A man has extra marital affairs. Nope, his body doesn’t concern her. It only becomes her business if he contracts HIV and he still fucks her without a condom.
Dutch, although I disagree with Dio on this issue, I don’t think your analogy holds water. A man is never going to catch pregnancy or abortions in his own body from a female partner, no matter how many of them she has.
A question for Diogenes and those who agree with him:
A man and women have agreed with each other that they want children. Secretly however, the man prefers to remain childless. He likes the sex though, and suspects that there would be less of it if they weren’t trying for children. So he goes off and secretly gets a vasectomy (yeah, I’m sure there are some practical problems with hiding such an operation from your wife – let’s assume he’s a good liar).
Would you consider that immoral? If so: what’s the difference?
Personally, I’d say that if there is such an emotional distance between two people that she wouldn’t share something of this magnitude with him, or that he wouldn’t be interested, then they have no business living together in the first place.
Oops, I see Kimstu already made the same point (about the man having a vasectomy). I’m still interested in the answer, though.
It’s not “offspring” until it’s born. Until then it’s part of someone else’s body.
There is still a risk that she will catch a deadly disease so the anolgy is a non-starter. There isn’t even a theoretical chance that a man can be harmed or affected by a woman terminating a pregnancy.
I would not consider that immoral. She is not being harmed.
You honestly don’t see how someone is ‘harmed’ by that example? Is it just the wording of it? I think it’s clear that, in that example, someone is being defrauded. Do you disagree? Is that fraud value neutral in your mind?
But he’s still lying to her, even if only by omission. You don’t consider that immoral? Even between two people who pretend to be in a committed relationship with each other?
Oh well, I guess we just have very different standards then.
She has a right to sleep with whoever she wants. I don’t have to like it in order for her to have the right. I think this question is not quite analogous to abortion, though, because there is a chance that an unfaithful partner could pass a disease to the other partner. There is no chance that I can be harmed by my wife getting an abortion.
Yeah, okay I withdraw it. I like the vasectomy anology way better anyway.
I honestly don’t. How is not getting a woman pregnant doing her any harm?
I think it’s a trivial example of “fraud.” Everybody lies about something. I definitely don’t think it’s a crime.
Incidentally, is this only supposed to be a “morals” discussion? I thought it was about whether women should be legally mandated to tell a parner if they get an abortion. “Morally” speaking, I have no idea. It’s certainly not automatic. If it’s a meaningful relationship, I’m sure the woman would say something anyway. If she doesn’t say anything, it probably wasn’t much of a relationship anyway, so no harm done.
Do I detect a little back-pedalling here? The discussion so far has quite obviously been in terms of morality, not legality.
Beautiful.
Legally, no.
Morally, it depends. If I knocked up some chick from the local dive, I wouldn’t expect her to search me out to let me know she had an abortion. If my wife got pregnant, and I went with her to all the classes, made sure to do all the housework when she was unable to, got her icecream and pickles at midnight, bought all the baby gear, set up the kids room, bought the new minivan and generally supported her 100% in preparing for this kid, then yeah, she damn well has an obligation to discuss getting a 3rd trimester abortion, instead of telling me she had a “miscarriage”.
DtC, if it was a legal question, it would be in GQ, and the first line of the OP wouldn’t be
No backpedalling, just not very comprehensive reading. There’s another thread about Alito’s legal opinion on this issue and I assumed this thread was an extension of that discussion. I noticed people were expressing moral opinions but I thought they were just qualifying their opinions that it should not be illegal. I missed that it was in the OP
In any case, I don’t think a woman has either a moral or a legal obligation to tell anybody that she terminated a pregnancy so i’m not backing off anything.
I didn’t think it was a factual question about what the law IS, I thought it was a debate question about what the law SHOULD be.
Could you email me a quick JPEG? Thanks dude, you’re a real sport.
Well, at the very least, it’s extremely manipulative. If she knew that she would never have kids with this man, she would have the option to leave him and find someone who will give her the children she wants. By withholding that knowledge from him he denies her the possibility to make that decision, and effectively makes her stay with him and sleep with him under false pretext.
And of course, the same thing is true for the OP’s question, just with the pronouns reversed.
Interesting definition of “trivial” you have. I’m sure there are plenty of people for whom such a lie (either the abortion thing or the vasectomy analogy) would be a relationship ender.
If the same woman goes out on the street and sets up a game of three-card monte and wins twenty bucks from some gullible stranger, is that trivial fraud?
Because I know I’d feel far more hurt by my wife lying to me about something like this than I would by some stranger cheating me out of twenty bucks.
I don’t see this as trivial at all: it’d be one of the deepest betrayals I could imagine a loved one doing to me. It shouldn’t be illegal, but it’d definitely be immoral.
Daniel
IMHO unquestionably YES (No Great Debates, and no minor debates IMHO) the father should know morally (and I would say legally also - though legally there might not be a darn thing he can do about it).