Abortion and child support

[marshmallow]

I’m going to be a devil’s advocate. I don’t have a fundamental problem with the current system. But I’ve seen some arguments that don’t seem to be internally consistent.

Someone referenced the idea that we must make men pay for their children because otherwise they will engage in risky behavior and “look at the third world. QED.” The differences between the first and third worlds go back centuries, not a couple of decades when we finally started to reel the horny men in. Women’s education, rights, and easy access to contraception are much more important routes to lowering fertility or increasing responsible behavior and they all predate modern child support laws. But even those implements are still way after the divergence.

@cosmosdan

She is not taking the man’s rights away n any form. She is exercising the rights given to her by biology. remember, biology prohibits that it can ever be fair or equal.

That’s right. Which is why when the sperm donor walks away the mother shouldn’t ask the coercive power of the state to help her or her child. She should just tell herself that biology ain’t fair and ‘I knew the risks,’ as Dio would say of the man.

What you’re saying is the child should not expect to be cared for by the father either financially or emotionally, if he decides he doesn’t want to. What you’re saying is that males get to have sex, knowing that it risks pregnancy and have a way to completely avoid any responsibility simply by saying “I didn’t mean to”

Freedom is scary. And we’ve already learned, throughout the thread, that biology isn’t fair.

@even_sven

Why don’t you be the one who goes years without sex because nobody wants to date someone with kids? Why don’t you watch your career stall as you have to take time off for kid-related stuff? Why don’t you say goodbye to parties, clubs, serious travel and all that fun stuff people without kids get to do? Why don’t you come home and put a family’s worth of food on the table instead of just grabbing a hot pocket for yourself?

I agree. Being a single parent is not desirable. Why so many women who can afford abortion would skip over such a huge privilege afforded to them and then complain about being a parent is beyond me. But they know what they want better than anyone else.

@even_sven

Why do you think women like to get to a know a man first before having sex with them? Why do you think women tend to shy away from one-night-stands and no-strings-attached sex? Do you think it’s because we are frigid? Because we like to say the word “no?” Because we just like to make things complicated and difficult?

No. A large part of it is that we are afraid we will get knocked up and left high and dry. Sex comes with risk. So we assess our partners, choose ones that are less likely to be risky, and generally try to make good choices.

This is a component of it, on a rational planning level, but it’s also true that men are a lot different than women when it comes to sex. Especially casual sex, where the psychology goes to opposite poles. We understand that men want to have as much sex with as many different partners as possible. Some men actually want to prevent a pregnancy; others, not so much. What women want is less clear. Sometimes even the women don’t know. Biological imperatives are doing tricks to both sides.

For that reason, I think the best argument women can use for the current system is (I’m not sure who suggested it) that going with the “men can walk away no strings” model means less casual sex across the board. Is that likely? I don’t know. I kinda doubt it. But it’s enough to give any man seeking casual sex pause. If the alternative is potentially less sex then the current setup is better, and you can just hope that you get lucky (in both ways).

[villa]

@marshmallow

That’s right. Which is why when the sperm donor walks away the mother shouldn’t ask the coercive power of the state to help her or her child. She should just tell herself that biology ain’t fair and ‘I knew the risks,’ as Dio would say of the man.

…

Being a single parent is not desirable.

This is what shows you fail to understand the basic point. You are thinking of this as a contest between male and female rights, and ignoring the child’s rights. It isn’t, in the end, the mother using the coercive power of the state to help her - it is the child’s right, and the state is using that coercive power on the part of the child. It isn’t that being a single parent is not desirable, it is that it is better for a child to receive support from two rather than one parent.

I 100% agree that a mother who chooses to have a child against the wishes of the father doesn’t have the right to expect support. But that ain’t the issue here - it is whether a child has the right to expect support. And that child both legally does and should.

[cosmosdan]

@Damuri_Ajashi

:smack:

So why are you holding men to a standard that you would be called a mysogynist if you held women to the same standard? If you said that a woman’s choice was made when she opened her legs, why would that be any worse than saying that the man made his choice when he came in the vagina?

??? I am really stunned that this is so difficult to grasp.

It’s not a different standard. It’s judgment calls and choices based on the realities of biology. When two people make the choice to risk pregnancy they are both equally accountable. They are both financially responsible for the resulting child’s care. If a woman has a child and then decides she doesn’t want it or can’t care for it , and the Dad does, then she has to pay child support because the law sees them both as accountable for their offspring.

If an unplanned pregnancy occurs the choice to have the child or not is the woman’s, not because of any unfairness, or persecution of men, but because of the reality that it is her body. The man gets to voice an opinion and influence the decision but that’s all. That biological reality is why this can never be equatable or fair to all parties. Any change to try and make it “fair” for men, simply shifts the equity for everyone involved and it becomes more unfair. That’s the reality.
If a woman decides to have a child we have to consider the welfare of a helpless child and decide who should be responsible for the care of this child. We’ve decided the most equatable thing is for both genetic parents to be responsible for the choice of risking pregnancy.

If the suggestion is to give both parties the same choices , that’s just unrealistic and impossible isn’t it. If the goal is , as close to the same choices as possible we again have to deal with the realities of biology.

Do we want to give men the right to veto a childbirth in the name of fairness, and compel a woman to have an abortion?

Do we want men to force a woman to surrender the child for adoption?

Do we want encourage irresponsible sexual behavior among men and have women or society in general bear the burden. How does that make it more equitable?

Based on the biological realities there simply isn’t a way to make it more equitable than it is now. Someone earlier in the thread suggested some kind of legal contract freeing men of responsibility, but IMO the reality is that men take the risk already knowing the legal ramifications so they enter a de facto legal contract when they take the risk, and so do women.

[cosmosdan]

@marshmallow

I’m going to be a devil’s advocate. I don’t have a fundamental problem with the current system. But I’ve seen some arguments that don’t seem to be internally consistent.

Someone referenced the idea that we must make men pay for their children because otherwise they will engage in risky behavior and “look at the third world. QED.” The differences between the first and third worlds go back centuries, not a couple of decades when we finally started to reel the horny men in. Women’s education, rights, and easy access to contraception are much more important routes to lowering fertility or increasing responsible behavior and they all predate modern child support laws. But even those implements are still way after the divergence.

That’s right. Which is why when the sperm donor walks away the mother shouldn’t ask the coercive power of the state to help her or her child. She should just tell herself that biology ain’t fair and ‘I knew the risks,’ as Dio would say of the man.

This isn’t a new argument. We currently make both people responsible for the risk of pregnancy and the resulting child which is more equitable than placing it all on the mother. The responsibility for contraception should also be shared equally even though the choices are different.

Freedom is scary. And we’ve already learned, throughout the thread, that biology isn’t fair.

And so what? You’re not offering anything that hasn’t been offered. You seem to be suggesting that biology has shown us that women should bear even more of the responsibility rather than making an effort to encourage men to behave responsibly. It’s an argument that fails to make things more equatable and has already been dealt with.

[cosmosdan]

@villa

This is what shows you fail to understand the basic point. You are thinking of this as a contest between male and female rights, and ignoring the child’s rights. It isn’t, in the end, the mother using the coercive power of the state to help her - it is the child’s right, and the state is using that coercive power on the part of the child. It isn’t that being a single parent is not desirable, it is that it is better for a child to receive support from two rather than one parent.

I 100% agree that a mother who chooses to have a child against the wishes of the father doesn’t have the right to expect support. But that ain’t the issue here - it is whether a child has the right to expect support. And that child both legally does and should.

This is it.

[cosmosdan]

@Damuri_Ajashi

I thought the title of this thread was abortion and child support.

abortion in realtion to child birth and child support, not whether abortion itself is right or wrong, so no it’s not relevant.

In this thread we are assuming abortion is a valid an viable choice.

We even seem to be ignoring the fact that for a lot of accidental pregnancies the very idea of abortion is morally unacceptable.

[wonky]

@cosmosdan

Based on the biological realities there simply isn’t a way to make it more equitable than it is now. Someone earlier in the thread suggested some kind of legal contract freeing men of responsibility, but IMO the reality is that men take the risk already knowing the legal ramifications so they enter a de facto legal contract when they take the risk, and so do women.

I agree with you. I’m not sure if I’m the person you’re referring to with the legal contract, but I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with it. I think men who are upfront about saying that women are on their own if they get pregnant would have fewer sex partners, which is why the conversation rarely happens.

(Other conversations that rarely happen include “I am needy and high-maintenance,” “I am a jealous asshole,” “I have a psycho ex who may try to kill you,” “My mother will be the third person in our marriage,” and “I have several communicable diseases. Wanna fuck?”)

[robertliguori]

@cosmosdan

If you get drunk and have an accident in your car, as you less responsible?

That’s something of a special case, because driving drunk is a risky behavior for other people. We don’t recognize contracts signed while inebriated, and we don’t recognize sexual consent given under those circumstances.

You haven’t convinced me responsibility is a red herring. The laws have always been based on the concept of personal responsibility. We assume unwanted pregnancies will occur, so we have laws to deal with it.

Personal responsibility for what? There are a non-trivial number of cases where the father was not actually given a reasonable choice as to whether or not he would be a father. We do not exempt said fathers from child support. Ergo, child support is about the needs of the child rather than the actions of the parents; if you wish to argue otherwise, I’d love to see a nice, rigorous test for at what point a father has taken enough affirmative action not to be considered responsible for the child.

Take a perverse case, in which I snag germ cells from two random passer-by, brew up a fetus, and implant it in a host mother. Are the passers-by responsible for the resulting child? If not, what level of participation from the passers-by is enough to give them responsibility? As mentioned up-thread, there are cases nearly as perverse as this one, in which men who were raped ended up liable for child support for the children resulting from the rape; surely being victimized is the very definition of not being responsible for the results.

And yet, children need support. Hence, my statement that a general tax would be fairer. Children have a right to be supported; people do not have a right not to be taxed, even if they have nothing to do with the children in question.

What is moral about that? Once again, it’s encouraging irresponsible behavior in males because it doesn’t require them to be concerned about unwanted pregnancies at all. How is it moral to have society pay for the offspring of irresponsible men? Doesn’t that mean people who have kids and are financially responsible for them now are paying a tax to support kids for people who want to avoid that financial burden?

Yes, it does mean that; but since we’ve accepted that children deserve support, the ability of the parents to pay or not pay is irrelevant. However, since it would be a general fund, presumably it would be a general subsidy; if you had kids, you would both pay into the fund in taxes, and receive money from it to support your own children.

I’ll turn the question around on you; is the current scenario encouraging irresponsible behavior in the form of mothers choosing to bear rather than abort children they cannot support? If the goal is to limit the number of unwanted pregnancies, surely incentives geared at the mother (who has considerably more choice on the matter) would be more effective than incentives at the father?

[pravnik]

@villa

This is what shows you fail to understand the basic point. You are thinking of this as a contest between male and female rights, and ignoring the child’s rights. It isn’t, in the end, the mother using the coercive power of the state to help her - it is the child’s right, and the state is using that coercive power on the part of the child. It isn’t that being a single parent is not desirable, it is that it is better for a child to receive support from two rather than one parent.

I 100% agree that a mother who chooses to have a child against the wishes of the father doesn’t have the right to expect support. But that ain’t the issue here - it is whether a child has the right to expect support. And that child both legally does and should.

@cosmosdan

This is it.

This is it, this was it when he said it on post 6 of page 1 of this thread, this will be it on page 20 when sometone new to the thread makes exact the same argument again, this was it on the last thread, and this will be it when the same exact topic comes up again in 3-6 months. The argument that keeps getting rehashed and reworded is that it’s not fair to men who don’t want to be fathers (or for that fact, women who don’t want to be mothers), comparing it to a situation where a woman unilaterally decides to purchase an automobile or private jet, which aren’t people and do not have the legal right to oil changes and jet fuel. It’s not about fairness to the parents, it’s not about screwing over men, it’s about the legally recognized right of the child to support. That’s all it is.

[pravnik]

@ZPG_Zealot

Forcing a woman to touch your hand is a physical act in the continuum of violence against woman just like rape. Shooting a pregnant woman or a child to avoid paying child support may in some circumstances be the moral equivalency of shooting a burgular breaking into your home or a mugger that tries to rob you on the street. Whether or not it’s murder, well that depends on whether or not you consider it moral to defend property. Some of people do, especially in circumstances were property is shared among family members and the loss of one members property can effect the lives of many.

Yeah, again, if you’re down with murdering children and pregnant women to avoid paying child support, there’s not much hope of our reaching any sort of mutual understanding of one another’s positions here. As such, we’ll have to agree to wildly, wildly disagree. I would say “shake on it,” but given the circumstances I’ll just wave politely.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@cosmosdan

Didn’t say that. The point that has been made 1000 freakin times is that the biology makes equity impossible. Suggesting men escape all responsibility isn’t close to anything like equity. No thanks , isn’t really the same as a surgical procedure is it? Let’s just be total hard asses and if people have an unplanned pregnancy and don’t agree together to support the child, we’ll sterilize them both.

As long as you acknowledge its not fair, I’m fine but earlier on in the thread a few posters were making a vigorous defense of the equity of the situation because the man had a choice when he ejaculated. If we’ve abandoned that position, then I’m fine with the way things are. Mostly because I frankly don’t care as much about the man’s convenience as I do about the child’s welfare (I am pro-life for pretty much the same reason).

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@martu

I don’t know how many times it has been stated in this thread but I’ll try again - it is impossible, due to the facts of biology, to treat men and women as equals in this scenario. It can’t be fair until men are able to carry a foetus to term.

Are you saying that noone in this thread has said that this standard was perfectly equitable because the man made his choice when he had sex?

[ZPG_Zealot]

@martu

Why do you want to punish the child for the transgressions of the mother?

Why do you want to punish the father and reward the mother? Also as long as the social safety net exists I don’t consider parents to owe anything to their children. Anything beyond what is necessary for minimal survival should be considered the gift of your family for which the child should pay back in support in loyalty when they grow up.

[villa]

@ZPG_Zealot

Why do you want to punish the father and reward the mother? Also as long as the social safety net exists I don’t consider parents to owe anything to their children. Anything beyond what is necessary for minimal survival should be considered the gift of your family for which the child should pay back in support in loyalty when they grow up.

Why are they owed what is necessary for minimal survival? Why should they not be left to fend for themselves?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@cosmosdan

??? I am really stunned that this is so difficult to grasp.

Its mostly because the argument seems to be at least somewhat conclusion driven.

If an unplanned pregnancy occurs the choice to have the child or not is the woman’s, not because of any unfairness, or persecution of men, but because of the reality that it is her body…If a woman decides to have a child we have to consider the welfare of a helpless child and decide who should be responsible for the care of this child.

Once again, while I have no problem with the current system, why doesn’t the woman bear the responsibility for that decision? We have welfare, no child goes hungry in this country, so why is the child support (which varies greatly depending on who the father is) so important to the welfare of the child that we need to tell pregnant mothers (when they are deciding whether or not to have children) that they can rely on child support payments from the father?

We’ve decided the most equatable thing is for both genetic parents to be responsible for the choice of risking pregnancy.

But the woman can terminate a pregnancy. It is ultimately her choice to have the child.

If the suggestion is to give both parties the same choices , that’s just unrealistic and impossible isn’t it. If the goal is , as close to the same choices as possible we again have to deal with the realities of biology.

As long as you recognize that we have drawn the line in a mannerthat is unfair to men, I don’t have any large disagreement with you.

Do we want to give men the right to veto a childbirth in the name of fairness, and compel a woman to have an abortion?

Of course not but we can tell the woman that if she has a child, she’s on her own.

Do we want men to force a woman to surrender the child for adoption?

Of course not but we can tell women that if they have a child, she’s on her own.

Do we want encourage irresponsible sexual behavior among men and have women or society in general bear the burden. How does that make it more equitable?

Is the threat of 18 years of child support supposed to be a “deterrent”? This sounds eerily like “punishing” men for their promiscuity. Isn’t that the purpose of abortions? To relieve society of the unintended consequences of casual sex?

I mean seriously, there are over a million abortions every year, most of those were not planned pregnancies. I know at least 3 guys that got married when their girlfriends got pregnant (and at least another three that claim to have premature honeymoon babies), I’m pretty sure they would have gotten married even without the threat of child support payments. Why do we have to hang this sword over their heads?

Based on the biological realities there simply isn’t a way to make it more equitable than it is now. Someone earlier in the thread suggested some kind of legal contract freeing men of responsibility, but IMO the reality is that men take the risk already knowing the legal ramifications so they enter a de facto legal contract when they take the risk, and so do women.

I guess we could tell the woman, you have your choice, abortion or childbirth. Women take the risk of having to have an abortion, men take the risk of having child support payments for the next 18 years of his life.

Once again, I am OK with the current situation but only because of the results, not because it is a principled position.

[even_sven]

[quote=“Damuri_Ajashi, post:455, topic:563985”]

Once again, while I have no problem with the current system, why doesn’t the woman bear the responsibility for that decision?/QUOTE]

Repeat after me.

Non-custodial mothers pay child support. Non-custodial mothers pay child support. Non-custodial mothers pay child support.

Women have to pay in an exactly equal way as men. Women have an exactly equal financial obligation to support their children.

[villa]

@even_sven

Non-custodial mothers pay child support. Non-custodial mothers pay child support. Non-custodial mothers pay child support.

And, just as important, custodial parents provide support.

Child support payments don’t force the non-custodial parent to pick up 100% of the costs of raising the child. Instead, they prevent one parent opting out entirely.

[even_sven]

Exactly.

Is it any surprise that many father choose to cut a check rather than actually raise their kids. Having custody of a child is no walk in the park.

[ZPG_Zealot]

@even_sven

Exactly.

Is it any surprise that many father choose to cut a check rather than actually raise their kids. Having custody of a child is no walk in the park.

Exactly why the father didn’t want the kid to be born. If only the mother had taken this into consideration neither would have the burden.

[ZPG_Zealot]

@villa

And, just as important, custodial parents provide support.

Child support payments don’t force the non-custodial parent to pick up 100% of the costs of raising the child. Instead, they prevent one parent opting out entirely.

Plenty of older children basically raise themselves and their siblings. Unless the non-custodial parent has a battery of good lawyers the custodial parent can spend most of the money on themselves as long as the children are not starving.