Since when does flesh and blood matter one wink? My stepfather is the greatest man i know(and has the patience of a saint… how he put up with my mom all those years…).
There is far, far more to being a parent than a drunken sperm/egg deposit in the back of a car in some seedy bar parking lot.
FWIW, I agree with the notion that men should be able to opt out of parenthood before a certain period in the womans pregnancy. I’d say 1st trimester, giving the woman 3 months to decide what she wants to do as well. If she doesn’t know him or can’t find the father before that time, then his rights are automatically waived unless he expresses desire at any point later on.
We really just need to abandon the idea of sex equaling parenthood. Its not anymore, or shouldn’t be.
Or better yet, leave it the way I suggested, and most women will become very choosy about the men they sleep with. That system’s 100% fair to everyone. A woman will have no claim on a man to whom she is not married, and a man will have no claim on a woman to whom he is not married, or on any children he may father with her. Simple, easy, and everybody knows exactly what’s expected of them.
So your solution is to make all the responsibility fall on the women, to the detriment of the child, even though the deadbeat didn’t have to stick it in?
Sex shouldn’t be a lot of things. You shouldn’t have to risk getting an incurable disease. You shouldn’t have to ever get your heart broken when you are lied to.
We live in a world of risk. Sex is risky. Really, would you rather have the risk of child support that men have (and that women, of course, also have) or women’s increased risk of getting AIDS from a sex partner? You want to talk about biology being unfair? Are you really ready to argue that men get the short end, so to speak, of the sex stick?
Life isn’t fair. Don’t take that out on your own child.
Ah, now that is the debate, isn’t it? A man who uses really really reliable contraception, expresses, through his actions, a VERY strong opinion, before intercourse, that he doesn’t want to be a father. As such, he should stand a better chance in court if he wanted to opt out. (This is of course theoretical, as such male contraceptives are not really available yet, as WhyNot pointed out.)
Take for instance, a man who has undergone a vasectomy. The chance of him accidentally impregnating a woman is freakishly small. Now suppose it somehow did happen, and he is in court, saying he didn’t want a child, and took every reasonable precaution imaginable not to get a woman pregnant. Could a judge, reasonably, say to the guy: “No, you took the risk, now pay?”
Compare it to countries who don’t allow a woman to have an abortion, but who do allow it if she was raped. The reasoning is that she can’t reasonably be blamed for the pregnancy. Now, could a judge reasonably blame a man who had a freaking vasectomy, for still getting a woman pregnant?
None of this holds for ordinary condom use. The pregnancy rate there is just too high to consider condom use a “reasonable precaution” against getting pregnant.
Such is your theory, and I appreciate how you come to it. Certainly if it took place inside an incubator, they would never have been asked the question, given that such a scenario also means that there would never be any unwanted children.
But they were asked the question, and they answered it, and they did so putting very little emphasis of any kind on the biological aspect. And that’s what we know for sure.
Have you ever read “This Perfect Day” by Ira Levin? Very cool science fiction book wherein everyone is genetically identical and the population is controlled and managed by, among other things, injections of chemical cocktails that include, among other things, contraception.
With a woman and rape, there was no consent to the act that can result in pregnancy. With a man, he has consented and participated in the act, regardless of what precautions were taken prior to the act.
But that’s really not the issue here. Intent, inshment, I say. Shit happens. Our lives don’t always turn out the way we want. I get that a woman has more options for the end result of the pregnancy, but that is purely biological. As I said in an earlier post, if the father’s body was put into pregnancy mode, he’d have an option to end the pregnancy, too. But it’s not his body. I know its difficult for people to distinguish between the legal aspect of right to privacy and the secondary “benefit” of ending one’s responsibility to the pregnancy, but it is a difference that cannot be understated. If a child is born as a result of the pregnancy, it is the child’s right to receive support from its parents.
Now I must ask whether you think abortion rights apply to women and not men for any other reason other than the fact that women exclusively carry pregnancies. If men were the pregnant ones, do you really think Roe v Wade would still give women the right to abortion while leaving men on the hook? Yes or no.
I’m not sure it’s the inventing that’s the problem – it’s convincing drug makers that men will actually pay for it (and, I guess, convincing men to actually take it and to put up with the same potential side effects that plague women on hormonal BC).
It’s not about a woman’s right to not be a mother, it’s about her right to make decisions about her own body. If the government can’t tell her what to do with her own body, there’s no way to assert that some guy can. The guy can not have sex or use contraception. No one is stealing his sperm.
Maybe an argument can be made with regards to being able to disown the kid, but no argument can be made with regard to the choice to have the abortion.
He can opt out by not ejaculating in someone else’s body. You can’t just fire a rocket into the air and then say don’t want to be responsible if it hits somebody.
It’s not an “idea,” it’s a fact of biology. Men do not have any kind of entitlement to risk free sex. Having potentially procreative sex is an assumed risk. If you don’t like the risk, don’t do it.
I still can’t see how anybody thinks the state would be served by relinquishing men from all responsibility for their children and dumping it all on the taxpayers.
I disagree. If you read your excerpt again, you’ll notice this part follows all the arguments about hardship due to childcare etc.:
(bolding mine)
Sounds like the justices were listing arguments used to defend the legitimacy of abortion, many of which relate to reproduction. But they essentially stated that they do not agree that these arguments make woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy absolute, as “appellant and some amici argue”. It was the right of personal privacy that was cited as the basis for their ruling, and nothing else.
I’ll ask you the same thing that I asked Kobal, since you took issue with the mechanical incubator thing. If men, not women, were the ones to get pregnant, do you think Roe v Wade would still give women the right to abortion while leaving men on the hook? I’ll be flabbergasted if you say anything except no.
You make a ton of assertions in this thread, and you never provide data or support for any of them. I’ve asked you once already to provide data or support and you did not. The sword swings both ways, I’d rather you stop badgering people for something you yourself refuse to do.
You could start with all of these, most of them are the same.
“It’s not legal for you to abandon yours.”
“You can’t give the baby up for adoption without the father’s permission.”
“Men’s responsibility doesn’t accrue until the child is born.”
“and she can’t arrange an adoption without the father’s permission.”
“I agree, but those are different issues than whether the guy should be able to walk awy scot-free of any responsibility at all just be yelling, “not it.” The woman has no such ability, regardless of some of the ignorant assertions which have been made in this thread.”
“The Supreme Court declared no such thing, and after the child is born (it’s irrelevant what happens during pregnancy), the sperm donor has exactly the same rights as the mother.”
“If he can prove he’s the father, though, he still has all parental rights.”
The biological aspect is the reason for the woman getting the right to make the ultimate decision, but the decision itself is not being questioned at all.
I think that if pregnancy happened in a vacuum, both parents would still get the right to request the artipregnancy to be discontinued, out of the very same right to privacy, best interest of society in general etc… (i.e. all the points bolded by **Stoid **in the excerpt), which has been deemed to trump the “child’s” right to live up to a certain point. It’s my impression that SCOTUS ruled that there was a point at which the mother’s privacy right was trumped by the child-to-be’s biology, but that before this point, the woman’s right to choose parenting or not was the one holding more weight. I could be wrong, there.
@Shodan : Thanks. And yeah, that’s what I figured. Which… kinda sucks.