I don’t know much about the medicine, but this reall doesn’t sound like that bad an idea, if it could be done without serious side effects. Or, something for the men?
You mention that my stand about abortion in cases of rape is inconsistent. I suppose it is, but you also mention that we have complete dominion over our bodies, and a woman that has become pregnant by rape has lost her dominion.
Things rarely fall into clear cut categories. How about your statment about dominion over our bodies, and the one about Norplant for all the females at puberty?
I guess I shouldn’t have put in my 2 cents here, I don’t have time to follow the whole thing as closely as the rest of you seem to. I have to go to work to support the family that I adopted, the children of another man who had his fun and left to do it to someone else.
No, there really isn’t. The point, which apparently went right over your head, was that if you had been aborted, you wouldn’t be sitting off somewhere lamenting the fact that your mother had aborted you. No way around that fact. If you were never born, you never knew it anyway.
That’s nice. And at some points you have vestigial gills and a tail, and all embryos start out as females, so again, who cares? What do you think you’re proving with your anti-abortion propaganda? You think you and you alone are going to settle a difficult question of science, ethics and law? Please.
Yes, that’s right, I have no heart. That’s logical.
It sort of does, according to the laws and the wishes of most people in this country.
[quote at that stage you are developing and most vulnerable.[/quote]
I was most vulnerable right after my parents split up.
Abortion is legal. Face it. Don’t like it? Don’t have one.
Abortion is not murder, and saying it is does not change that. You ready to deal with prisons full of doctors and women who had abortions? Or seeing them strapped to the gurney getting lethal injections? You ready to be responsible for that? If not, then please abandon your stupid, illogical, emotionally-charged language.
I think you missed the point, probably as a result of not being the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I can not BELIEVE the people who are suggesting mandatory Norplant. Especially Stoidela, since she has stated that she feels a woman has full dominion over her own body. The day the goverment forces me to have ANYTHING implanted in my body is the day I find a new country to call home. And Stiodela, what are you thinking? That all woman are so irresponsible and stupid that the government must take control of their reproductive system? Are you a socilaist?
As to chosing a decent partner in the first place, Stoidela said that this is not always possible, and that many woman discover too late that their man is a wife-beater. Many? Really? I’m sure this happens occasionally, but I don’t believe it’s the norm. Woman see signs of what’s to come, but chose to ignore it. The abuse is often evident prior to marriage, but he apologizes and says it will never happen again blah blah blah we all know the story. But I’m getting off topic here.
I was thinking about this thread last night and it occurred to me that men actually have an additional option in this scenario which is not available to women. First, let’s assume we’re talking about after the baby is born (if the woman aborts, the support issue becomes moot). The woman may now either give the child up for adoption, forfeiting all rights and responsibilities to the child, or she can keep it and accept full responsibility on both counts. Of course, if she’s lucky, she may get some finaincial help from the man, but we all know, court order or not, that this often doesn’t happen. She must be prepared for the possibility of receiving no financial support from the man.
The man has more choices. If she does not want to keep the child, he can take full responsibility and opt to raise it himself. At the other end of the spectrum, he can completely blow off his responsibilities, never see the child and (though there are laws against it) avoid paying child support.
But he has another option that the woman does not have. He can opt for ‘partial parenthood’, meaning that he can legally live up to his responsibilities by just paying child support. Buying one’s way out of one’s responsibilities is not generally smiled upon, but doesn’t seem to be a problem here. He can also opt for ‘partial parenthood’ with varying degrees of involvement. He can obtain visitation if he wants and be either deeply or peripherally involved in the life of his child. No such option exists for the woman. It’s either give the child up completely or accept full responsibility. Frankly, I think the man has better options.
Stoidela, you seem to be advocating no accountability in chosing one’s sexual partner and no accountability if a pregnancy results. What exactly do you think the benefits of this will be?
“I think it would be a great idea” Mohandas Ghandi’s answer when asked what he thought of Western civilization
yepitsme,
I wasn’t that offended by what you said. I phrased my responce in that manner to punctuate how ridiculous the assertion that men don’t care what’s going on is. Niether you nor anyone else could be quoted as saying it, but it was definitly implied, by several people. I also realize that it is different for men and women, its obvious. My point was that different does not mean less.
I think alot of people are missing the point of this argument. The argument is not over who should or should not be able to shirk responsibility, its about equality. Its about the fact that a woman can, and a man cannot. We all realize that unexpected or unplanned things happen in life, but why should a woman be given an out, while the man is not?
Alot of you are arguing that people have to owe up to their responsibilities. I couldn’t be in greater agreement on this point. However, the fact reamins that its a one sided thing, and that’s not right.
I’m going to try to sum this up. We’ve conceeded that both people take a risk when engaging in intercourse, and that it is rightly the woman’s choice whether or not to abort. So the question seems to be the adoption vs. raising the child choice. The argument is that if he would prefer to give the child up, but she choses to keep it, he is obligated to pay support. So what. If you reverse that situation, she is in exactly the same position. If she wants to give the child up, but he wants to raise it, she will have to pay him support. Where is the inequity here? They both have equal choice and equal responsibility.
I thought about why this hasn’t come up before on this thread and I think I know the answer. It’s because the men very rarely chose to raise the child themselves. The thought of HIM chosing not to give the child up was so foreign to us all that we didn’t even consider it. I think this is a very good example of why we certainly should not make it easier for men to back away from their responsibilities. They are backing away as much as they can already.
**My apologies to all of the fine, upstanding gentlemen in the audiance who would never dream of abandoning their children. My ‘they’ doesn’t refer to you.
“I think it would be a great idea” Mohandas Ghandi’s answer when asked what he thought of Western civilization
Allow me to say a word on behalf of the indispensible third party in this scenario, which is the State. When you talk about child-support obligations, it isn’t just father/mother, it’s father/mother/state. And the government has a pretty clear (and pretty consistent in all jurisidictions) attitude about this, which breaks down as follows:
The government is not voluntarily in the business of raising children. That is the right (and the responsibility) of the parents who have the child.
The government is not particularly good at raising children, which is why it tries to keep families together and, if that isn’t possible, strives to place as many children as possible to adoptive homes or foster homes.
The government will take on the resonsibility of raising a child only if the parents cannot or will not. They take on this social obligation because it is repellant to American society that children should be hungry, endangered, abused, or alone. (Yes, it happens, but the goal is that it will not.)
Providing foster care, institutional care, education, clothing, schooling, adoptive placement – in short, caring for these kids – as well as supporting all the infastructure necessary to keep a Department of Human Services running, is enormously expensive.
Society as a whole pays for the care and upkeep of children left to the care of the government. That’s you, me, and every other taxpayer, none of whom are responsible for the creation of the child in question.
The government expects parents of children to provide support (financial and otherwise) for their children in order to limit the number of children in its care and to off-set the expense of taking care of other people’s children. And I’m not talking about children not in at least one parent’s care; I’m also talking about children who are welfare because their fathers (or mothers) will not support them.
Now you ask, why should a father be financially responsible for the care of a child he didn’t want and clearly said he didn’t want? Because if he won’t be, who will? The government, that’s who, through Aid to Families With Dependent Children, food stamps, foster care, and a million other programs that, in a perfect world, we would have no need for. And the government doesn’t get it’s money from out of the air; it gets it from us, the taxpayers. Why should this financial obligation fall to us instead of to the parents of the child? You talk about how “unfair” it is to expect a biological parent to financially support his or her child; I don’t find this unfair at all. Better him (or her) than all the rest of us. And, expensive, enormous, and unwieldy as the system is now, imagine how much worse it would be if we just allowed people to walk away from their obligations to their children. It would be a nightmare, and society would be a lot poorer for it, in every sense of the word.
I’d have to agree with jodih. It is very expensive to care for children whose parents abandon them, and the degree of care can not match that given by loving parents.
I work in group homes for abused/troubled teens. Most of these kids have been in trouble with the law to some extent (such as refusing to go to school, stealing, etc). But the main reason most of them are there is because their home life is so completely messed up. I talk to some of them who say they have been “in the system” since they were ten years old, or even younger. Their parents were druggies, abusive, neglegent, absent, whatever.
Though the company I work for provides good homes for these kids (they have it better than my own kids in terms of the activities they get to do, they food they eat, the clothes money, tutors, etc), the kids still are missing something very important in their lives - parents. Sometimes I want to cry after talking to these kids. It’s so sad haering them talk about their future and how scared they are. They have never had a normal life and are afraid or what will happen when they get out on their own.
I think that any law that enables parents to be even less responsible than they are now is a bad one. I really don’t care if it’s not fair. Sorry - too bad. Life’s not fair (yes, I know - that pisses you off). We don’t need the state encourage irresponsibility. It’s already easy enough for a parent to be a dead beat.
Also, as a sidenote, the money that the government pays to take care of these institutionalized kids is only enough to provide them with the bare minimum of care (in fact, it’s probably not even enough to do that). In order to provide them with decent living conditions, the company I work for (which is non-profit) must actively fundraise and seek other sources of income. This is not easy - right now they are in a budget crisis of sorts.
My point…um…scratches her head…I know I had one, but I forgot it. Oh well shrugs
yah yah, I know - I wasn’t going to say anything else on this topic, but this was something different =)
This is yet another example of talking out of both sides of your face.
Suggesting government mandatory implants of Norplant invalidates your pro-choice statement that woman have the right to decide what happens to their own body.
So, Stoid, which is it?
>^,^<
KITTEN
He who walk through airport door sideways going to Bangkok. - Confucius
I just found this thread. Stoidela, you certainly think outside of the box.
You have situation where two people take a risk, but only one can choose whether or not there are consequences. Not fair. But then the courts are not always fair to men who do want involvement (and I am talking about divorced dads who lose a disproportianate number of custody cases.)
But life is not “fair.” You fool around, you face the consequences. If only Stoidela’s model could be applied to distribut the responsibility in proportion to the amount of decision making power.
In insurance there is a concept called Last Clear Chance (bear with me for a moment, it is relevant.)
It arises from an auto accident early in the century. Farmer A used to let his mule roam around wherever it wanted. Farmer B was mad about this. One day farmer B is driving down the road and the Mule is standing there. So Farmer B hits the gas and smashes into the mule killing it.
Farmer B argued that it was not his fault that the mule got killed. After all, farmer A was negligent for allowing it to walk in the road. The court agreed that farmer A was negligent, however they ruled against Farmer B because he had the last clear chance to avoid the accident.
The Abortion for Men topic is about the same. There may be negligence/irresponsibility on the part of the man and woman for having sexual relations before they are ready to have a child, however the woman has the last clear chance to avoid the consequences (by whatever means.) If she chooses not to avoid the consequences, she should be liable for the results. If they guy says he isn’t going to be a dad, then the woman should have to handle the consequences of keeping the baby.
The decision to have sex is 50-50. The decision to have the baby is 100% on the part of the woman.
(please remember that I am not the Thorleiflur from Iceland. I am not trying to piss people off – just to engage in friendly debate.)
First of all, for those who are getting your panties in a tangle about my Norplant and licensing suggestions, those are not serious suggestions. That’s just the fed-up fascist in me yearning to break free and straighten this sorry-ass world out. Fear not, it won’t be happening. (If I were Emperor of the World, the first order of business would be to reduce the world’s poulation by at least half. Many problems would then become far more managable.)
Thor:
Thinking outside the box is important to me. And not being afraid to say it, either.
And THANK you for that excellent analogy and summary of what I’ve been trying to say!
I just read through this entire thread - heavy going, I must say - and came across a possible logic error in the OP that nobody’s addressed yet.
Stoidela raises the possibility that perhaps if a woman KNEW she couldn’t automatically get child support from a man with whom she had sex, perhaps she’d think twice about getting pregnant. This logic, based on the assumption that if the law doesn’t protect a certain behaviour, it will not occur so frequently, is faulty. This same logic was probably applied while drafting the Child Support laws that made men financially responsible for children they inadvertently fathered: If men know that there will be financial consequences for fathering children, maybe they’ll take more precautions. Obviously, this didn’t quite work.
Women who get pregnant and stay pregnant against the wishes of the father aren’t likely to listen to logic or consider the legal consequences. More than financial support, they probably want an emotional tie, too. There is no way to legislate this. Prior to Child Support Laws, women did this all the time. The problem is ignorance, emotional neediness and lack of education, not whether or not a man has a legal responsibility for this or that.
What I really have a problem with is Stoidela’s assertion that men be able to escape the consequences of their actions so easily. Others have objected to this already, so I’ll leave it alone. The consequences of such an action would not be a significant drop in the number of pregnancies unwanted by men; the consequences would be a greater burden on the state.
As much as I’m pro-abortion, I can’t see that financially forcing a woman to have an abortion or give a child up for adoption is right. This WOULD happen if men were permitted to “just say no” to parenthood. I would think that the emotional damage this would cause would far outstrip any benefits.
There is a kind of thinking here that I find interesting. A large number of people seem to feel that most men, or at the very least, huge numbers of men, would, if given the opportunity, free impregnate dozens of women, and flee their responsibilities afterwards. The thinking seems to be that (You can send an SASE if you prefer) same irresponsible, thoughtless, callous men are NOT doing this right now.
This is very similar to many people’s thinking about keeping drugs illegal: that to legalize them will somehow unleash millions of potential drug addicts who up until now were restrained by their fear of the law, and once drugs became legal theyw ould go nuts abusing them.
Both ideas are perfectly ridiculous.
Butthead males who have no interest in being fathers or caring for their children in even the most perfunctory way exist already. And they already don’t pay child support, laws notwithstanding. This number of them would not change significantly if there were a legal way for them to do this. There might be a few more. And, I believe, fewer kids to worry about…but I’ve already made this argument.
(And as for the drugs, same thing. IT’s not like there are millions of people who WISH they could do drugs but don’t because it is illegal. People who want to do drugs do them.)
I feel like many of us are saying the same thing, and saying it repeatedly, to no avail. Stodeila has made her argument several times, but she has never really responded to the arguments made against her position. So here we go again . . .
THOR – The legal doctrine of “last clear chance” is totally inapplicable in this hypothetical. It says, if two parties are negligent but one had a “last clear chance” to avoid an accident, then that party will be held responsible, because their failure to take the last clear chance was, in effect, the superceding cause of the accident. Not only is it not applicable here, it isn’t even applicable in your example, where one farmer INTENTIONALLY hits the other farmer’s cow. In this case, both parties are equally responsible for the pregnancy – the mother contributes the egg and the father the sperm. Neither is negligent, or both are equally negligent (depending how you look at it). You seem to be arguing that if the mother has the option to abort and she chooses not to, and the father wanted her to, then she should give up her right to expect him to support the child. You say:
The point many of us have tried to make several times is that a baby is not merely “results” or “consequences,” it’s a CHILD, and SOMEONE will have to pay for its support. Assuming the mother cannot pay for everything herself, who then should step in? The father or the State? I said – and still say – it should be the father. HE got her pregnant, it is HIS baby, and if it keeps one more child off welfare, by all means make him pay. The degree to which this is unfair to him is far outweighed by the benefit to the only innocent party to the transaction – the baby. And, just to remind you, child support is not required to punish the father or to enrich the mother, it’s for the benefit of the child.
STOIDELA – Do you seriously believe that relieving men of their responsibilities towards children they create will lead to a DECREASE in the number of children created? The fallacy in this is self-evident to me. You say:
Maybe I have a higher opinion of men than you. My experience is that the vast majority of men who know they have children step forward and do their damnedest by their kids – whether the kids were planned or not. And, sure, there are some who absolutely refuse to pay court-ordered child support, but it is a very, very small percentage. It’s not as easy a thing to do as you seem to think; the courts can and do garnish the man’s wages and bank accounts, seize his assents, and inhibit his right to obtain a license for any number of things from fishing to driving. And if he STILL refuses to pay, he can be (and often is) thrown in jail.
It seems like, in advancing your position, you want to leave the child out of it and you want to leave the governmnent out of it, but you can’t. This isn’t some project the two people made in shop class that one should have to keep. It’s a kid. It must be supported, it must be raised, and the fact that the father doesn’t WANT to do it is not, to me, a very compelling argument that he should not be forced to do so anyway for the greater good of the child.
I would like to ask you the following question: If the father doesn’t want the child but the mother does, and the mother can’t afford to raise the child on her own without financial assistance, who should provide the necessary financial assistance – the father or the state? I have stated why I think it should be the father; I would be very interested to know why you think it should NOT be him, and how you would justify making the child the responsibility of the government.