The point is, the woman has an option to get out of the financial or social requirements of raising a child that the man does not have. Once he’s ejaculated, he has to deal with the consequences for 18 years, essentially. Sharing those costs are never considered, but contraception costs are mandated.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that people who don’t wish to have children use birth control in a reliable fashion. Why charge the father for this accident? Why not have a lottery of all people who have sex but don’t want children, and make some random person pay? Why not have everyone pay a little bit with a one-time (per child) head-tax? All that’s been offered in defense of our current situation so far is that having sex is some kind of contract on a male. But plenty of males have sex, and therefore it is assumed they would pay for a child. So pick one—why the father?
As far as I’m concerned, the pool in question is the portion of people having sex. It’s unfortunate that, biologically, having sex is the same activity as conceiving a child. It’s unfortunate that, biologically, having a child is totally borne by the female of the species. But this is life. We can work with this, if we recognize where the burdens actually lie.
Here’s a burden: what happens when the dad cannot pay? The answer is: tough shit, mom. I would rather we recognize this burden at the outset and find a realistic way to relieve it than institute some kind of child support system which satisfies people’s sense of revenge for fathers that skip out on their responsibility but doesn’t actually even aim at the target in question, which is helping children (and mothers).
Vasectomy. A man who doesn’t want children can have a vasectomy. Simples.
It’s not as unpleasant as having an abortion.
That’s a judgement call that’s impossible to accurately discern, since as far as I know, nobody has had both.
Again, we’re willing to make situational accomodations for women when it comes to abortion, but men are required to bear the burden unless they take preventative measures.
Because the right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to paycheck autonomy. Why is that so hard to comprehend?
Nonsense. It’s singularly less invasive or - in many cases - emotionally arduous. I can’t view any claim otherwise as anything but ridiculous. You know what each involves, right?
What, and women aren’t? You don’t consider pregnancy or an abortion to be a burden? Men are lucky. They can make all this burdonsome potential go away with a quick snip. Women can’t.
No, this is where your argument disconnects from reality.
*Both *parents are required bear the burden and the custodial parent bears a *greater *burden financially as well as in time invested and lost earning potential. The mother bears *all *the physical risks whether she aborts or carries to term.
Because a man should have as much a right as a woman to choose when and with whom he will have a child with. We do not require women to carry to term the fetus of every man who ejaculates into their vaginas, do we? A man should not be compelled to be the financial partner of every woman whose vagina he enters.
That’s fine, but it’s not how the debate was being framed. It was being framed as if the man was not taking adequate precautions and was completely uninterested in the fate of his child.
How about: if the man expresses his wish for the woman to abort and she cites her bodily autonomy in order to refuse, then she loses the right to his paychecks. Her bodily autonomy is not put at stake.
Paycheck automony and bodily autonomy are interchangeable. How do you think that paycheck is earned? By using his body and mind to go to work and perform a job for which someone pays him a wage.
What on earth are you talking about? “Sharing those costs are never considered;” do you mean the cost of raising a child isn’t shared? Because, uh… it is. It’s already been shown in this thread that the (average/normal) cost of child support doesn’t actually cover half of the cost of raising a kid. It’s women who carry the bulk of this burden the majority of the time, not men, but even still, it is a shared cost.
And “contraception costs are mandated”? Are you talking about birth control being covered by insurance? You know that will cover vasectomies too, right?
Loo, here is the deal. If you, as a man, don’t want to worry about having kids you don’t want, bank your sperm and get a vasectomy. Since your sperm is banked, and vasectomies are pretty easy to reverse, you haven’t even sacrificed future fertility, something women are unable to do (oh noez! biological unfairness rears its ugly head again!!). Then, when you have sex with random women, wear a condom. This will protect you from STDs, and also bring your chances of unwanted fertilization down to “woman falls into a coma and gives birth against her will” territory.
But wait! You want more. Ok, well, you can do more! You can only have sex with women you’ve run a background check on, or women that have proven they have also been sterilized, or women who can prove they are currently on birth control*, or all of these. You can refuse to have penis-in-vagina sex with women. You can have long talks with the woman you sleep with and discuss what they would do in the event of an unplanned pregnancy, and only choose to sleep with women who you feel certain would abort. You can buy a supply of morning after pills and tell the women you sleep with that they must swallow one in your presence after sex. You can get to know the women you sleep with VERY well, and track their cycles for several months before sleeping with them, and only have sex during their unfertile periods. You can join a childfree message board, and only date women you meet on there. If you do any of these, or a combination, or all of them in addition to the aforementioned vasectomy and condom, you no longer need to worry about being on the hook for child support to a kid you didn’t want.
You’re welcome.
*I actually knew a guy who was concerned with this, and he only dated women on the birth control patch. He would check daily, and before sex, to ensure they were wearing the patch, and yes, he still got laid. So, it is possible.
What part of “vasectomy” do you not understand?
She never has a right to his paychecks. His child does.
Even if a man does absolutely nothing to prevent pregnancy, he STILL won’t be the financial partner of every woman whose vagina he enters. And if he takes reasonable precautions, he will NEVER be the (unwilling) financial partner of any woman who’s vagina he enters.
HOWEVER, people who act irresponsibly find there are consequences to those actions. The law doesn’t protect anyone from that, especially not at the expense of a child. The vast majority of the populace finds this morally correct and fair, and the law reflects that.
Speaking as a random skank, I chose to have my unanticipated baby against the wishes of her reluctant father because I found (to my surprise) that I was unable to live with the emotional fallout from having an abortion.
He was devastated at my decision to keep the child, but I would have been devastated to abort. In the end I made my decision based on the fact that I was no less important than him. I did not owe him anything, especially not taking the greatest emotional blow of my life to spare his feelings. One of us had to end up devastated, and who was he to me that I should put myself through that in order to protect him?
ZPG would deny my child existence because her father objects to her being born and her very life has put him through some misery, but that same child brought so much joy and love to me, to her grandparents, aunts, uncles and stepfather, and to her little half-brother. Apparently that counts for nothing because one man resents helping support her financially, and in other threads she has advocated the position that he should have been allowed to kill the skank or the baby - that’s me or my daughter - because paying child support would so inconvenience him. I disagree.
Unless they’re aborted of course.
Also, by “sharing the costs”, I meant sharing the costs of child rearing socially. If the woman does not spend hours of her time discussing birth control and contraceptives and the man’s approach to child raising, decides not to abort her foetus and cannot afford to raise the child without assistance after the father decides not to be involved, I certainly don’t blame her for it. However, I think it’d be better if the father’s contributions were recommended, yet voluntary and the state provided the rest of the assistance for child rearing.
Thank you. Succinct. All that needs to be said.
Far too many people in this thread view a newborn baby as a tool in some kind of battle of “fairness” between those who created it. It’s not. It’s a baby, and if you made it you owe it a life.
Whining about 18 years of reduced paychecks. Please. What about the poor innocent child who didn’t ask you to make it and thrust it into this world? Should it have 18 years of poverty because it doesn’t get your paychecks? You made it after all. Not the other way round.
You make it, you owe it. It didn’t ask you to make it, and it doesn’t give a fuck about your parental rights. It’s a baby. That you made.
Don’t want a baby? Have a vasectomy. Too much effort? Don’t have sex. Don’t blame the laws of physics for the consequences. They weren’t designed just to piss you off. Nobody chose this body design; and you don’t get to blame anyone for it. You just live with it. That’s how your body works.
This is a fantastic idea. Rather than making the biological father the legal father, we instead hold a lottery, and all sexually active males are entered. To make it fair, we should weight this by level of risky behavior–so the guy who has one session of unprotected sex gets entered once, the guy who has 100 gets entered 100 times. Then we put all these numbers in a big jar, and pull out the winning/losing lottery ticket.
This makes perfect sense, but we can simplify the situation. Rather than trying to keep track of risky sex by proxy, which sounds like a lot of work, we could, instead of using numbered ping-pong balls, use spermatazoons instead. Each spermatazoon can, after all, be traced back to a particular male. And, rather than pulling sperm out of a big jar, we use vaginas instead of jars. So, if you spooge into a random vagina, your odds of being named the parent are exactly equal to your odds of actually being the parent. It makes your proposal much simpler.
It would be like, we’re trying to cut back on drunk driving, and it’s unfair that we only arrest the drunk drivers that cause accidents, or get pulled over randomly. Wouldn’t it be more fair to have a lottery? Or, we could just use the actual accidents as a proxy for the lottery, and arrest those who actually turn out to have caused accidents.
You cannot abort a child. You can only abort a fetus.
Firstly, most women spend a large amount of time dealing with birth control and choosing their partners. This is because, Men’s “Rights” Activists whining to the contrary, women still bear vast majority of the burden of an unwanted child.
And I cannot agree that child support should be purely voluntary; I find that too open to abuse. But I do think that the state could help a lot more with child rearing costs. And I do think that if someone is truly unable to pay the support the child needs, that there should be another avenue, rather than jail.
There are reforms that should be made to the system. I think most people would get behind reforms like that. Unfortunately, all this talk of sperm stealing psycho bitches and taking babies away because dad doesn’t want to support his kids, and all this other nonsense turns people off to the entire cause, which is a shame. These obviously ludicrous complaints about issues that rarely (if ever) occur make the whole movement look insane.
That is really stupid. I’m sorry, it is stupid. If I said, “Hey, repairing a car is expensive, we should have this mechanism for people to share the costs of accidents,” and you said, “Don’t want to pay for an accident? Don’t drive a car!” it would also be very stupid.
It’s an overly-simplistic opinion. Having sex is a normal part of human interaction. We can divorce this, imperfectly, from reproduction. Accidents happen.
It is more believable that they were, rather than designed to promote welfare, because they are more effective at one than the other.
I don’t. You do: the father. Don’t want to be a dad, don’t have sex… right?
No, it’s how the female body works. The male body doesn’t create a financial obligation. That’s the social contract you wish to be imposed. I happen to agree that men should support their own children but if there is a more effective mechanism, I want to consider it.
By “the state”, you mean me. I’m not too selfish to pay to keep a baby from starving, but I am too selfish to pay if I can make the baby’s father pay instead.
Of course, if the custodial parent decides that the don’t want the absent parent’s involvement, they’re free to let them wander off into the sunset. Child support actually isn’t mandatory, if the custodial parent doesn’t try to get child support for the child, then you’re home free. The only caveat is, we taxpayer don’t allow the custodial parent to make a binding decision today that they’ll never seek child support in the future. We’ve decided that isn’t in the best interest of the child, since child support supports the child.
So if you only fuck stable women who want to be single mothers with no involvement from the father, then you’re golden. Nobody cares, as long as we taxpayers don’t have to get involved.