the debt of your own existence until you were 42 years old. Talk about lack of autonomy.)
Dorset, I have been thinking hard about your posts, and if you don’t mind, I will try to restate your position to make sure I understand what you’re trying to say. You have said (I think) that a basic pro-choice position separates the act of sex from consent to parenthood, and that a basic pro-life position does not make that separation. Therefore, it is unfair that the law allows women not to accept responsibility for a child after choosing to have sex (the pro-choice position) while simultaneously requiring men to provide support for children they don’t want when they chose to have sex (the pro-life position).
I disagree strongly with many of your statements, but I thought there might be less thread derailment this way.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Still you make this silly claim? Male biology is different from female biology. Sometimes (combined with modern medical biology, which okay, does not exist in “nature”, but was instead created by human inventiveness which is natural to us) this gives men an advantage, sometimes it gives women an advantage.
I don’t see anyone proposing that men should bleed once a month, or only produce one sperm a month. I don’t see anyone requiring that women should not have multiple orgasms in course of an intercourse, if they feel that happening.
How many times does it have to be hammered into your head that the autonomy rights of women have are also considered nul and void after birth (to the exactly same degree that men’s are)? Yeah, men can’t get pregnant, and can not abort. Get. Over. It.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 9:28 am
That is, if one is to accept the definition of autonomy rights as: Right to dump own children at any time.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Come to think of it, the first two paragraphs are irrelevant to the discussion at hand (in my post 219), and I wouldn’t mind seeing them gone. Just ignore them, everyone.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I have no interest in trying to euthanize your child. Waste your life over your offspring to your heart’s content. You have the autonomy right to do so, and thankfully the legal order respects that autonomy right for now. Of course if efficient euthanasia ever became part of the legal order, they wouldn’t have to mutilate you, just bludgeon or mace you while the state doctors administer the morphine.
Forcing a female to carry a pregnancy or to abort a pregnancy against her will is egregious because it is a violation of an autonomy right. Just like forcing someone to labor is a violation of an autonomy right. Just because one does not involve physical penetration into the physical body does not mean that it becomes acceptable.
Apologists for rights violations concede that the male’s liberty rights are being violated by coercing him to pay child support for a birth that he did not consent to. They tolerate it because they think the violation of this level of right is acceptable to prevent the child from falling into a worse economic happenstance. This utilitarian trade-off, if accepted, does not stop at economic assets or the liberty rights of property. If the child is facing a worse bodily happenstance than the female would conceivably face (by having ALD, Tay-Sachs, or Cri du Chat), the female’s claim to live with bodily integrity would seem to be outweighed by the child’s interest in being spared a progressively more torturous and painful existence. Or if the claim holds that existence is always presumed better than non-existence, no matter how impoverished, disabled, or unwanted that existence is, the child’s claim to have a bite at existence, to live at all, trump the female’s claim to live without bodily transgression. Three or four years of total debilitation and pain versus an hour of forced uterine suction?
Yes, they are, but most here have started out accepting the premise of abortion rights and the autonomy rights that justify them. If they start out accepting the premise of an autonomous individual with entitlements to protect that autonomy, the terms of the dispute are much narrower from the outset. Notions that consent to sex equals enforceable consent to its secondary burdens and that autonomy rights can be trumped for the potential interests of the child would seem to be anathema to believers in the autonomy right to abortion. However, both of those notions have been repeatedly invoked to combat the C4M position.
This ever going to be true, Tuomas, or do you love “wasting your time”?
After giving somebody a gift of your own volition, are you allowed to sue somebody for the monetary value of that gift? The person owes you nothing in exchange for that gift. Children did not commission or contract their birth or rearing, nor did they coerce their parents into it. If parents voluntarily decide to give birth and bestow life and sustenance to a child, that is their foolish decision for which the child is not responsible. Voluntary parents foolishly decide to bestow their labor and time to the child’s upbringing. If the child want’s to “repay” it because he/she is grateful, fine. But that is superogatory, not obligatory, just like it is superogatory to have children in the first place. If the child is ungrateful wretch and does not want to “repay” his parents 21 years of servitude, too bad for the parents. Child owes them nothing, the parents are entitled to nothing. If the mother or father were coerced into parenthood, they cannot sue the child for compensation, but would have a just claim against the coercing agent (usually the state).
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Is that a rhetorical question? Obviously I do. Play word games all you want. Don’t address any substantial points made against you. It merely proves that you don’t have any ground to argue on anymore.
I think euthanasia (=”good death”) is defined as “people should have a right to gain assistance in ending their own life if they decide so”, NOT “the state should have an unlimited right to murder people at will”. Are you stupid or just plain mean at Lu and her disabled child (”neither” is not valid in this instance, “both” is, but I vote for plain mean)?
Ah. I see you grasped the parts I wrote, that I regretted writing (and specifically asked to be deleted/ignored), grasping the opportunity to once more make your long-winded claim that the current system is unfair to “males” to different degree that it is to “females” and mostly ignored everything else. Including:
And never existing is not inarguably worse than existing. This is not saying that existance=always better, it is saying that such determination can not be easily made one way or another.
Why do you keep insisting that killing (sufficiently) disabled persons is for their own good in all cases?
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
Yes. Potential interests of the child. Not interests of the child, like C4M advocates are arguing.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
This, too, is a pretty scary turn for a conversation to take, particularly in light of the recent discussions about civility, objectivity, and lack of personal investment.
Re: Peter Singer, check out this article by Harriet McBryde Johnson about her debate with him. Some interesting meditations on “ethics:”
http://community-2.webtv.net/@HH!80!A2!2134BF518044/stigmanet/HarrietMcByrde/
But like the protagonist in a classical drama, Singer has his flaw. It is his unexamined assumption that disabled people are inherently ”worse off,” that we ‘’suffer,” that we have lesser ”prospects of a happy life.” Because of this all-too-common prejudice, and his rare courage in taking it to its logical conclusion, catastrophe looms. Here in the midpoint of the play, I can’t look at him without fellow-feeling.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
Women give birth. Not men. Therefore, “male consent to birth” is irrelevant.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
FYI, Dorset? There’s a difference between making a logical argument for euthanasia and graphically describing to a parent the hypothetical death of his/her child.
This comment was written by Ledasmom.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Dorset, so you owe your current state of autonomy to your foolish parents, boy, were they stupid? If everybody were to follow this logic, the human race would rapidly face extinction, because who on earth would do such an idiotic thing as voluntarily agree to 21 years of servitude?
And did I state your position correctly up-thread? Just curious.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
And yet you keep responding to allegedly vacuous comments. You and your cadre made complacent claims, but then when problems were brought to light, you shifted the goal post, failing to recognize that the shifted post was at logger-heads with maintaining your prior assurances. When the contradictions of the shifted goal post are brought to light, you shift back to the original position, pretending that it has never been addressed. Nice.
And for you and your ilk, I vote for petulant and selectively illiterate. Utilitarian euthanasia is often predicated upon sparing valuable medical and emotional capital by minimizing its waste upon unimproving and chronic conditions. Cajoling obstinate parents into continuing with productive lives and not wasting their lives on attending a vegetative individual serves a valuable interest and who knows? Maybe the parents will say, “Thank God the state snapped me out of that.”
The child physically exists even when in utero, and its interest in living is not potential. We hold that its interest in living does not override a female’s autonomy right. Yet you all hold that the child’s interest in financial support, if the female let it survive, trumps the male’s autonomy right. Extra financial support is thought to be indisputably in the interest of the child because it prevents deprivation and increases capability, so it must justify violating the male’s liberty right. Yet the female’s autonomy rights can impose upon the child a deprived and painful existence bereft of any capability (bodily or otherwise). And even if you all believe that any existence is more capable and preferable to non-existence, you have then undone the pro-choice position. The male’s claim to living unviolated does not trump the child’s interest in being provided for, but the female’s claim to living unviolated does not trump the child’s claim to live at all. Confine the female until the point of viability and attempt a life-birth extraction and then let her go and give the child to state custody. A few months of her freedom versus the child’s entire life. Of course that is unacceptable, but not if you accept the utilitarian trade-off between autonomy rights and providing the necessities of existence.
Consent to birth would be irrelevant if birth had no autonomy implications for the male. Unfortunately it does. A decision cannot have autonomy impositions for a person unless that person has enforceable power in that decision. The male only decide to copulate, as did the female. Consent to copulation does not equal enforceable consent to birth or parenthood for the female, it should not be so for the male. Males and females conjugally decide to copulate. Females now unilaterally decide whether or not to give birth. Their unilateral decision should not fetter another person unless that other person elects to be burdened like them.
And there’s a difference opposing euthanasia and accusing one of being a conspiring murderer and promising to be attack, or hoping that disabled persons physically assault another person.
Yes, I’ve told them that repeatedly. However, neither one exercised the options available to them and both voluntarily consigned themselves. Millions do so every day. Blame their hormones, their sentiments, and pro-natalist indoctrination.
The extinction of a community or species is not a bad thing unless it resulted through coercion and murder. If a community or species dies off due to the free and voluntary decisions of its individual members, there is nothing wrong with that, at least nothing unjust. Anti-abortion advocates and opponents of contraception warned that if females had reproductive autonomy, nations and the species would take a nosedive in numbers, because they would hold their individual interests above the continuity of the species or family or nation. This view of species continuity as valuable in itself is a position that sees individuals as receptacles and vessels of gametes, only valuable for collective continuity. Hopefully we are beyond such natalist lunacy.
Yes, you did. Thank you.
This comment was written by Dorset.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
This isn’t a hypothetical situation at all, nor are parents and caretakers of disabled, dependent, and critically ill people mute on the subject. YMMV, once you do your own research, but I haven’t seen many of them worrying about having too much leeway to get emotionally invested in the person who needs care, or arguing that their current lives are unproductive. The interest forced euthanasia serves is a very dangerous “interest” to be defending over the interests of the people who suffer and die without assistance, as Singer’s descent into pro-euthanasia arguments indicates. It also is predicated upon an understanding of quality of life with disability that disabled people emphatically reject. It is both interesting and hopeful to see you move the goalposts from diseases like cerebral palsy to vegetative states.
Also, describing the death of a disabled child to that child’s parent–particularly when you’ve demonstrated your willingness to make that possibility policy–isn’t comparable to describing assault with wheelchair, no matter how tender your toes may be.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Dorset, you’ve now had 45 posts - which in your case amounts to about 22,000 words - to make your case on “Alas.” By any standard, 22,000 words is enough for you to have had a fair chance of expressing your views.
More importantly, I feel the conversation has long passed being “circular.”
I’m also concerned by the rudeness and contempt implied by phrases like “you and your ilk,” not to mention the tendency of your posts to veer close to (or well past) endorsing prejudicial views of the disabled, Blacks, and women. Finally, I think that a viewpoint so materialist that it views paying child support as being just as bad as enforced childbirth is so far from my own view, as to make ever coming to agreement virtually impossible.
For all these reasons, I’ve decided that you shouldn’t post on “Alas” from now on. Thank you for respecting this decision.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
[Deleted by the request of the author. --Amp]
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Amp, as Dorset is asked to not post, I would like my response to him to be deleted as a manner of common courtesy. (I cross-posted with your comment #231).
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
By the way, this simply isn’t true. If a born child is raised by the father, the father can sue for and win child support payments. Child support laws do not distinguish between mothers and fathers in the way that Dorset seems to believe they do.
(Dorset, if you can email me the text of a current statute stating that custodial biological fathers have no right to be paid child support by non-custodial biological mothers, I’ll post a correction to my above statement.)
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
I believe you are correct, Amp, that that discussion had become pointless some time ago. I hope therefore that you will forgive me if I emit a heartfelt wow.
This comment was written by Lu.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
And, belatedly remembering my manners — thanks for the support, Tuomas, Ledasmom, piny and Amp.
This comment was written by Lu.Report this comment to the moderators
January 10th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
I am usually not a fan of cheerleading posts piping in from the galleries, but wow, Dorset has done an absolutely masterful job at shredding the original arguments as well as most challengers in this thread (beyond the nitpicking of whether certain analogies are always exactly correct). Exposing the hypocrisy and the logical implications of their own positions was most excellent.
I fear he was a victim of his own success (as the selective application of the “rudeness standard” would indicate). Oh well, it is a great loss for any blog that valued a high level, even if sometimes aggressive, debates.
This comment was written by FormerlyLarry.Report this comment to the moderators
January 10th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
Nice sockpuppet–is that off-the-rack or did you make it yourself?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
January 11th, 2006 at 9:30 am
“Nice sockpuppet”“is that off-the-rack or did you make it yourself?”
My, my, that could be considered rude. I am offended and hurt by such an obvious personal attack! (just kidding) As I said I usually don’t care for the cheerleader type posts, but it was such a exceptional display I had to comment. It was a little like watching a small swarm of flies attacking a full grown man. But I do agree with Amp on one thing, this thread was settled by Dorset many posts ago. Everything else was wound licking.
This comment was written by FormerlyLarry.Report this comment to the moderators
January 11th, 2006 at 9:39 am
First of all, FormerlyLarry isn’t a sock puppet; he’s posted here a bunch of times, and his style is very distinct from Dorset’s.
Second of all, FormerlyLarry, in the past your posts have usually had real content and arguments. These last two posts are nothing but cheerleading and insults. If that’s all you’ve got, please don’t post on “Alas.”
Third of all, this post closes the discussion of if Larry is a sock puppet, Larry’s cheerleading, etc. Don’t post to this thread again, Larry, unless you have actual content to add.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 16th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Let me open with an appology for not reading all 240 posts. I hope what I am going to write was not covered previously. I read to a point, and read the last few (which seemed to have become quite hateful) to be semi current with the thread. What made me want to post were the early posts on the “facts of biology” and the argument about the differences between men and women. Man or woman as the right to choose NOT to get pregnant, though it is much easier for a female to “trick” a man into an unwanted pregnancy than vice versa. (please don’t be offended, it does happen) Now, once there is a pregnancy that is unwanted by one or both of the future parents that is where the “biological rights” seem to shift in favor of the woman. I have no argument with that. I am pro-choice and though I think it is truly wrong of a woman to abort a child that would have one loving parent to raise it if it came into being I can think of no way to stop it without impeding on the rights of that female.
Now I am confused on what comes after though. If the female feels the child has a right to live but can not raise it she can give up legal responsibility and put it up for adoption and is praised for her sacrifice for the sake of the child. If a man feels he can not raise the child and gives up his legal responsibility…wait, he can’t. Now, how can we blame that particular part of it on biology? If you want to argue biological rules then we could just as easily argue that the woman has to be more meticulous about birth control because it is she that is stuck with the child and (biologicly) the man’s part is finished. We have established social and legal rules that change that, not biological ones.
I agree that there is no way to ever make this fair, not to the man, woman, or child if there is a disagreement on abortion, adoption, or custody. I do think that blaming biology for allowing or disallowing disproportional rights to one gender after birth is inaccurate and deceptive.
On a similar note, there is no legal responsibility of a biological mother to inform a biological father (unless they are married) of a pregnancy before or after an abortion or adoption. To my knowledge there is no law that requires a mother to even list a biological father before giving up a child. Would it truly infringe, at least in the case of adoption if not abortion, on the rights of a woman to give the other biological parent a chance to raise the child?
I am sure the comparison will be frowned on but imagine taking a woman’s child from her immediately after birth and never allowing her to see it. Fathers who “know” they have children but have no legal claim to them face a similar circumstance. Men are biologicly different but saying that they love their children less is quite a predjudiced statement.
This comment was written by Ed.Report this comment to the moderators
January 16th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
I don’t understand. Is using a pin to poke a few holes in a condom something much more difficult for men? How about saying “don’t worry, I’ll pull out in time” and then not pulling out in time - is that terribly difficult?
Once the baby is born, the mother and father - if the father is around - are legally in the same boat. Neither of them has the right to give up the child for adoption without the other parent’s agreement. If either one of them decides they don’t want custody, the other parent can take the child, and the non-custodial parent can be sued for child support.
There is one inequality here, which is that it’s possible for a mother to keep a pregnancy secret from the father, but not vice versa. However, that inequality is biological, and carries substantial disadvantages for women.
You’re mistaken. However, in practice it’s a nearly-impossible law to enforce. If a woman says “I don’t know who the father was - his first name was “Joe,” I was drunk and I have no idea where he lives” - what do you propose, arresting her?
Again, the difference is biological, not legal. Neither parent is permitted to give up a child for abortion unilaterally if the other parent is known, alive and can be contacted. That’s why we’ve had cases like the “baby M” case, in which biological parents have been able to sue for custody of their already-adopted child on the grounds that the bio-father had never been informed.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 17th, 2006 at 2:29 am
From reading this whole thread, I think the anserw to your question Amp at the start: Do Feminists and Pro-lifers make the same arguements
Is a resounding YES.
I have never supported C4M but after reading this, I have had my mind changed.
I feel that the C4M arguement has been put in a balanced way, and the essential arguement for dismissal is “He should keep his pants on”
This comment was written by Wookie.Report this comment to the moderators
January 17th, 2006 at 3:09 am
Gee, the men’s rights activist has decided that C4M makes sense. That’s a stunner. Next you’ll tell me that there are Republicans out there who voted for George Bush.
I don’t care for cheerleading posts here, Wookie. Nothing in your post provides any logical rebuttal of my opening post, or indeed of what anyone has said on this thread. If you want to attempt to make logical arguments or rebuttals, then that’s okay. If you have nothing to add but cheerleading the same old MRA positions, then please keep it off of “Alas.”
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 17th, 2006 at 5:50 am
Fair enougth mate, your blog your rules.
I just feel others here have done that job, and that I do not need to.
I have always been of the postion of pro-choice,even though my personal belifes are pro-life, If I have sex and a pregnacy occurs, I will take full responciblity for my actions. But I don’t have the right to impose that belife on anyone else, and I see the logical arguments to the pro-choice postion for both men and women.
I am sorry that you felt the need to get hostile with me, but again your blog your rules.
I will refraine from posting in the future, if you wish.
By the way although I do get involved in Men’s Rights Activism, that is not all I am, My belifes are wide ranging and can change from issue to issue. Do not assume things about me based on my views on a particular topic.
This comment was written by Wookie.Report this comment to the moderators
January 17th, 2006 at 8:49 am
Ed writes:
And thank G-d that isn’t the way the law works!!
(Don’t shoot me, Amp, I’m going to mention Father’s Rights boards and conversations …)
Men who want to be fathers — real fathers, not “I’m going to make the mother’s life miserable” fathers — do fight for, and are granted by the courts, their legal right to be involved parents. And as much as I disagree with the concept of Parental Alienation Syndrome, courts have even recognized that custodial parents who decide “I’m going to make the (the other parent)’s life miserable and make my child hate him/her” and have changed custody.
Now, there are some biological facts that tend to grant rights to women that men don’t have. For example, women have breasts, and contrary to the purveyors of pr0nography, breasts exist … to feed babies. (Some men might seem to have breasts, but that’s another subject.) So, women tend to have a superior right to custody of infants based on the biology of breast feeding and the advantages to a newborn of being breast fed. Beyond that, courts grant rights based on which parent was the primary caregiver. That some men seem to think “But I had a job!” equals “caregiving” is not a valid reason to receive custody. It’s an argument for why those men (and where the roles are reversed from gender stereotypes, women) should continue to have the same level of involvement as before the separation — provide money to the mother (or father — see earlier comment) so that parent can continue to be the caregiver.
So … men already have plenty of choices. If they are sure they never want children, the choice begins with having a vasectomy. If they don’t want a child now, there are forms of male contraception, as well as forms of female contraception, which can be used to greatly reduce the risk of pregnancy. Those forms — condoms, spermacides, vaginal suppositories containing spermicides, etc. — are things the man can use so that he can have control. Should, by some accident, a child be conceived, the man again has choices. He can be however fully-involved in the child’s life his relationship with the child’s mother permits. And, should the child’s mother deny the constitutionally protected (yes, it’s a right founded in the Constitution) right to be an involved parent to the child’s father, he can sue. Quite conventiently, the child’s mother has the same constitutionally-protected rights.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 17th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
Just a quick response to the responses, and thank you for the dialogue.
First, When I mentioned deception to get pregnant I was referring to how easy it is for a woman to stop the pill or say she is taking it when she is not. Any couple trusting withdrawl is not overly bright as pregnancy can occur without male ejaculation. On a similar topic, women have more incentives to become pregnant than a men do. I know that is going to upset some people but most men “on the fence” about marriage would jump into it if their partner gets pregnant. There are also the financial benefits that child support laws now provide. I would hate to believe it is common but I assure you that it is abused.
As for your comment on “what do you propose, arresting her?” Perhaps if we started holding her accountable for false statements and fraud then such incidences would decrease. It seems the current trend is allowing lies deception and fraud as part of her rights, I don’t undertand that.
Furrycatherder, I am lost as to your reply to the sentence you quoted. You are saying thank goodness there are disproportionate rights or that there currently are not? I am also confused as to how a vaginal suppositories are a valid contraceptive method for men. We have condoms or surgery, that is pretty much it. For the most part, and I am not an expert as I have no real problem with condoms so use that method, but the rest of the options are vaginal or medical for a female. As for caregiving, I believe most men want financial stability used as at least part of the consideration for custody. As it stands, she just gave birth and isnt working so can stay home and take care of the child is a positive argument. When a man brings up being able to support the child, the court simply takes the money from him. Heck, send her to work and he can quit his job just as easily as she did. I think that is where the “caregiver” argument comes from for working men. We get punished for what we can not do, women get rewarded for what they can not or are not doing.
I think part of the reason this thread is argumentative is that we keep referring to “rights” but switch back and forth between what kinds of rights we are talking about. There are basic human rights, not set down and quantified anywhere but seemingly apparent yet different to everyone. There are also legal rights, current legal rights, which are simply legislative and have very little to do with justice or fairness and then there are biological rights, the things that are simply laws of nature. To confuse the issue further each religion has its own sets of rights and responsibilities to men and women.
I have seen arguments against mens involvment or rights to a pre-natal child saying women have the “right” to an abortion, that is a legal right and didnt exist before Roe v Wade. Was the “legal” right of the gov’t to deny abortion just then and all of a sudden unjust after the ruling? Again, legal and human rights will never truly match. I think what most fathers simply want a bit more of an even shake. It seems that when you talk about a father-child relationship we discuss responsibility and when we discuss a mother-child relationship we talk about rights.
People don’t like to think about it unless it supports their own cause but I think both sides have justified examples of why they are right. There are abusive men and fathers out there that simply want to not support their children or it was a fling and they don’t even care that they have any. There are also mothers out there that abuse the system for money and dump the kids on a third party or neglect and abuse them in other ways and are using the support money on themselves. I think basicly at this point men want an out. They want a legal option that allows them to walk away, which is what women have. I think they lump themselves in with pro-lifers to try and strip back a “right” from the “evil women” that they themselves don’t have.
As for feminist saying men have enough rights already and seeming to parrot pro-lifers…perhaps the words are similar but I think the motivations are completely different. Pro-life advocates, not all but many, take a moral superiority stance. Feminists feel threatened by the men’s demand for rights because they feel that if men have more rights then women automaticly have to lose some of theirs. So their stance is more of a self preservation outlook.
A quick PS… I just realized another logic conflict here. We talked about the rights men already have… listed over and over… and yet you (Amp) admitted that by a simple lie men’s parental rights are circumvented and you seem, by your statement, opposed to punishing the liars or finding a way to cut down on such instances of deceit or fraud. If the rights can be that easily stripped are they rights at all, or is it similar to saying that, sure blacks can eat here, as long as they have permission from the whites. Is it a parental right if you have to have the mothers permission to exercise it?
Sorry this got long.
This comment was written by Ed.Report this comment to the moderators
January 17th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Amp, I reread your opening post and just have to say this though I know you will hate me. Men have the biologicly viable option to walk away after pregnancy. It is only child support laws that prevent it. You are removing a man’s viable option, just like outlawing abortion is, for moral reasons. It is not the man’s fault that women physically lack the option to walk away from a pregnancy.
Read it this way…
When feminists say a man’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, what they really mean is, “I want to deny you one of your viable options.” There’s no reason, except for child support laws, that men can’t walk away after pregnancy begins.
I personally think the argument rings hollow both ways. I would not want to walk away from my child, I am a proud father, but that does not mean the option should be denied. Just becaues not every woman votes does not mean that all women should be denied the vote.
This comment was written by Ed.Report this comment to the moderators
January 17th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
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This comment was written by Ampersand.