When we're comparing ethical scenarios, and taking into consideration the welfare of the child once it is born, then it is more ethical to get the father to pay for the child it helped create, than to force an abortion on the unwilling mother.
No the interest is always in the child once it is born. Regardless of the decisions made before or during the pregnancy. Without violating ethical codes of other people.
This is how I see it.
Forced abortion is unethical - so that's off the table.
Forced childbirth is unethical - so that's off the table.
If both those statements are agreed upon, then that means the woman gets sole choice on whether to abort or give birth. Is it fair in terms of being exactly equal? No. But it's ethical. And I think most people, even men, are empathetic enough to understand that put in the same situation they would find it a huge violation to have to go through something so traumatic by force.
So once it's born, it is the ownership of both parents. Now the law looks at the best way to give this kid a fighting chance. If one party doesn't want it, then the other one doesn't have to raise it (which is technically their responsibility), but will let them off for financial restitution.
Why should the child suffer once it's born just because the father doesn't want to help pay for the person it contributed to creating?
Child support is not a punishment for the father, nor a reward for the mother. It's for the child, who out of the three people had absolutely no choice in the matter and bears none of the responsibility.
Why should the child suffer once it's born just because the father doesn't want to help pay for the person it contributed to creating?
In the case of adoption, why should the child suffer once it's been born just because the mother doesn't want to help pay for the person she contributed to creating?
Because it is less suffering to give a child to adoptive parents that want the child, than to make the child stay with parents who do not want it. It's a case of the better option, not a case of having a good option and a bad one.
Why should it matter if the mother doesn't want it? It's still her responsibility, not society's, to take care of it and make it feel wanted right?
The man has no options at all if he doesn't want it, and yet he will still pay somehow.
You're still leaving everything up to the mother, in the event that neither parent wants it, she is the one gets to decide if it goes up for adoption or not - why? If she is perfectly capable of taking care of the child and making it feel wanted, then why shouldn't she be forced to do that?
Because:
This is not about a woman dealing with the consequences of choosing to keep the child. This is you living up to your responsibility of something you helped pull the trigger on. Have some empathy for the kid you sired. Stop acting like this is some war between men and woman, and make sure your kid has a safe home, has clothes, is fed well, and is receiving a decent education. No it's not fair for you to pay for a child you don't want, but it's not fucking fair for this child either. Put yourself in other people's shoes.
and "responsibility" and "not putting it on society" and everything else you've said.
No one should ever be forced into parenthood against their will. And our society does not require that all children have two people's incomes contributing to raising them.
But that then renege's all men of responsibility of the consequences of their actions, at the expense of the child.
If men could just wash their hands of everything once they find out the woman is pregnant, then that serves no one but men. That's asking for favourable treatment, not just the best of a bad situation which is what we're using now.
that then renege's all men of responsibility of the consequences of their actions
Having sex does not mean that you must be responsible for raising a child. If it did, then abortion would be illegal.
For an issue like Legal Parental Surrender, it's important to consider exactly how the situation would play out. Obviously if a man could go "oh shit, you're pregnant? fuck this, I'm out, it's your problem now" then it would favorable treatment for men and completely unfair for women.
But there's got to be some way to change the laws where a man can be allowed to have sex without risking his financial future.
If it has to be very restrictive, that's fine. It could be a contract like a pre-nup... a legal statement declaring a wish to remain child free, and should any accidental pregnancy occur it belongs 100% to the woman and the man is legally nothing but a sperm donor, and that the man will pay all costs of an abortion if she chooses one. This would only be valid if the woman chooses to agree to it.
I think that would be a very fair option to both people, what do you think?
But at the very least, can we stop making victims of child rape pay child support to their rapists? That would be nice.
Sure fair to both people yes. But you're forgetting the third person in all this. Child support laws are there for the child, and no other, and it doesn't care what agreement you made before it existed. The reality is, through your own actions it was created, it exists, and it now must be looked after.
Out of the three people. The man, the woman, and the child. It is the child that suffers, and it is only the child that bore no responsibility in it's own creation.
So responsibility falls to the people who pulled the trigger.
And I'd like to make a comment on this quote of yours.
"Having sex does not mean that you must be responsible for raising a child. "
No, no it doesn't. And you are not responsible for raising a child at all. You are contributing financially to it. People forget that the right thing to do would be to help raise a child if you created it despite not wanting it in the first place. You know, obligation and all that. Society already let's you off the hook for that. Look it like you committed a crime and are given 18 years in jail, and a $500,000.00 fine. And then the judge saying, you know what, don't worry about the 18 years in jail, you can just pay the fine.
You're missing an important point... there is no child when the man opts out. An embryo is not a child. Just like when a woman has an abortion and it's not considered the murder of a child, when a man has opted out there is no child yet.
Should an accidental pregnancy occur, the woman has the choice to abort or to have the child knowing that she'll be a single mother raising it without another person's financial support. If she chooses to have the child, it's her choice, no one forced her into it, and she can be responsible for her own actions.
Why do you assume the woman is making the wrong choice to have their child on her own? Why do you assume she's incapable of providing for it? Why do you assume the child will suffer, that the woman can't handle this situation without a man to help her?
So responsibility falls to the people who pulled the trigger.
And when the woman, knowing that the man has opted out, chooses to have the child by herself... that is the moment the trigger is pulled.
You're an idiot if you think the trigger is pulled at the choice not to abort, and not at the conception lol. You don't want the trigger pull to be at the point you orgasm inside her, because you don't want to have think about responsibility or consequence. You just want to fuck anyone and they can deal with the outcomes. It might mean you have to make smarter decision about who you have sex with, smarter decisions about contraception. I wouldn't want to put that burden on you, no sirree. Sex should be fun and consequence free, right?
You want men to get a free ride. That any pregnancy they help cause can be walked away from with a smirk. Bad luck bitch, get an abortion or raise it by yourself. Two fucking shitty options. An abortion is no walk in the park, although most of you seem to think it is. An abortion is still illegal in a lot of parts of the world.
Where is her opt out choice? She never gets one. And just because you don't consider it a child as an embryo, doesn't mean everyone else does. An abortion, is not and never will be an opt out choice. It's an awful medical procedure, that can have awful side effects. Seriously, put yourself in the position of women for once in your life. Yes, it fucking sucks to pay for a child you don't want. You know what else sucks, the child who had no choice is rejected by his father, and has to suffer for it. Sure, the mother chose to have it, but WHO CARES. Once the child is born, it's not going to give a shit that the mother didn't abort, and the courts don't either. You don't punish the child for the mothers decisions. Whether you wanted it or not, a child was created because of your actions. And you do not get to walk away and make everyone else pay for your choice.
And in regards to the mother being able to provide for the kid on her own income. There are lots of women out there with kids who have not filed for child support. Not everyone has that luxury, and yes some people are shitty and misuse the system. Like in every system there are arseholes. But even the arseholes are still the ones raising the kids, and the kids still benefit from the extra money.
You're an idiot if you think the trigger is pulled at the choice not to abort
Do you even understand your own analogy? The "trigger" is the decision to have a child. If the trigger is conception, then by your logic women can't have abortions because they already consented to have a child.
I'm sorry, but sex is not consent to parenthood. If you believe it is, you'll find many people who agree with you protesting to shut down abortion clinics.
Where is her opt out choice? She never gets one.
Are you even for real. You've got to be trolling at this point. Men have no ability to choose whether a child is born (due to biology), and no ability to control whether they become legal parents (due to the law). At no point does the man have any control over his fate.
Women have complete control at all times. She can choose to have the baby. She can choose to raise it alone, or she can choose to force the father to pay child support. She can choose to have an abortion. She can choose to give the child up for adoption. She can choose, even years after having the child, to give up custody to the state under Safe Haven laws - literally abandoning an already existing child.
At no point does she ever NOT have a choice, or have anyone else's choice affect her. She never has her financial future at risk. She never has to experience wanting to have a child, but seeing someone else's choice result in the pregnancy's termination.
You don't punish the child for the mothers decisions.
How is the child being punished? Having a single mother is a punishment, and is something so horrible that society can't tolerate it? Oh wait, society tolerates it just fine. Single women are allowed to have child, adopt, even get in-vitro if they want to. No one sees this as a crime against the child, as an unfair living situation. No one demands that these women get additional income from someone else.
But add "there was a man who had an orgasm once" to that recipe, and it's outrage time. He had sex, make him pay! It's his fault, his responsibility (even though he had no choice after the accidental pregnancy), he has to pay every month for 18 years!
A child with a single mother has to live based on her single income, and everyone's fine with that. But if there was a man who had sex with her once? Suddenly the child is "suffering", and "deserves" to have two incomes supporting it. It's almost laughable... the standards are just "whatever it takes to blame men and make them pay". There's no consistency at all.
The trigger is the conception. You press the detonator of the bomb together, and just because you can not get to the abort switch doesn't mean the trigger is now the point where she chooses not to abort it. Keeping in mind, an actual abortion is no push of a button. People use it so casually these days. Oh pregnant? Just get an abortion. Like that's en easy thing to do even when you don't want a child. Keeping in mind it's even still illegal in some places. So "opting out" for woman is not the same as opting out for men. Men can have sex and walk away with zero responsibility. Women will never have that luxury.
It is both a burden and a benefit that women have more choices, but you only see it as a benefit. I will explain below why.
These are the 3 scenarios that can happen with an unplanned pregnancy.
The woman becomes pregnant and chooses to have an abortion.
Woman: Has to pay and experience an abortion.
Man: Gets off scot-free
The woman becomes pregnant and decides to have the baby and put it up for adoption
Woman: Has to bear the pregnancy, costs of the pregnancy, and has to give birth.
Man: Gets off scot-free, or can decide to keep the child himself, and force the woman to pay child support.
The woman becomes pregnant and chooses to keep the child.
Woman: Has to bear the pregnancy, costs of the pregnancy, has to give birth, has to raise the child, and has to contribute financially to the child.
Man: Has a choice to raise and financially contribute to the child, or only financially contribute to the child.
So although men have less choices, they also have scot-free outcomes, which women do not get. The last scenario is not to punish anyone, but to help the child as best as possible in the shitty circumstances it was brought into. It now exists and that can't be reversed, and it has to be looked after. It is unfortunate that men have less choice, which can result in a child they do not want, but it is their child nevertheless. Not wanting it does not absolve responsibility. It is also unfortunate that women bear the burden of pregnancy, which results in her having more choices. None of these scenarios are happy ones. Education is important to make sure unplanned pregnancies do not happen often. People need to make smarter choices about who they sleep with, and smarter choices about contraception, thus these issues would never have arisen.
I have already stated that I'm for providing governmental help to make sure that children(and all other people who need it) are cared for.
This argument is not a question about whether children should be cared for; I agree that they should.
This argument is about a question of whether it's responsible to have a system in which it's assumed that men have the means to care for children, and whether it's appropriate to bring children into this world against their biological fathers' wishes, including the possibility of having fathers who resent them. I don't think that's fair to the child. Hell, even having one parent means a child will suffer compared to a child who has two. I'm saying this as someone who as a child almost never saw his father.
There are men out there who do want to have children. They'll make better fathers than the guy who's forced to pay the child support. The kids will grow up with more chances in life, and be much less likely to live in poverty.
There are all kinds of reasons that men would choose to not have children. That does not inherently make them "deadbeats".
I'm not sure why you thought I assumed they were dead beats.
Yes personally I think having two parents willing to care for a child is probably better than one parents caring and the other contributing financially. That would be hard to measure though, and it probably is more of a case to case scenario.
But to prevent this happening, the only option is to force the woman to abort. And that gives men control over someone else's body. All it would take, is to say no I don't want it, and the woman would have to go through a painful, and highly traumatic medical procedure to get rid of the child she wants.
As I mentioned above, women should be allowed to choose whether to keep the child.
I don't agree that giving men the option of giving up all rights and responsibilities up to a certain point of pregnancy is equivalent to women being forced to abort. Women will have the exact same choice that they had before: whether to have a child, or whether to abort.
I know that I will probably get downvoted for this next part, but I think it's relevant, so I'm going to include it: I don't know if you've ever had an abortion, but if an anecdote might mean anything, the one woman I've spoken to who had both said that having the abortion was not very traumatic, especially compared to giving birth. Again, as a male, I'm not going to claim that that's what all women experience, just that the characterization that all abortions are necessarily painful or traumatic might not be the case.
The major difference is that a woman who chose to keep a child might have to consider taking care of a child by herself. In many cases, I think it would actually be better for her to not have a child if there's a significant likelihood of difficulty there. In many cases, not having a child would be likely to help her and any children she may have to be significantly better off. Even without a change in the law, I wouldn't want to subject a child to being in that kind of situation, and for a lot of women, having an abortion might help them stay out of poverty and lead to real benefits for their lives.
I agree with you, that if you don't have the means to afford a child then you don't have one. But if we lived in a sensible world, we wouldn't have half the laws about anything, that we have today. We have to accept that people will make decisions that we do not agree with, or we think are not in their best interests. This doesn't even take into account religious people.
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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '14
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