I’ll just say that responsibility isn’t about punishment; it’s just responsibility. My daughter has to clean her room. She hates it. I’m not punishing her by making her clean her room, it is just one of those things in life that is right and proper for her to do.
If a person is of the mindset that a fetus is a human life and that the mother and father have a responsiblity and moral duty to care for that child, then it must be done. Not as a punishment.
Keep your morality off of me the pro-choicers say? Well, I’ll just sit at home, get drunk and deny my daughter basic food and water. No, you say? That is harming someone else, you say? Well, that is what the debate comes down to, me thinks.
By “often DOES the above” you don’t mean “spit in the face of the Source of Goodness & Life and to please its Dark Prince Satan” do you? How can you possibly argue that? I’m assuming you aren’t a Gnostic or some sort of Marcionite, so how can you argue that? Where in the bible does it tell you that? The OT seems to be okay with it. Seriously, I want to know what your rationalization is.
I think that a far more accurate statement would be, “The pro-life movement often oppresses and abuses women but the people therein don’t intend to.”
I think this solution is too complicated - clearly we should just stone whores to death, “whore” being defined rather arbitrarily as any woman who has sex without intent to bear children, as determined by any man’s accusation. This has the added advantage of not rewarding women who use their naughty bits irresponsibly but through luck manage not to get pregnant - punishing them too would be considered a good thing because the irresponsibility itself is the crime this thread’s proposal seeks to punish.
-By definition, you cannot make child support payments for a non-existent child. What this would actually be would be an arbitrary punitive fine, that straddles the line of being a very, very steep sin tax from the pro-choice perspective, and a purchasable murder permit from the pro-life side.
Clearly some people think this is a legitimate goal. I consider it equally legitimate to flog people for attending church - in either case an action is being performed that conflicts with some specific morality.
Which debate? The abortion debate? The abortion debate has nothing to do with financial considerations except when they’re used as a method of selective denial (rich women may get abortions, but poor women may not). This thread’s debate is all about financial considerations, but it’s really quite silly.
I’m actually pro-choice, but I’ve found in the abortion debate there’s a lot of miscommunication going on regarding what either side really wants. When the Pro-Life side talks about “avoiding responsibility”, it sounds like a code-word. When the Pro-Choice side claims that this has nothing to do with financial issues, I doubt their sincerity, especially when they turn right around and talk about choosing to abort because of their financial situation (while ignoring or outright opposing initiatives to alter the child support structure to give equal financial control to fathers).
From the responses thus far, it seems that even though I’ve managed to piss off both sides, I’ve utterly failed to spark a conversation between the two groups who hate the proposal, and neither side seems to have come into any insight into one another’s reasons for their positions.
The pro-choice side doesn’t claim that, and as a matter of fact, financial issues are a perfectly reason to terminate a pregnancy, as is no reason at all.
I’ve seen it claimed that the ability to eliminate an 18 year financial obligation is an irrelevent side-effect. Obviously not every pro-choicer treats it that way when formulating an argument, but I’ve seen it quite a bit.
I am pro-choice. To me, being able to opt out of a financial and emotional obligation is the key function of abortion; in my mind, it has fuck-all to do with the right to privacy or whatever. Those are sidelines relevant only to the legal community. So, no, I do not like this proposal. There is no reason to punish people for having consentual sex. Period, bing, end of story.
That being said, as I understand the pro-life side of things, most of those on that end believe that a fetus is a fully-fledged person, and that performing an abortion is killing a child. So, you know. Good luck finding someone to accept money for murder.
Because it is; on the Right, they use words like “responsibility” to excuse preying upon people.
Someone, somewhere may have said that; but it’s hardly some major idea on the pro-choice side as far as I’ve heard.
I already know their reasons; they overwhelmingly are woman haters, and the goal is to hurt women; the are the moral equivalent of the KKK. Which is why I called your proposal a cave-in to them. You might as well have come up with a “compromise” suggesting that beating women with whips should be outlawed in favor of using clubs instead.
I thank the stars for my friend Loren who is the local newspaper distributor in my little mid-Colorado town and its rural environs. He occasionally throws me the Tuesday NYT Science Times supplement.