If a man doesn’t want a baby then he needs to wear protection. or keep it in his pants. The moment he decides to have unprotected sex, he assumes responsibility for any pregnancy. He should not be allowed off the hook for any financial obligations to the baby.
What if the condom breaks?
What if there’s a hole in it?
What if he’s allergic to laytex and sheepskin and must rely on his partner for protection?
What if she sabotages the birth control method in an effort to get pregnant?
What if she gives him a blow job, they kiss, and then he gives her cunnilingus and they get pregnant that way?
I can think of more wacky wild examples if you like…
The point is this: the woman always has a choice. Always. She can abort, give it up, or raise the baby. Knowing the man won’t help out financially doesn’t change those three options. She still has the right to do any of the above but she now knows that if she chooses door #3, she’s going it alone. Where’s the harm in that?
Too bad.
Too bad.
Too bad.
Too bad.
Let me rephrase my original statement. If a guy has sex with a woman, he assumes the risk of pregnancy. There is absolutely no scenario by which he should be allowed to escape his financial and moral responsibility.
I agree entirely with Enderw24.
IMHO, a man does not have any moral obligation to support a child he does not want to support. (Except in the sense of everyone having an obligation to support everyone else through paying taxes for services.)
Of course, if a man leads a woman to believe that he will support a child of hers, he must do so or be guilty of a terrible fraud.
Do you honestly believe a man should take no responsibility for his own children?
Sorry, BK–once a man produces children, he’s responsible for them, whether he wants to be or not. It’s no longer about the parent’s needs/wants, it’s about the child. Those needs come first.
We have seen the effects of fathers abandoning their children, and it’s not pretty.
So if a woman agrees to have sex with me, I am giving her the power to obligate me to pay at least 18 years worth of bills?, thank you, I have been cured, I will never be horny again.
unclviny
Actually, once you decide to have sex you have just obligated yourself to the possibility that you will have to pay bills of another person for 18 years. Instead of seeing it as unfair that women get to make the final “have baby/not have baby” decision, consider yourself lucky that at least one person does have that decision. Otherwise, it would just be a crapshoot as to where your money is going the next couple decades. At least this way you have the opportunity, upon deciding that the impending bundle of joy is not your cup of tea, to speak and attempt to reason with another human being.
Somewhere along the way people seem to have forgotten that having sex=creating babies. It’s not “unfair” that this happens. It’s nature.
That is the law (as it damn well should be).
No, if a woman agrees to have sex with you, she is giving you power to obligate her to make the choice between carrying a pregnancy she may or may not want to term and having an abortion. This is a possibility she takes on when agreeing to have sex.
If you agree to have sex with a woman, you are taking on the possibility of paying 18 years worth of bills.
If a woman doesn’t feel comfortable with the possible choices and responsibilites, well, that’s why they make vibrators.
If a man doesn’t feel comfortable with the possible choices and responsiblities, well, that’s why men are able to make fists.
What I believe is that a man shouldn’t be held to a higher standard of responsibility than the woman.
—What I believe is that a man shouldn’t be held to a higher standard of responsibility than the woman.—
Now that raises an interesting wrinkle: adoption.
If either party want to give the kid up for adoption, then there IS a way to negate the financial burden. But since the adoption cannot go forward without the consent of both parents (since they both have a claim to parental rights when the other drops theirs), whether party A owes the B and the kid money is again entirely the decision of party B (the one who wants to keep the kid) even AFTER birth.
Since party B is usually the woman in these cases, that gives some pretty strong deference to the woman, regardless of it being before or after birth. At any time at all, she can decide, utterly without regard to the father’s wishes, whether or not she or the father will be forced to care for the child financially. B can give up that burden any time B pleases: A cannot.
Note, however, that this is an issue not unlike the sort of game theory that is common in economics: the power the woman has over the man is ONLY there when the man doesn’t want the child. If he wants it, then she loses that power: suddenly no matter what SHE wants she cannot escape financial responsibility for the child.
The interesting conclusion here is that in theory and in practice, it is NOT THE CHILD’S INTERESTS that decide whether or not a parent has an obligaiton to care for the child, as some here seem to be suggesting: it’s is entirely the interests (financial or otherwise) of the other parent tha decide the issue!
—That is the law (as it damn well should be).—
Apparently, it’s more complex than that: as a recent famous case has involved the state forcing a man to pay child support even though his wife cheated on him and had kids by another man. So, he never got her pregnant: and only thought he had a legal obligation to support her kids because she lied to him… but he’s STILL financially responsible for them because at one point (thinking they were his) he asserted parental rights. (He’s also been barred from seeing them, including the one daughter that is his, due to his telling the boys that he wasn’t their biological father and that he wasn’t going to pay to support them).
So, in one case, we have you claiming that sex is the deciding line, even when the person always and forever rejects the idea of having and caring for a child. And in another, we have the courts saying that sex is irrelevant: the once-exercised, never-revokable claim to parental rights is what matters.
The following are my opinions only.
IMHO, if the man wants the kid (and the woman does not), he should pay for all medical costs to bring the pregnancy to term, pay compensation for any income lost by the mother during and for some time after the pregnancy and that he should have sole and exclusive parental rights to the child after being born and not hold the woman to any financial or parental obligation. The woman should reliquish all parental rights to the child, should then follow medical guidelines to safeguard the pregnancy and afterwhich should have no visitation privileges.
First opinion in reverse. The woman enters a contract where man is freed from all financial and parental obligation. The choice is now soley up to the woman to either terminate or complete the pregnancy. The man should not be made legally responsible for an act that he had no expectations for. However, if he did not take precautions, then certain obligations would probably be considered but to the full point of forced parental obligation.
The decision is hers while the baby is in her womb, because it is still part of her body. My opinion is, the fathers rights begin when the baby is born.
Diogenes the Cynic,
1.) how would the man be able to prove that he was the one who impregnated the woman? (in either the case where the man disagreed with the woman’s decision)
DNA testing - it can be done while the BABY is still in the womb now.
2.) Even if the man was given some kind of equal standing with the woman as to decisions about her body ( a truly repulsive thought) all you would have is a stalemate. You would still not have a case where the wishes of the male would take precedence over the wishes of the female. How would you break the stalemate?
A: If the male wanted the baby and the female aborted : Bummer. Turtle eggs are eaten by predetors too. Find another female. Try again.
If the female wanted the baby and the male didn’t, if he could somehow provide sufficent proof (I don’t know how!) that sex was consensual and HE took all possible precautions aside from abstainence, the choice to continue the pregnancy would still reside with the female, only without financial support of any kind from the male.
As far as redistribution goes:
quote:
“No one has a right to be a billionaire, and the government has a responsibility to look after the well-being of all its citizens. I am a dyed in the wool redistributionist. If you have too much money, the government needs to take it away from you.”
You’ed have quite a different perspective if YOU were the one that worked and created the fortune. Something a redistributionist will never have to worry about, they don’t understand capitalism well enough to make the fortune in the first place. Your Utopia would end up being the pawn of a capitalist nation that has advanced technology, strong industrial base, and LOT’s of money and power to the one’s that created the situation, with only a portion of those decisons being rationed out to those that are incapable of creating the cash to finance the agenda.
DNA testing is expensive and, to test a fetus is extremely invasive to the woman. Do you think a woman should be forced to submit to a DNA test at the whim of any guy off the street that claims he knocked her up? How would you determine if the guy has a remotely credible claim or not? Who pays for the test? Doesn’t a woman have the right to not have her body invaded for a test?
How could a guy possibly prove this? And even if he could, too bad, as far as I’m concerned. He is responsible for his own semen. It is ridiculous to suggest that we should legitimize the abandonment of children by their fathers. Remember, it’s not about the woman obligating the guy to anything, it’s about fatherhood obligating to guy to support his own child. If you don’t like these rules, then get an effing vasectomy. There’s no such thing as free sex. Frankly, as liberal as I am, i would say that a man should not have sex with a woman that he would not willing to have children with.
There is no correlation between wealth and hard work. This is the most vicious of all American myths. Just look at the White House. There is a man who has never worked a day or earned a dollar in his life, yet he has incredible wealth and privelege. We also have millions of people who bust their asses all their lives for nothing. Capitalism is a failure. It is an evil, amoral system and it needs to be abolished-- but this is really another thread.
A man does not produce children. At most, he produces a zygote.
I still like one of my early posts from the last iteration (Child support and the “male abortion”):
That is, the man and woman share responsibility for getting into the situation where she has to choose between abortion and delivery, but only the woman has control over how they get out of it.
I believe the man should only be held responsible for one solution, and if the woman chooses a different one, she can pay the difference herself. After all, when she made her choice, she knew exactly what it would entail, and choosing to raise a child she can’t afford is just as much her decision as choosing to buy a car she can’t afford.
I would require the man to notify the woman and the state of his decision not to support the child, during the same timeframe that abortion is legally and medically possible, and pay for the cost of an abortion (or perhaps the cost of delivery and adoption). The woman may then do whatever she wants with the pregnancy and the money, but if a child results, the man has no parental rights or responsibilities.
And the zygote then disappears, never to be seen again? Assuming the zygote–>embryo–>fetus doesn’t die, it turns right into…a baby! Which the man had 50% to do with, and is responsible for. If people don’t like the absolutely natural consequences of sex–an activity designed to produce children–then they need to stay away from it until they can deal with that possibility.
That depends almost entirely on a woman’s choice. (There is, of course, an element of chance as well.)
Correct. And the woman whom the baby grew in is the one responsible for allowing the baby to come into being at all. Ergo, she is the one who should bear responsibility for him.
This sounds like an argument against abortion.