Ok, this will be a good one.
Let’s put aside the legal abortion debate. Let’s just concede the point that it is the constitutional right of every woman to choose whether or not to abort. No father/spouse consent/notification or anything. That is unconstitutional as well.
If it is 100% your choice, then why when you exercise your choice to have the child is it okay to come to baby daddy with your hand out? If it is your choice, and not the father’s choice, why does he have to pay?
Because he is the Father of a child. His choice would have to be exercised earlier in the process.
That is a gross oversimplification.
It’s the truth. She didn’t choose to have a baby, they both did she just happened to have a few months longer to make the decision final.
Bollocks. He chose to engage in sexual activity with her. An activity that in modern humans is performed FAR more often for bonding and recreation than procreation. Further, there are any number of additional factors that can play into this scenario that complicates it. He very well have made a the responsible choice and have used protection that failed, or was sabotaged. It’s possible they both were simply irresponsible but only she has the final say.
The current situation is inadequate, and does not fairly address the rights of males in any way shape or form approaching equality. Before anyone starts up, I allow that the biological realities cause some inequalities that can never be fully addressed. I think that males should have additional legal recourse to balance the playing field a bit.
This again?
Child support is the right of the child. If the mother chooses to abort, there is no child. If she does not, then the extant child has a right to be supported, both by the mother and the sperm donor.
It really isn’t complicated, and it isn’t a big nasty conspiracy to screw men over.
Because the noncostodial parent has to pay support.
If you don’t want to pay support you’re perfectly welcome to go to court and try to get custody.
Pretty much all of the arguments for and against can be found in any one of the the 8-10 page threads we have on exactly this topic every 6 months or so.
About abortion and child support
Screw your culture, take responsibility
Abortions: should the father have a say in it?
Abortion for Men (redux) now “Roe v. Wade for Men”
Roe v. Wade’s Dirty Little Secret (2004)
Roe v. Wade’s Dirty Little Secret (2003)
This. Thread over. Thread should never be repeated ever again for any reason. The answer will not change.
Agreed.
Thank you. You said it much better than I did.
Yep, this is the answer. Of course, this is also the debate. Is “child support” a right of a child, and if so how should we quantify it.
It is impossible to make the choice about abortion “fair,” as the OP seems to be suggesting it should be, because the woman’s situation is not parallel to the man’s. Women are the one the who bear the babies; their investment of time and effort in any pregnancy is inevitably far greater than the man’s, and their emotional involvement is also far more likely to be profound. Thus it is entirely proper that the decison whether to terminate a pregnancy should be the woman’s alone.
Guys who don’t like it can suck it. If you don’t want to risk paying child support, keep your damn pants zipped or get a vasectomy.
I’d go for that if men had something even remotely looking like a fair chance in a custody hearing.
Yes.
Up for debate, but fundamentally irrelevant to the question posed in the OP, unless one is arguing a man has no obligation to provide support to his child. In which case I would argue that the term “man” is no longer appropriate.
Isn’t this the exact same argument that anti-abortionists would use against pregnant women seeking an abortion? I acknowledge that in the interests of the child sometimes parents get the short end of the stick. I don’t think our current system is 100% equitable but sometimes what’s fair and what’s needed do not overlap. However we have long acknowledged that this is a bad argument with regards to women, so it seems hypocritical that this argument always pops up in these threads.
Well said, even if we’re on opposite sides of the aisle.
As far as I can tell the actual purpose of child support is often to simply take money from a man (regardless of whether he is the father) and give it to a woman. Regardless of whether this benefits the child in any way, regardless of how she treats the child, regardless of whether or not he is allowed to even see the child, and whether or not it deprives other children of his support. Yes, abortion law is unfair because biology is unfair, but I see no biological reason why for example, a man should be forced to pay money to a woman who is raising a child he never sees or even not related to him, who never actually benefits from that money, and who is being taught to hate him.
That’s gender politics, cruelty, and greed; not biology.
I won’t argue that this is not usually the case due to how society works and our evolutionary baggage, but I wouldn’t say this is always necessarily the case. 9 months of discomfort and (possibly many) hours of agony are nothing to sneeze at, but I think most folks would consider the “investment” of time, effort and money spent during 18+ years of raising a kid to be the real “cost” of having children. And those costs are shared equally by the man and woman (or at least this is how our society tries to make it).
In a society like our own that supposedly strives for gender equality, the only insurmountable biological difference between gender roles in parenting is the discomfort of pregnancy and the agony of childbirth. This is obviously a huge difference that carries enormous emotional significance, but I don’t think it rationally justifies men having no say in what happens with unplanned pregnancies visa vis their future obligations.
In my experience, the damage to society caused by one person forcing another to become an unwilling parent is far worse than that caused by someone being a single parent. Since adoption is a perfectly viable option, nobody is being forced into impoverished single parenthood or abortion and so I think it’s perfectly reasonable and in the best interests of society for both parties to be able to veto the formation of a family. I recognize that the decision to give up a child for adoption or have an abortion is usually much harder on a woman (though it’s utterly wrong to assume it’s not hard on many men as well), but in the greater scheme of things it’s insignificant compared to the all-encompassing life transformation that is becoming a parent.
Because you’re morally duty bound to look after your offspring. Woman have to pay child support too if they don’t have custody.