Jodi: *Because this ENTIRE discussion presumes that (a) the baby is entitled to support and (b) the mother alone cannot support it so (c) someone else must. Who should that someone else be? The mostly innocent man, or the entirely innocent taxpayers? *
Jodi, this emphasis on “innocence” and “unfairness” as they apply to taxpayers in general, because the taxpayers “didn’t even get laid”, is puzzling me a bit. Surely we often “unfairly” require the taxpayers to support people even if the taxpayers aren’t the ones, or the primary ones, who get something out of it. For example, somebody who is cared for and supported for decades by his parents certainly gets very substantial benefits from that; but we don’t insist that the burden of supporting elderly parents should therefore fall on their children rather than on the taxpayers as a whole. In fact, a rich person can let his impoverished loving parents eke out their existence with Medicare and Social Security while he blows his pile on riotous living if he wants to, and we don’t complain that that’s “unfair” to the “innocent” taxpayers.
True, the point behind Social Security and Medicare is supposed to be that society as a whole is also indebted to the elders who have worked and paid taxes for years; but surely society as a whole is not as indebted as the children who were fed and washed and sheltered by those elders, yet we never sue the children for “elder support”. Is that fair?
And an argument can be made that society as a whole, although it may not be responsible for a baby’s conception, stands to gain significantly from having that baby properly supported and cared for: children are a society’s future, after all. In addition, we already help support many children by providing everything from food and clothes to education and low-interest loans for them, and not all of those are just for poor children whose parents can’t support them independently, either. Very few children are brought up from birth to adulthood solely on their parents’ own dollar.
Looking at all these things, my outrage level on considering the prospect of having society help support children whose fathers have unilaterally renounced parental rights and responsibilities is lower than yours. Yes, it’s not quite fair to society, but then neither is almost anything else. I don’t like the prospect of men having irresponsible sex and then ducking the consequences by renouncing all parental involvement, but I don’t like the prospect of women having irresponsible sex and then ducking the consequences by having an abortion, either. Neither is a good approach to the important issues of sex and reproduction, but I don’t think it’s ultimately best for society to permit one and not the other.
As I’ve said before, I appreciate the argument that abortion must be permitted because it involves a woman’s fundamental rights over her body. But (also as I’ve said before) an abortion is not just about exercising the option not to have a pregnant body; it’s about unilaterally renouncing impending parental responsibilities too. That’s a de facto right that women have that men don’t, simply because only women get pregnant; but I think it would be in the interests of equality and fairness to extend a legal equivalent of that right (renouncing impending parental responsibilities) to men.
See, what’s bothering me most here is a nagging conviction that a very important component in our ideal of parenthood is that it be voluntary. As a society, we have been gradually moving in the direction of separating sex and parenthood, recognizing that people have a right to indulge in the former even if they don’t desire the latter. In 1965 the Court held that it was unconstitutional to prohibit married people from using birth control, and in 1973 it held that a woman had a right to an abortion, and at present I think we’re slowly moving closer to officially recognizing sexual partnerships between people of the same sex: and all of this is tending to undermine the idea that having sex implies accepting the possibility of becoming a parent.
I don’t agree that the law is justified in considering that you’ve implicitly accepted parental responsibilities just because you got laid. I do agree that that’s the way anybody who gets laid ought to consider it; and personally, whenever I have sex (when I’m not spending all my Friday evenings on this goddamn message board, that is :)), I consider it my responsibility to make sure my partner and I agree on what we should do in every eventuality. But I don’t think that the law should be enforcing that attitude. And when I see the law in some cases contradicting that attitude—in particular, by telling women that they have the right to renounce impending motherhood, even if they chose to have sex, even unprotected sex—I have a hard time reconciling that with the law’s telling men that they implicitly accepted fatherhood as soon as they got laid.
I know many of us feel indignant about the idea of men getting laid and then weaseling out of fatherhood. Many people feel indignant about the idea of women getting laid and then weaseling out of motherhood via abortion, too. But as has been pointed out, the law can’t be coterminous with morality. We just have to pick out which moral aspects we think are paramount enough to be considered “rights”, and leave the rest up to individual moral judgement.
And I can’t help feeling that what we as a society ought to regard as one of the paramount moral issues of parenthood is its voluntary acceptance. No, I’m certainly not suggesting that parents should be able to give up the burdens of parenthood any time they feel like it: for one thing, there’s probably never been a parent in the history of the human race who didn’t feel like giving up at some point, if only momentarily. 
But I think we ought to value the conscious act of consenting to parenthood—not just getting laid, but explicitly accepting responsibility for a particular child who exists or is about to exist—highly enough to refrain from insisting that people who have never given that consent, for whatever reason, are still obliged to be parents.
Yes, that means that society has to pick up the slack when there aren’t enough consenting parents to handle that responsibility. But as I said, society has an interest in picking up that slack, and I think it’s a better solution in the long run than saying that the responsibility automatically belongs on the people who got laid. As the pro-choice slogan says, “Every child a wanted child”—and to my mind, that means that the child should be wanted first and foremost by the people who bear responsibility for supporting him or her. If the only people who want the child are the taxpayers, then so be it. I think we have a duty to share responsibilities as a society that we don’t have a right to demand from unwilling individuals, whether or not they had sex.
