No, she’s just being lied to, and basically being used. No, that’s not “harm” at all.
How do you think she’s gonna feel when she can’t get pregnant? What if she starts blaming herself and thinking there’s something wrong with her? How the hell is she supposed to trust her husband if he lies to her?
I don’t think DtC’s wife should tell him.
Diogenes is it okay with you if Kitty Dukakis has an affair?
Does a woman contemplating abortion owe any notice to the father when he is a guy she once had sex with in the bathroom of the bar while her husband was out of town?
Why on earth would I care?
Of course not.
Actually, I think I was just whooshed. Never mind.
Here’s the first sentence of the OP:
That sounds like a moral argument. Why “would” the woman say something if it was a meaningful relationship? Because it wouldn’t be moral to hide it.
I’ve known women whose husbands went out and got vasectomies without discussing it with them. Women who wanted more children, but whose partners evidently did not. I know some marriages that suffered badly for it. I’ve never heard of any one such where the woman just shrugged, smiled, and said “Well, at least I’m not being hurt!”
No, because she would probably want to. If she doesn’t want to, she probably has a good reason and I’m not going to second guess her.
Why would she want to? It’s her body. Does she automatically tell her husband what she had for lunch? Same thing, right?
Circular reasoning. We don’t know the reason. That’s the whole point. What if she doesn’t have a good reason? What if she actually doesn’t want to have a baby but is too chicken to tell her husband? Is she making a morally defensible decision to keep him in the dark?
This was supposed to be a joke reference to the moronic question asked of Michael Dukakis about whether he would support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. I was mocking the people demanding to know about your feelings about your wife having an affair. I thought it was at least a little bit funny, but that’s just me.
My second question was an open one, not really directed at you. Most of this discussion has concerned itself with whether a woman contemplating abortion should discuss it with the father of the baby when the father is also her husband, and when they share an otherwise stable relationship.
I thought it might be useful to explore the parameters around the discussion, and see if there are circumstances in which most people would not believe that the father has to be notified. Such as some drunk guy at a bar.
My own suspicion is that the latter circumstance, or something close to it, will be more frequently the case than a woman who is involved in a marriage keeping the matter from her husband when he is the father. However, if her obligations differ under differing conditions of relationship to the father, this is interesting. Again, perhaps it’s just me.
Yes, very much so. Where did the idea that the man has no input in his child’s life come from? In some latin american countries it is reversed, the woman has no authority or input into what happens to her kids. Would you guys want to live in a society where the woman’s response to that kind of treatment was ‘ok, its your semen and I respect whatever decision you decide to make’?
Should you tell: probably.
However, there are reasons that someone might not want to (anyone remember Se7en?), they may be inspired by worthy motives, such as saving someone from emotional distress.
For many reasons, I think that some women would prefer to tell their partners after the event, especially if they have reason to feel that they may be “talked out of it” or co-erced into a decision they don’t wish to make.
Perhaps while they would be willing to tell their partner, they would not be willing for the information to go further, but know that he is likely to tell the wider family.
If you want to remain in a good, solid relationship with someone, honesty is the best policy. If you never had that kind or relationship, or feel that the relationship would not survive if the truth were to come out, you may make different choices.
We let people decide whether or not to tell their spouses about affairs, terminal illness, children they had adopted in their teens, children resulting from extra-marital affairs, financial circumstances, previous criminal records etc.
Most people make an appropriate judgement based on their circumstances, and we accept their decisions as theirs to make.
I don’t see why this situation should be any different.
Absolutely. If she can’t trust him to respect her decision then that’s an excellent reason not to tell him. He is not being hurt.
We aren’t talking about children, we’re talking about a woman terminating a pregnancy. There IS no child.
This is part of the abortion debate, does life begin at conception or birth. Some people feels it begins at birth, some feel it begins at conception, some feel it begins when the baby begins to develop consciousness, which is around 7 months, some when the fetus is ‘viable’ and able to survive outside the womb at about 6 months.
The point is there is no easy answer because there is no universal definition of ‘life’.
But back to the debate, I still think the woman owes it to a man because he may not share her definition of ‘life’ and just because she doesn’t want the baby doesn’t mean he doesn’t want it. She can just hand it over to him no questions asked if he wants it and she doesn’t.
Furthermore, women cannot make babies by themselves so the child is not ‘theirs’ alone as they can’t make them alone. If women want to completely cut men out of decision making processes for what happens to the fetuses that it took two people to make then men should cut those women completely out of reproduction cycles (naturally that won’t happen but you get the idea). It takes two people to make a baby, not just one. If it takes two people to make a fetus but only one to make decisions on that fetus/baby/toddler/child/young adult then that is not fair.
Wesley Clark-You’re being disingenuous.
In the USA:
Mortality associated with abortion is 0.6/100,000.
Maternal mortality associated with carrying a pregnancy to term is between 7 and 23/100,000 depending on ethnic group and social class, and can be as high as 63/100,000 for african american women over 35.
Cite: http://www.mchb.hrsa.gov/pages/page_55.htm
A first trimester legal abortion is less risky than carrying the pregnancy to term, just because a woman may be able to give up parental rights, doesn’t impy that she should do so if she, in fact, would prefer to have an abortion.
As long as it’s a fetus, it’s part of her body. That means it has to be her choice alone. It’s completely irrelevant when he thinks life begins because it’s not his body. That’s the way it has to be. Men are entitled to zero say and zero information as to what goes on inside a woman’s body. Too bad if it’s not fair. The unfairness is built into the biology. Do you really want men making the decisions on whether a woman can get an abortion?
OK, but if we accept this, then a woman shouldn’t be able to go to a man after the baby is born and demand financial support, if he stated that he didn’t want a baby.
Would that be fair to the baby? I think not, but, as you said:
I agree that this would be a bad idea, but it is also a bad idea to make the man pay if the woman decides to have a baby.
If he doesn’t want a baby and she does, her two options should not be
but
The man makes his choice when he puts his sperm inside her body. We’ve had this debate before, and I’m not really interested in reopening it, but I don’t see how society could possibly be served by absolving men of all responsibility for their offspring.