OK so I’m sick to death of hearing the abortion/anti-abortion debate here in the U.S.A. I think part of the problem is that an unwanted pregnancy affects the woman much more than the man. To remedy this I propose we pass a law to even up the score. The law would make it a crime for a man to cause an unwanted pregnancy. Basically if an unmarried woman becomes pregnant, the sperm donor goes to prison for 12 months. No mitigating circumstances, it doesn’t matter the the male is 14 and the mother is 32. He still does a year in the pen.
The religious right would love it, because they are opposed to sex before marriage. Conservatives would love it because they are all about personal responsibility. Women would love it because unwanted pregnancies would not be solely their problem anymore.
This solution is so obvious, I wonder why it has never been put forward by the major religions, or family values politicians.
I don’t think that would actually work, but it is an interesting idea. Men should be held more responsible for where they put their dicks.
Sounds like a great way to up the murder rate, actually. And to send quite a few boys to prison, but hey boys are all born evil so if they end up beaten, raped or killed because their girlfriend lied about being on the pill, their death and suffering is just an extra bonus, right? Perhaps we should have the girlfriend set them on fire when they leave prison just to make sure they are properly taken care of.
Only for women; men can screw around as much as they like.
“Personal responsibility” is just code for “I want to prey on other people and have the law protect me from my victims”. They don’t want to actually be held responsibility for anything.
More like far too many women looking at men and boys as demonic and having no compassion or ethical impulses towards them. I can just see women as a whole just shrugging off the unfairness of some man being sent to prison because a condom broke or she lied about taking the pill or because a 30 year old woman seduced a teenager. After all, they’re men so they must be guilty of something, right? Teach them a lesson. And it’s not like they have feelings like women do, right?
Because the anti-abortion movement is just about tormenting, oppressing and killing women. And because such a law is blatantly sexist and unfair towards men.
If this was meant as a joke it wasn’t very funny to me.
You’re making the erroneous assumption that married women never get abortions. I would imagine if your law got passed, you would just get a lot more marriages of convenience (and subsequent divorces) to legitimize any unwanted pregnancies.
Plus, I’m not sure a year in the pen is any more of a disincentive than having to pay child support for 18 years, which is always a possibility unless you’re 100% sure what your partner would do in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. I imagine if you made it an option between a year in jail and 18 years of support, a lot of men now would take the slammer.
Moved MPSIMS --> GD.
And probably more unwanted children or secret abortions; I expect you’d see women either going through with pregnancies they don’t want to or getting an abortion under the table in order to keep their boyfriend out of prison.
I’m a firm believer in privacy rights. BUT…
I’m getting to a point where I think that they should take DNA as part of any ID card (driver’s license, photo ID, passport, etc). Once the kid is born the father should be listed based on DNA verification and the father should have an automatic $200/mo (minimum) bill no matter what his work situation is. The $200/mo should be billed from month 0 and until the kid is 18yo. (Obviously, the kid’s DNA would be collected at birth) $20 of each payment could go to paying for the DNA verification system and the balance to the person who is providing care for the child.
If someone wants to have an abortion, the child will still get a record of the fact that it was concieved and who the father and mother were. (I think some states do issue birth certificates for aborted children where it was a ‘something went wrong at the end of the pregnancy’ thing).
Part of the reason that I lean this way is because with sperm donors (who would be excluded from the $200/mo above) and everything else… kids could be dating their own half siblings for all they know. How many times have you seen couples who look a lot alike? It would be one thing to find out that your husband had a criminal record before you were married, but quite a different thing to find out that you’re half brother/sister.
Better, an antiabortion law that just puts all family value politicians in jail. It would be easier to get passed and would fix the problem the OP posted about. Plus it would do society good.
How did this get moved out of MPSIMS?
As a father I laugh heartily at your financial assumption, heartily, I tell you.
Earlier this year, when the state of Oklahoma was considering a law that would define human life as beginning at fertilization, a Democratic state senator proposed an amendment that said, “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”
Yeah but she was making a deliberately ridiculous proposition to ridicule an anti-abortion bill. It looks like OP is earnest.
How about just making the dude responsible for .75 the cost of the abortion? And that only if he didn’t front half the cash beforehand.
Gotta say that the sonogram and waiting period law in Texas totally sucks. I think that law was mostly to prevent women from Louisiana from coming to Houston to get abortions. OK, add on the cost of a motel room in the Houston burbs.
Should all come out to about 600 bucks. Abortions and motels are cheap here.
I’m trying to see how this “evens up the score”.
Did I miss something? Is there some place in this country where it’s illegal for a woman to become pregnant?
It would possibly count as cruel and unusual punishment for the common criminals already in jail, however.
Just to address this one point, it is called a Certificate of Still Birth. It is sort of like a birth certificate and death certificate all in one. Those of us who have experienced this unfortunate bit of paperwork were mightily offended when birthers criticized Obama’s Certificate of Live Birth with statements like, “Is there any other kind?” Yes, actually there is.
By the way, the IRS recognizes no tax deduction for stillbirths, either.
Imprisoning rape victims. Brilliant idea.
Despite the birth of a child being solely the choice of a woman, partly due to the legality of abortion, men are still held responsible for “their” children financially through enforcement of child support.
Here’s an idea: as women have “choice” give it to men too. As men don’t have any decisive say in whether a child is born make women take reponsibility for their choices. Let men opt out of any involvement with a child if they do wish, including financial support. Over 90% of fathers with joint custody of their children happily pay child support anyway, so there’s already a clear correlation between involvement with the child and monetary support, but at the moment people can be put in prison simply for being financially unable to keep themselves alive and working and still pay a chunk of their income to someone else simply because of a choice she made.
Or, another idea: do the DNA test thing suggested by Enkel and give the child to the father. She can have the reposibility for the first nine months from conception, then he can take over. She can have nine months to recuperate, then they can take it in turns.
Here’s one that ought to appeal to right wing politicians: intellectual property rights. I want copyright on my sperm, should I impregnate a woman without my prior agreement I want compensation for unauthorised piracy of my genome and royalties. Might have the double effect of finally making those copyright laws a bit more reasonable, as there’s no way people would stand for it.
Or the way copyright laws have been going in recent years it would result in the mothers of twins being sued for millions for unauthorized copying.
I guess you are talking about a unwanted pregnancy with unwanted defined by ending in abortion. If the woman willingly carried the baby to term it is declared wanted by that.
So by doing this you made abortion illegal, just that the man faces the prison time instead of the woman while giving him no say in the choice.
The problem with this is that women are currently given the sole right to decide if the baby is wanted or not, if your system would be put into place it would need to be a joint decision if a abortion would take place - or if it is the woman’s sole decision then both would need to spend a year in jail (or perhaps 6 months each - maybe giving them the option of separate cells so this doesn’t repeat ). In effect, except under some circumstances, would make abortion illegal for women.
You also have a problem because you are equating a pregnancy with punishment which is not the case, they are not equivalent. It seems like a harmful, and IMHO false, premise to advance in legal coding.
The very concept appears to stem from anger and revenge.
It doesn’t make abortion illegal; it would just mean that if a woman had an abortion, the father of the aborted fetus would go to prison. It’s actually a rather bizarre scenario where one person is sent to prison for the legal act of someone else that they have no control over; it’s as if your neighbor buying a new car automatically resulted in you going to jail.
Is this a bad attempt at Swiftian wit or is the OP really that much of a can’t-say-outside-the-pit?