How is it biologically unfair? Can men force women to bear children?
Men should have the right to ‘abort’ responsibility for an unborn child, Swedish political group say
Because women get pregnant men do not. Women have the entire financial burden of pregnancy and the physical limitations it imposes.
Women also do not have unrestricted access to abortions. When they are able to access them men have no financial responsibility for it.
Nope. The control intrinsically belongs to the woman when it comes to making decisions about her own body.
The “unfairness” in that situation is purely biological. It’s not the law’s job to attempt to redress biological unfairness by making up new forms of legal unfairness.
If a child is born, the responsibility for its support rests with both the mother and the father.
No, and women can’t force men to support them during pregnancy, either. A pregnancy is solely a woman’s responsibility and solely within her control. That’s the biological unfairness.
Once the pregnancy gives rise to a child, though, the two parents are both responsible for it. That’s the legal fairness.
It’s apparently illiberal to recognize unfairness, or to not spent every ounce of energy trying to remedy unfairness.
I’m personally okay with the pregnant person having this choice, or at least there isn’t a better option available.
Funny how nobody seems to mind such unfairness when it comes to women paying more out of pocket for healthcare costs, for example.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the total direct cost to women of healthcare over and above what men pay far outweighs all the child support payments being made by men who never voluntarily chose to be fathers. Yet somehow we never see men demanding to pay more in order to compensate women for having been involuntarily issued parts that are much more expensive to maintain. :rolleyes:
Bullfuckingshit.
There are entire countries where abortion [and even birth control] are illegal so there goes that argument. Hell, there are getting to be large areas of the US without access to a facility to procure an abortion, and even pharmacies that have personnel who refuse to dispense birth control to women …
What fucking control? If the theoretical I can’t get birth control, nor access a safe medical abortion, where is MY control over the situation?
Well you could move to Sweden, where the thread is about?
I think your anger is a bit misplaced.
Well, yes, and historically (and currently) do just that.
I sympathize with your anger and I’m not denying the gravity of the erosion of women’s rights in the US and elsewhere, but we’re talking about principles here, not merely about the current state of the law. (As in the OP’s thread title concerning the statement “Men should have the right…”, which is obviously an assertion about what the speaker thinks ought to be law rather than what currently is law.)
Similarly, I would say that control over their personal matrimonial decisions intrinsically belongs to women (and to men as well, of course), even though I know full well there are many societies where women aren’t legally permitted to make their own choices in the matter. I’m not saying that women always get the control they’re entitled to, I’m just asserting that as a question of ethics they are entitled to it.
Yeah, this question totally adds credibility to your position.
I agree with the proposed law. I think I’ve argued something like that on these boards but I don’t remember what topic it was in and if I started it or not.
I agree wholeheartedly that women have the single and absolute vote on whether or not to get an abortion. Their body, their choice. As a super liberal atheist, I never consider the desires of the fetus in question; to me the fetus is akin to a fingernail or an arm, nominally human but not human enough and with no rights and living off the body of its creator. My preferred line between where an abortion is ok and not ok is at birth.
I’m unmoved by the argument that we have to ensure what’s best for the child. We don’t. The reason we’re supposed to care about the kid is because he’s human, but so is the mother. So in matters of the mother vs. a future, potential human, I always side with the one who’s already human enough to have full rights.
In matters of paying for the child, I believe that since children can be given up through the foster care system, it is not a contradiction then for both parents to abdicate legal responsibility and make the state the caregiver. We already, legally, make it ok for a set of parents, or a single mom, to give up the child, it is not so different then to allow the father individually to do the same legally. This corrects an irreversible biological necessity that women have more rights than men in the field of pregnancy, something I’m perfectly fine with (so don’t take this as being an attack on women for some reason), but we should expand it to make it as fair as possible for men while still acknowledging that women bear the brunt of the work and therefore most of the rights
I don’t know exactly what hoops the law requires the man to jump through (ie. he needs consent from the woman, a judge, etc) but there’s nothing inherently wrong for a man to abdicate responsibility just like its fine if a woman wants to give up a kid and do the same. Both sides should have that option
You got a cite for that because ISTM that if they didn’t want the child then they had another option. They were not completely at the mercy of the father’s decision not to give up the child for adoption.
What you are saying is that if things were different then the rights would be exactly the same.
Arguing that you support a man’s right to an abortion is like saying you support a lesbian’s right to heterosexual marriage.
Abortions give women an “out” from unplanned parenthood that men do not have.
All in all, I think I’d rather be a man.
Not always. Not anywhere near always. As aruvquan pointed out, just because abortion is theoretically a right doesn’t mean that all women have access to it within the mandated gestational limits. Plenty of women who seek abortions aren’t allowed to get them, or are prevented from getting them in time by pragmatic constraints.
But women don’t have the option to unilaterally abdicate responsibility for a child unless the father consents. I don’t know why so many people seem to mistakenly believe that a woman can just give up her child for adoption and the father has no say in the matter.
Terminating a pregnancy, as already explained, is not the same thing as giving up a child for adoption.
Your first sentence is correct (or at least it would be if I had anything to say about it). You second sentence is a repetition of your earlier error.
It is conceivable (no pun intended) that within my lifetime, I could expect to see a lesbian couple start a pregnancy, i.e. each contributes genetic material which is combined in vitro then implanted into one of them for an otherwise unremarkable pregnancy. Let’s call the partners A (the pregnant one) and B (the non-pregnant but still genetically contributing one).
Somewhere along the way, A and B suffer a major falling out, or B dies or the couple goes bankrupt or some other significant change in conditions occurs to where A considers terminating the pregnancy. I support A’s right to make that choice, regardless of B’s gender. I’m not as keen to say B could just unilaterally walk away and abandon all obligations.
If it came to pass that A was male and through medical intervention became pregnant, the same dynamic applies. It’s not perfect, but likely the least-bad formula we can manage.
When the time comes (and I’m sure it will) when someone can become pregnant with their own clone and there is no other genetic parent, they’re on their own.
Women do have that option, abortion is the unilateral exercising of a woman’s right to choose without input from the father. You’re mixing abortion rights with adoption rights.
Its based on a shift in whose rights have priority. At some point, people disagree on when, but a some point between blastula and signing the birth certificate, the pregnancy turns into a human being.
Before it is a human being, it is a part of the mothers body, and we can have opinions on what happens to the mothers body, but at the end of the day it is her body and she has the final say in what happens to it.
After it becomes a human being, the baby has rights and the top priority here is what is best for the baby, who is totally helpless and absolutely dependent on other people if it is to survive and grow up to being a taxpayer. So its rights trump the fathers rights.
Basically, the mothers rights are paramount before its a person, then its own rights afterwards. Unfair as that may feel to males, there is no point where our rights outweigh the rights of the other two. We have the right to contraception, abstinence or sterilization, and if we chose not to exercise them, we’ve made our choice.
It’s absolutely ridiculous to believe that, since women can legally abort a pregnancy in some cases, that men should be able to unilaterally discharge their parental responsibilities.
I mean, we could easily fix this horrible, horrible unfair injustice by the simple expedient of making abortions illegal. Yay! Now men aren’t forced to pay child support for unwanted children any more than women are!
If there were some way for men to unilaterally have an abortion to stop a pregnancy in a way that didn’t affect the bodily integrity of a woman, then men should have that right. Except that doesn’t physically exist on planet Earth, and no matter how much we wail and stomp our feet and insist that it isn’t fair, it still can’t happen because human beings are placental mammals and placental mammals have a reproductive system where the developing embryo and fetus gestate inside the body of the mammalian female.
If we were like birds or reptiles, and women laid an egg and men fertilized it, then this could be handled entirely equitably. The egg might be incubated, or not, and either both parents would have to agree or both might have to disagree, or whatever, but it would be simple to construct entirely gender-neutral laws that treated the developing external egg without reference to the gender of either parent. We might say that the egg could be crushed if either parent wants it to be crushed, or we might say that unless both parents agree to crush the egg it cannot be crushed, or we might outlaw egg crushing, or enforce mandatory egg crushing, or whatever, and it would all magically have nothing to do with the gender of the parents.
However, while such a species is easy to imagine, human beings are not such a species. The embryo develops inside the human female’s body. Since we believe in human rights for human females, we don’t give other people the right to decide that the embryo must be destroyed, or preserved. We’ve decided that human beings should have the right to bodily autonomy, and human females are human beings, and the womb of a human female is part of her human body, and therefore we can’t force her to carry an embryo or not carry an embryo against her will.
So given that, what next? If there is no baby, then there is no question of child support. The fact that, if the baby had been aborted the male would have no child support obligation has no bearing on the fact that if the child exists the legal father of the child does have an obligation to support the child.
Should this be the case? Well, if not the father of the child, who else? The taxpayers?
In fact, it isn’t the “father” that has a child support obligation it is both parents. The child can, in fact, be adopted with consent of both parents, and both parents can terminate their obligation to the child. But it takes both. Now, it sometimes happens that a child slides out of the vagina of a human woman, and we know the woman is the mother of the child, but we don’t know who stuffed the sperm into her to create the child. Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe she knows but won’t say. We can test the baby against putative fathers, but some times it happens that the baby’s father is not known. Maybe the father would really want this baby, if only he knew about it. Maybe he wouldn’t. But it turns out that we can’t find the father.
Now it is logically possible to imagine a species that laid eggs, and we find the egg, but we don’t know who laid the egg any more that we know who fertilized the egg. Wow, gender-neutrality! Now we can treat unknown fathers and unknown mothers exactly equally. However, we are not such a species, and we almost always know the mother of a newborn baby because it just popped out of her. Yes, we do sometimes find abandoned newborns. It does happen. But it’s rare to find a baby and not know the mother. It’s a lot more common to not know the father.
In any case, we establish, to the best of our ability the parentage of this baby, keeping in mind the facts of human biology and our technological ability to determine genetic parentage.
And the fact is, our laws are completely gender-neutral with regards to child support, parental rights, custody, adoption, and so on and so on. It’s just not the case that mothers can put a baby up for adoption over the objection of the baby’s father. The only time this can happen is when we can’t identify the baby’s father, then it turns out that the only known parent can put the baby up for adoption. If mothers could be a thousand miles away when the baby hatched then it would be different, but they can’t, so it isn’t.
And so you have to pay child support for a baby, even if you don’t want to, because the baby exists. It doesn’t matter that if it were up to you the baby would never have existed. It does exist, and we will force you to support it, unless you can convince somebody else to support it, in which case we’re fine. It doesn’t matter that some people can take actions to make it so that no baby exists and so there will be no obligation to support the baby, and others can’t. It’s just a consequence of human biology. Again, it’s easy to imagine a species where an abortion would kill the mother, and so abortions are not possible. Its easy to imagine a species without internal gestation. We are not such a species.
So you have to support a child that you’re the parent of, regardless of your gender. And hey, it sometimes happens that one parent assumes full responsibility for a baby, and the other is let off the hook. Happens all the time, I know of several such cases where one parent is raising the child and the other is going about their life worry-free.
The only problem comes when the custodial parent needs help raising the child. Then we taxpayers have a choice. Pay the whole bill ourselves, or find the other parent and force them to chip in first? It’s only when there is a dispute between the parents that we have to step in and assign some legal duty to pay for the goddam brat.
If you don’t want to pay child support, only fuck women who can’t get pregnant, or only fuck women who will get an abortion, or only fuck women who will raise the child themselves without asking you for help. The problem is that someone can lie about stuff, or change their mind. Or go through a devastating illness, or die. So the woman who assured you that she could take care of this baby herself is now dead, and you’re on the hook for the baby. Good news though, since your’e now the sole parent you can put the baby up for adoption! If you can find any takers. Easy to find people who will take a healthy white baby, not so easy to find people interested in a surly swarthy teenager. But again, it has nothing to do with the fact that you’re a man that makes you have to pay child support. It’s because you are a non-custodial parent and the child needs to be supported, so fuck you, pay to take care of your goddam kid, and be glad that we can’t order specific performance of child care. You get off easy since all you have to do is cut a check.
I don’t agree that it should be unilateral given the nature of pregnancy. I’m for some mechanism that allows it to happen. That we don’t allow it at all is my problem. But I wouldn’t want it done rashly without due process and consideration
That strikes me a lot as the same thing as “If you don’t want to be pregnant, don’t have sex, once you have sex you have to live with the consequences by carrying a baby to term”. What’s so wrong about a man having sex and going through a legal process by which to abdicate their responsibility? If the process is done with fairness in mind for all parties, then what’s the problem?