Not one person has claimed that they should be.
Several people have claimed that the man has an ethical responsibility.
But what this thread is really about is whether or not it’s douche-like to bring up this general ethical debate in a General Questions thread about whether or not a legal responsibility currently exists when the person asking the rather simple legal question is currently clearly suffering a great deal of pain and has not really asked anyone what they think of the wider issue.
I guess I see it like if I left a bag of weed in my friend’s car and they got busted. Legally, it’d be on them, but ethically I’d feel like I should help out with the consequences.
She said she’s bitter that he has no responsibility, but never that she didn’t share in it: she started off saying she wanted to know if he was obligated to help, not pay for everything.
It’s the same thing. One implies the other.
She also did express a moral opinion about it, which invited a response.
It was still a dick thing to say. End of story.
There’s always time to try make a coaching moment out of tragedy and/or rub salt in a wound BUT that time isn’t until later.
I don’t see how this is analogous at all. A miscarriage is an act of God. Bad luck, but no one has any ethical responsibility for it.
She said she thought he should share financial responsibility for something that wasn’t his fault. If a baby had been born, then yes he would have been both financially and ethically responsible, but not until there is a baby. Before there is a baby, then she is making a choice, all by herself, to remain pregnant. That choice comes with the risk (including the financial risk) of miscarriage.
A little bit, yes, but not wrong. He probably shouldn’t have said it in GQ.
It may for you. It doesn’t for a lot of people who make a distinction between ethical and legal obligations. You may not agree that distinction makes sense, but don’t deny that we make it.
She made an off-the-cuff comment in what is clearly a time of great personal suffering. I really don’t see how that makes it ok to justify rubbing her nose in it like a bad puppy.
True enough.
Y’know, it’s not that likely that it will come up, but if I ever get Pitted, I think I’m just gonna try to find a way to turn it into another episode of Diogenes the Cynic v. The World…
Education does not guarantee that people will not take a chance in the heat of the moment.
.
Even after the pregnancy, she still made the autonomous decision to keep it, which makes the rest of the pregnancy (along with the attendant risks) her own choice, and not his.
Just when I thought you couldn’t possibly sink any lower than you already have.
Do you even understand what you’re indignant about? What part of what I said do you think is unfair?
Why? If the father bailed at the beginning, the decision to have a child was solely hers. That doesn’t seem too controversial to me.
The unsolicited moral spanking in the original fact-finding thread was douche-y and out of line. But Dio is correct: women either have autonomous legal, ethical, moral, and biological control of their bodies and functions, or they don’t. As he said, we can’t have it both ways.
It is a shame that dude won’t man up and help her with the medical bills which resulted from a pregnancy he was 50% responsible for creating. But if he legally has no rights to a fetus, he legally has no responsibility for same.
And here I was the past few days honestly thinking to myself “hmmmm Dio hasn’t been a fucking ubber threadshitting/derailing/insensitive/tasteless douche for the last month or two…I guess the new improved Dio HAS arrived”
Yeah, fucking right. That will learn me to think like that.
A true classic. I usually stop reading when a post that starts like this.
I didn’t think what you said was “unfair”. I thought what you said was downright sick. Basically you were saying, “well, by choosing to stay pregnant, you accepted the risk of a miscarriage. Too bad.”
You may not have MEANT it that way, but that’s how it came off – as if you were dismissing what happened to her, and that it’s no big deal. (Tell me, are you the type who tells a woman, “oh well, you can always have another one?”)
Forget it, Jake. It’s Diotown.
That is exactly what I meant. What part of that do you disagree with?
Apropos of nothing, there are people posting in this thread that I haven’t seen post in years: JohnBckWLD, Beadalin, athelas, SnakesCatLady, and MandaJO. I had to check the dates to see if the thread was a zombie. Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong threads.