Yes, having consensual sex certainly isn’t negligent. Of course, this raises the question of whether male-bodied people should be forced to financially support their unwanted children. After all, as you said, having consensual sex certainly isn’t a negligent activity.
Also, in this scenario, I was talking about having this man help financially support this woman’s husband and especially this woman’s children.
False–after all, you are certainly not the one who put the chicken breast into her mouth. Indeed, her decision to do this appears to have broken the chain of causation (if such a chain ever actually existed in this scenario, that is):
What about for the children that the now-dead woman had with her husband, though? After all, this man (who got this now-dead woman pregnant) caused a pregnancy which resulted in this woman’s death and which resulted in these children being made motherless and being put in a much worse financial situation than they previously were.
Yes; correct!
I actually wasn’t focusing on that child, though. Indeed, let’s have this specific child be given up for adoption. However, there would still be the issue of financially supporting the several children that this now-dead woman had with her husband.
You appear to have missed the point of my scenario here, though.
Where do you get the idea that only male-bodied people are forced to pay child support? This is quite wrong. We sometimes require non-custodial parents to pay child support. The custodial parent supports their children by providing food, clothing, shelter, and so on, directly rather than by subsidizing someone else.
You aren’t required to pay child support because you caused the child. You’re required to support children that you are the legal parent of. If you adopt a child, you are required to support that child, even though you didn’t cause the child. And plenty of people caused a child to be born, yet don’t pay child support, because they support the child directly. Other people cause a child to be born, yet don’t support the child in any way, because the child was adopted by a third party, and their parental rights and responsibilities were terminated.
Yes, one can also certainly argue in favor of giving female-bodied people a unilateral opt-out from paying child support on similar grounds. However, I have focused on male-bodied people here because unlike female-bodied people in many areas, male-bodied people certainly don’t have the guaranteed option of abortion in the event of an unplanned pregnancy. 
And how exactly does one stop being the legal parent of a child, though?
Yes, but that’s a voluntary assumption of parental responsibilities.
Yes, but that is still voluntary.
Yes, because they found someone else to assume their parental responsibilities for them.
As for “causing” the woman to die, and therefore being responsible for caring for her children, this is again quite wrong.
You are not responsible for caring for a person’s children, even if you murdered their mother. Or if you recklessly or negligently caused her death.
You might face criminal penalties for the death. You might face a wrongful death suit. But unless you have a lot of money, it doesn’t make financial sense for the family of the dead person to sue you for wrongful death. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.
In a case where you “caused” someone’s death, but you didn’t act maliciously or recklessly or negligently, then there’s no cause of action. You were driving your car down the road at a safe speed, obeying all traffic laws, and a freak gust of wind knocked her over into the road, and you hit her and killed her. Well, if you hadn’t been there she would have lived. Except you didn’t commit any wrongful act, and the fact that she would have lived if you hadn’t been on the road at that particular moment doesn’t make you legally or morally responsible for her death, or for her orphaned children. We as a society accept that accidents happen, we try to prevent them, but sometimes people die and no one in particular is at fault. We could ban cars, and no one would die in car crashes. But we don’t, we accept a certain level of risk, knowing that people will die randomly from car accidents.
When we look at the alternative, surely more people would die if we banned cars. No police cars, no trucks to bring food from the farms, no fire trucks, no ambulances. But even banning private cars and allowing emergency and public vehicles is no answer. I drive my car to work, which puts food on the table for my children. With no car, my standard of living would drop, as would the economic output of everyone human in America. That means less of everything, including lifesaving food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and so on.
I don’t think that I disagree with anything that you wrote here. That said, though, do you believe that there should be some unilateral way for a child’s parent to stop being considered the legal parent of this child?
So? We can’t allow men the legal right to force an abortion on a woman. Women can get abortions because only women can get pregnant. Any man who gets pregnant has the same option for abortion as a woman. So it’s not that you’re a woman that gives you the option to have an abortion, it’s the fact that you’re pregnant. And the problem that person who contributed the sperm doesn’t get the option to force you to have an abortion doesn’t mean we need to ban abortion just to make things “fair”.
If abortion were illegal you’d still have to support your goddam kids, so what difference does it make? At least with legal abortion you have the opportunity to convince the person you injected sperm into to have an abortion. So for a person who doesn’t want to be a parent it’s good that abortion is legal even though you don’t have full control over whether the abortion takes place, even though it creates an asymmetrical situation.
It is called adoption. You can also be such a shitty parent that your parental rights are ended involuntarily. But since children with two parents have to agree, you can’t get the brat adopted unless both parents agree to the adoption. However, this doesn’t mean both parents give up the child. Plenty of children are adopted by the second spouse of a parent.
And lots of genetic parents are never assigned legal paternity because they can’t be found. If you fuck a woman and she doesn’t know your real name or address, when she turns out pregnant you aren’t the legal father because she doesn’t know how to find you. Or she realizes what a shitty human being you are, and decides not to put your name on the birth certificate as the father. Or you’re the legal father, but since you don’t make any money or you’re sucha pain in the ass she decides it’s not worth trying to force you to pay. Or her husband decides to step up and be the legal father of the child. Lots of ways.
No. Why should there be? The fact that women can unilaterally opt for abortion doesn’t mean men should be able to unilaterally become deadbeat dads. One has nothing to do with the other. Once the baby is born, women can’t unilaterally become deadbeat moms. Abortion means there is no baby. No baby means no child. No child means no child support. Once the child is born the legal rights of the parents are exactly symmetrical again. And banning abortion, while it would create a symmetrical situation would increase unfairness, not decrease it.
Who exactly is advocating in favor of abortion bans here, though?
That certainly can’t be done unilaterally by a male-bodied person if his female-bodied sexual partner wants to raise their child herself, though.
As far as I know, though, a terminal of parental rights does not necessarily mean a termination of parental responsibilities.
Doesn’t that require the consent of the other parent, though?
Then create a “hack-proof” nationwide DNA database and fix this.
OK.
Can’t she change her mind in regards to this afterwards, though?
None of these ways are unilateral on the male-bodied person’s part, though.
Can’t women unilaterally exploit safe haven laws to give their children up for adoption, though?
Oh, please. Suppose the woman, in a romantic mood, asks her date to feed her a piece of the chicken on his plate, and she chokes on a bone. The guy literally places the piece of chicken into her mouth, not knowing there was a bone hidden in the meat somewhere.
Hey, if he’s hiding a bone in the meat, then he’s definitely responsible for her pregnancy!
No. Putting your baby in a basket at the fire station door doesn’t mean your parental rights are terminated, let alone unilaterally. The safe haven laws just mean that we won’t charge you with a crime for dumping your baby at the fire station, like we would if you dumped your baby in a McDonalds restroom. You are still the parent of the child, the other parent (if known) is still the parent of the child. All it means is the baby gets put into foster care, and you don’t go to prison.
If it turns out that you want to put the baby up for adoption, then that could happen. The other parent still needs to consent, though. If it turns out that you want your baby back after you’ve got yourself back together, then that could happen, provided that the child welfare people think you’re a stable parent. Or the kid could stay in foster care limbo for a long time. And the parents could be on the hook for child support for the child, if they have jobs. The fact that the baby is in foster care doesn’t mean you’re free of your responsibilities. It turns out that most parents with kids in foster care are incapable of contributing to the care of the kids, but some are.
Adoption can’t happen without the consent of both parents. A father can’t put the baby up for adoption without the consent of the mother, the mother can’t put the baby up for adoption without the consent of the father. It just so happens that humans are placental mammals, where the developing fetus gestates inside the body of the human female, and so when the baby is born the mother is right there, and the father could be on the other side of the planet, or dead. So it happens a lot more frequently that we know the mother of the newborn baby but not the father than the reverse. It’s not a conspiracy of laws that makes this happen, but the facts of mammalian reproduction. If we laid eggs like sea turtles it would be different, but we don’t, so it isn’t.
There are no unilateral legal methods for a mother to end her parental duties that are not also available to fathers, and vice versa. The only unilateral action is that pregnant people can decided to have legal abortions in some cases, but can’t be forced to have abortions. No baby, no parental duties. But there are no legal differences between the options of men and women that aren’t simply a consequence of how mammalian reproduction takes place. It could happen that there is a father with a newborn baby but no one knows who the mother is, and in that case the father would be the sole legal parent and able to make unilateral decisions about the child. Except where did the baby come from, if not out of a human vagina? And so by the facts of human reproduction we know who the mother is in almost all cases.
First, the pro-choice argument is that risk to the life of the mother is grounds enough for abortion, and once you buy that only the mother should decide what level of risk is acceptable. In your case if the biological father somehow forcibly prevents the mother from getting an abortion despite a clear risk, then we’d have something interesting to discuss. But a normal pregnancy does not give a foreseeable risk of death. When I walk outside there is a very small probability that I’ll get hit by a meteorite, but I don’t think that death from meteorite is reasonably foreseeable.
It was somewhat different 200 year ago when there was far more risk of death in childbirth than today.
Can’t a woman who utilizes a safe haven law avoid giving her name to the authorities, though? After all, “no name, no shame, no blame,” no?
Also, what if a woman will lie and claim that she doesn’t know who the father of her baby is?
So can a man who utilizes a safe haven law. After the birth of a baby, there is no legal parental right or responsibility that is not equally applicable to mothers and fathers.
As has been pointed out to you over and over, the reason that women can choose to terminate their pregnancies and men can’t is that (so far) only women can get pregnant. If a man somehow gets pregnant, he has just as much right to choose an abortion as a pregnant woman would have.
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Also, what if a woman will lie and claim that she doesn’t know who the father of her baby is?
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What if a man will lie and claim that he doesn’t know who the mother of his baby is? Say, he banged a woman whose name he never learned and she secretly left the baby on his doorstep nine months later? What’s your point here?
Yes, if you abandon your baby in a McDonald’s bathroom and don’t leave a note or any identifying information, and walk off into the night, then yay, you’ve successfully abandoned your baby. Same thing at a “safe haven”.
The only difference between abandoning your baby at McDonald’s and abandoning your baby at a safe haven site is that we’ve agreed not to send you to prison if you abandon your baby at a safe haven site, because we’d rather you abandon your baby there than in a dumpster.
So you don’t go to jail. But you’re still the parent of the baby. But yes, if you don’t leave a note and no one knows the mother or father of the baby then Yahtzee, you win. But you don’t have to do this, you can just say you want the baby to be adopted. You don’t have to leave it on the doorstep and ring the bell and run away to get out of taking care of the baby.
You’ve got a mistaken notion that a “safe haven” is a place women can dump babies and walk away, which is unfair since a man couldn’t dump a baby there. But that’s wrong. A father could dump a baby there exactly the same as a mother. But it turns out that most of the time a parent is abandoning a baby the father is already long gone. The mother is acting unilaterally only because the father isn’t even in the picture. And of course you still seem to believe that abandoning a baby at a safe haven means you don’t have any further legal responsibilities to the baby. Which is wrong. It just means we won’t bother to put you in jail. If the baby goes to foster care, then guess what, the abandoning parent is now a non-custodial parent and can be ordered to pay child support for their children in foster care. Yes, not just fathers but mothers too.
Yes, if a woman lies and says she doesn’t know the father of the baby, then it turns out that no father will be listed on the birth certificate. So? I thought you wanted to be able to skip out of parental responsibilities. The only reason this situation seems sooooo unfair and asymmetrical to you is that the baby comes out of the mommy’s tummy. So when the baby is born, the mother is right there. It’s very hard for a father to claim he doesn’t know the mother of the baby, because the mother was right there when the baby was born. Your ability to lie about the maternity of your children is exactly the same as the ability of a mother to lie about the paternity of her children.
Yes, we could rectify this injustice by creating a giant DNA database, and every time a baby is born we take a sample and find out the genetic mother and genetic father of the baby. Except why? What’s the point of that? To positively ID the father, since we already have a positive ID of the mother? Who cares? In actual fact most babies are not born with disputed paternity, and if paternity is not disputed then there is no need for the rest of us to barge in and demand to know the facts.
The facts are that mothers don’t abandon their children as often as fathers do. The fact is that mothers are custodial parents more often than fathers. This is why you hear about deadbeat dads but not so much about deadbeat moms. But legally there is no distinction. If dads assumed custody of their children more often than moms, if dads stopped abandoning their children more often than moms, then the situation would be even. But they don’t, so it isn’t. It’s like complaining that more men are in prison that women, and how unfair this is. It turns out that men commit more crimes than women, so it’s completely fair. We don’t require a woman to go to prison every time a man commits a crime just to make the genders even. We don’t require a woman to abandon her kids every time a man does just to make the genders even.
You don’t live in the United States, do you?
If you’re asking legal questions, the answers are all “no.” There is no cause of action against a father for complications resulting from pregnancy. The public policy implications are reason enough, aside from issues such as assumption of risk.
Most, if not all states have a legal presumption that the husband is the father of the children of his wife. If he is the legal father of the child, then he can’t pursue child support from a different man. On the other hand, if he lived in a state that allowed him to prove he wasn’t the father - and he did so - then presumably custody would go to the father, not the husband.