Sorry. Unless you’re trolling, you are a monster.
Ah, right, thanks for advice. I’ll disregard from now on. No point debating with sociopaths! Thanks for the tip - I’ve been here quite a while, but not come across her before somehow.
I agree that conceptually (but not practicaly in any sense of the word) that suggesting a man gets sterilized is no different than suggesting a woman gets sterilized. That does ignore the BIG difference between the two procedures, but OK, let’s ignore that.
It’s still irrelevant. You’re just talking about timing. No way you spin it is an abortion a nicer option than a vasectomy (or, indeed, female sterilization is far more than a vasectomy).
What’s you’re objection to the “I don’t want to have kids” -> I’ll have a vasectomy option? It’s like the magic pill that lets the man have his cake and eat it. And it’s an almost trivial procedure. He can screw anyone he wants and have no risk of pregnancy.
It seems to me that the only option acceptable to some people is that men can do whatever they want, accept no consequnces, and women should be burdened with invasive abortions or financial ruin. They’re not even willing to go so far as to have a trivial operation which negates the problem entirely - even that is too much!
I kinda feel like I’m back in the 1500s. Woman as chattel, and all that.
So what? Men don’t have children. Women do. Men shouldn’t run away. Women pretty much can’t. This situation is fundamentally imbalanced and adopting a moral highground about what men should do in some idyllic fantasy world doesn’t mean anything.
I agree that men should care for their children. I do not believe we should organize society around this fantasy.
The overwhelming burden falls on women. This is biology. If we fix this, the first step shouldn’t be to try and “balance” the situation by going after men. Laws aren’t made for responsible men and women. I would like to assume that if we’re discussing laws and social organization, we’re addressing actual problems. The actual problems have to do with irresponsible men and women and making overly simplistic pronouncements about vasectomies and crazy women do absolutely nothing to address them.
Funny, because it is the laws which create it.
It is all of the issue because we don’t have forced labor. A woman cannot force a man to earn enough money to care for the child they created. Now what?
It might have lead to a scenario where instead of assigning responsibility pointlessly we actually tried to develop a situation where we support women. Women already get the shaft in lifetime earnings by having a child, nevermind the cost of raising the child (which is all child support sorta kinda maybe covers—if she can get it). But our society is more interested in assigning blame and then saying, “Well, that’s that. Job well done.” And if I dare suggest that going after men is not a solution to anything, I’m a misogynist.
Chances are good that people who love the moral high ground of assigning responsibility to men will never get off their soapbox. I’ve had this argument most of my life. Blame is much more emotionally satisfying than coming up with a complicated solution to real problems.
Okay, erislover, what is your complicated solution then? Because I have no idea what you are advocating for.
If abortion was illegal… then I’d still support the “contract idea”. A potential mother or father should be able to, within the first 2 months of pregnancy, surrender their parental obligations to the state. If both biological parents surrender, then the child gets adopted. If only one parent surrenders, then the other parent gets to keep their parental obligations.
If the parents are financially unable to support the child, then the state would help them. If the parents are unsuitable and unfit to be parents, then the state would take the children away and give them to someone who could do a better job. If there are no volunteers, the state would pay to have those children taken care of.
I’ve made it very clear that a forced adoption would only occur if the parent is unfit to be a parent. If the parent is merely financially unfit to be a parent, then the state should help them financially.
It’s not really the child’s “right” though is it? I mean, if the mother has control as to whether this right is applied, then it’s not really a “right” in the way we typically define rights… no? A mother can choose to not seek child support - but then shouldn’t this be illegal if a child has a right to their father’s paychecks? If it was a right, wouldn’t anonymous sperm donation be illegal too… since that denies the resulting children their rights as well?
This is absolute nonsense. Did you know that sometimes men actually want to be fathers, voluntarily? You realize that if men signed such “minimal responsibility” contracts, not many women would agree to have their children? What woman looking for a family would have a man’s child, if the man clearly stated that they didn’t want any responsibilities in advance? You mention men changing their minds. Well… men shouldn’t be allowed to change their minds after committing/agreeing to the responsibility. I don’t think there’s been a single person in this thread that has suggested that a man has a right to abandon a child that he has previously agreed to have.
The reason men have sex is to leave a trail of abandoned babies? Woah… put down the ev-psych books and get back to reality for a bit.
They should. Nobody in this thread suggested that the ability for parents to surrender their parental obligations should only apply to men. That would be silly.
This wouldn’t make for a great family environment, but this would be acceptable. Why? Because no child (and the responsibility associated with that child) was brought into the world against either the mother’s or father’s will. The man made a choice to have babies with you, and he made a choice to accept responsibility for them.
If he wants a child, has sex with you for the purpose of procreation, and you give him a child, and he takes solo responsibility for that child, and does a good job raising the child… I fail to see what the problem is in this scenario.
That’s the *point. *You just don’t get it. “The State” isn’t some magical money tree. It’s me.
You are saying: “If I don’t want to support my child, I should be able to force Candyman74 to support my child instead.”
How is it you can’t see that? Or why it’s wrong? I honestly can’t even compehend your thought patterns. It’s OK for you not to support your own child, but it’s OK for you to make someone else do so?
Will you support mine?
Gah. This is like bizarro world. How can people like this exist?
Do you realize this is really pretty close to the system we already have? The only differences are that if the custodial parent is financially unable to support themselves and the child, there is an effort to find the other biological parent and have them contribute before the state steps in to help, and that you cannot surrender your parental obligations unless you have someone willing to take them from you. I know the second part is your big point here, but I cannot understand how to make it more “fair”.
You want to allow men time to decide they don’t want to be a parent after conception; a “dad’s abortion” if you will. But how on earth would that work? Most pregnancies are aborted very early on. That is because the longer the pregnancy goes on, the more dangerous, expensive, painful and illegal the procedure becomes. And what about if there is more than one potential father?
I just cannot see an equitable way to legislate something like this. All you would be doing is increasing the burdens on the woman, who is already bearing more than half. How is this fair?! Men have birth control options, they should use them. If they do not, and do not take any care about who they may impregnate, I am very uncomfortable with shielding them from the results of that irresponsibility by placing further burdens on women and children. THAT, to me, is unfair.
This is the system we have. Although it could be/should be better funded.
No. I have the right to vote, but I don’t have to. I have the right to abortion, but I may also carry a pregnancy to term. Having a right does not mean you have to take advantage of that right.
If a custodial parent chooses to forgo child support, but is unable to care for the child without that support, then there are many different ways to deal with that so the child is not shortchanged or neglected.
I’ll ask of you what I asked of erislover. What, exactly, are you advocating for here? What is your “solution”? I see a lot of hemming and hawing about fairness, but no concrete solutions, simple or otherwise.
As I said earlier, I don’t have a solution handy. The status quo is fine until we come up with a better one, but we desperately need a better one. The current system is indefensible and doesn’t work.
I can’t seem to find it, but I did an analysis once on baby insurance that showed what the cost of sex was to a woman under the assumption that they could not seek redress against men. (In other words, what she’d ostensibly have to “charge” men for assuming the risk in question. As I recall everyone flew off the handle accusing me of turning all women into prostitutes.) Insurance rates for accidental pregnancies would be fairly low overall, if we could somehow assure that accidental pregnancies could be distinguished from intentional pregnancies. This is the problem I don’t know how to solve, so I don’t think insurance is workable.
A next approximation would be to pay women for having children regardless—intentional or accidental pregnancies. (In this case I am using “women” in a general sense as providers; in principle it could be men if the man can take the child from the woman by her agreement. But she would be considered the default caregiver for what I hope are not particularly offensive reasons.) This would be just a small salary given to women for having kids. Maybe we’d pay for 2, and the rest are your burden, I don’t know. But anyway, pay women for having children. This money would come from a man-tax. All men have to pay it, but not women. Given a lifetime of work, we’d expect working males to cover at least half the expected cost of raising children. (Could be more than half because, again, women take a lifetime earning hit due to childbearing, which they should be compensated for.) So if we say, today, it costs $12,000 to raise a child, then—to pick a number—men should cover $7000 of this. But $7000 in a lifetime of taxes amounts to just about nothing. Even supposing I never made more than $8/hour for my whole working life from 18 to 65, that would be a 1% tax rate increase, or about $3.20 a week. I happen to assume we don’t have enough kids yet, but even at replacement rates assuming two children per “couple” then a man should cover something like $6 a week for his whole life.
Please don’t kill me over the proposal. I am saying for the third time that I don’t have a “real” solution to this. But I’d consider working on something like this a legitimate effort to accomplish something without trying to legislate fairness in an inherently unfair situation.
ETA: yes I know children are vastly more expensive than $12,000.
erislover, I think your proposals are very interesting, and would merit their own thread. For what it’s worth, I do not think you are a misogynist. I’m not sure I agree with everything you are saying, but I think you have a different perspective on a lot of this than I do. I don’t see the system as completely broken; I think child support works for most people. There are some problems that need to be fixed, though.
I do think men complaining about unfairness because they have to pay a rather small sum for the care of the lives they created to be completely full of shit, and generally contemptible.
You haven’t made anything “clear” at all.
If a women gets pregnant unintentionally she has all the choices and if she decides to keep it then the state can come back on the man for child support. He cannot give up his share of the child for adoption.
Of course not. Plenty of men have sex while actively avoiding having babies.
But men who have the kind of sex that makes babies? They are making babies. That’s what unprotected sex is. It is, whether you think it should be or not, making a baby.
Men have it 100% in their control not to impregnante women. If you are walking around impregnating women, it’s because you are choosing to impregnante women. It’s not an accident. An accident is something you can’t prevent, and you can prevent getting a woman who wil carry her baby to term knocked up.
Look, I have never been pregnant. How in the world is that humanly possible? I use birth control. Because I don’t want to get pregnant. If I didn’t use birth control, I will eventually get pregnant. Choosing not to use birth control is choosing to get pregnant. A man choosing not to use reliable birth control is choosing to impregnate someone.
So, yes, men who are making babies must be into the idea of “leaving a trail of babies.” If they really didn’t want babies, they would take the many simple options for not leaving a trail of babies, as opposed to the one that
Think about it- if you got a girl’s pants off and saw that her vulva was covered in huge weeping herpes sores, what would you do? I’m betting you would not have sex with her- or at least use very good protection- because you don’t want herpes. When sex has a consequence that you don’t want, you find a way to avoid that consequence.
Well, every woman with an unknown or untrusted birth control status is a weeping herpes sore of potential babies.
If a woman gets pregnant, the man who impregnated her has the option of taking full custody and getting support from the mother, having equal custody and no one pays, giving her custody and paying support, or, if the mother agrees, putting the child up for adoption.
If a woman gets pregnant she* also* has the option of taking full custody and getting support from the father, having equal custody and no one pays, giving custody to the father and paying support, or, if the father agrees, putting the child up for adoption.
The ONLY difference is during the pregnancy. The woman has sole discretion to abort (although obviously the man can talk with her and work to influence the decision) because she is the one who is carrying the pregnancy. She always carries the full physical risk, and with that comes a few rights, but those rights are tempered by the risks she takes by carrying the fetus. It’s isn’t fair, because biology isn’t fair, but it is pretty damn close.
you left out that a man cannot give the child up for adoption if he doesn’t want it. If a woman keeps it the state almost always gives her custody and then forces the man to pay.
Oh my god.
BOTH PARENTS HAVE THE EXACT SAME RIGHTS IN REGARDS TO ADOPTION; THEY HAVE TO AGREE OR NEITHER CAN GIVE THE CHILD UP!
What is so freaking hard about this?! And, no, the state doesn’t “give” her custody and “force” the man to pay; very few fathers are interested in taking custody (BECAUSE IT’S HARDER) and would rather pay support. There is some discrimination in family court, true, but it is much improved these days. Women do NOT just get custody, if the father wants it too.
The issue is that men do not want custody and they also don’t want to pay, and to that the state says “Tough titty.” Which is as it should be.
ETA: and men DO have the right to give up the child if they can find a willing father, anyway. This happens ALL THE TIME, where a mom remarries and the new stepdad adopts her kids. What you can’t do is just bail and leave the child with one parent because you “don’t feel like being a dad”.
I think the problem you are not seeing is that no one wants to pay additional money for your kids. For every thread like this that pops up there is another where someone is bitching that some of their tax money pays for public school. They don’t feel like they should have to pay because they don’t have kids and explaining that they benefit from an educated populace and that they received a free education on the government dime falls on deaf ears. If it isn’t anger at paying taxes to schools it is paying taxes for food stamps or welfare (which are exactly the programs that go to help kids who had one parent or the other refuse to pay child support) because they want people to be responsible for themselves. Now there are a bunch of threads about how they shouldn’t have to pay for birth control and women should be required to jump through extra hoops to get an abortion, etc.
A very large percentage of our population is already ticked off that they are being asked to kick in to support society in any way and now you want them to pay additional money to support a kid you helped create because it isn’t fair to you that a rogue sperm fooled an egg into accepting a candygram. They aren’t going to like that. Hell, I am all for social safety nets and additional government responsibilities and I still don’t like that plan. I am happy to pitch in and do my part to make sure that our society is robust and healthy but personal responsibility is important too. That is why I had my tubes tied after my daughter was born. I have many friends who don’t ever want to have kids and they have all either had vasectomies, gotten IUDs, or taken other serious steps towards pregnancy prevention that go far beyond remembering to pick up a box of condoms. I would hope that other people would be willing to do the same instead of just complaining about how women get the choice of an abortion so it isn’t fair.
Well there’s good arguments to suggest that - from a logical and philosophical perspective - newborns aren’t even “persons”. And it’s true, they contribute next to nothing… especially to parents that don’t want them. And if you are willing to cross the taboo of human valuation, then babies are amongst the lowest and least-valuable form of human life, since they are effectively useless and produce nothing of value.
Not that this viewpoint is practical in any sense… but that is mainly the result of the fact that it goes against natural human instinct and emotion.
While it’s difficult to argue these points with someone… it’s a bit unfair to call them “a monster” or a “sociopath”.
I would find it hard to believe that anyone who actually dealt with a newborn baby for a signifcant time would have any doubt that it was a “person”. Certain personality traits of my son were in evidence right out of the womb, and I’ve heard the same from lots of other parents.
I’m sorry, but this is just not true. If the woman never tells the man that she’s pregnant then how is he to know? Nor are there rules in every state that require the woman to say who the father is.
Twice in my life I’ve had women break up with me by not returning calls/emails. I would have no idea if there was an accident, and I was careful with them but accidents do happen. I could have a 20 year old child and not know about it. Both times they could have given up a child for adoption and I wouldn’t know one thing about it, how could I if they broke off and refused any communication.
Sorry, but this just isn’t true either, and quite insulting as well. I’d take custody of my girls if I could, and I’m already starting to do so, but it’s an uphill battle and very costly. When my ex left she just took the children, when we went for our divorce she was given physical custody, though we have joint. And no I’d rather not just ‘pay support’, I want to be part of their lives and they want me in theirs as well.
Again this is highly insulting, I know men who would take custody of their children, yet they have to fight hard for it. I also don’t know any dead beat dads. I started to pay my child support the day it was ordered, it comes directly out of my pay, not because the state said to but because I wanted it that way. But if I lose my job and I’m late on one payment, it’s a fine. If I can’t pay I have to find a way or go to jail.
I’m tired of being painted with just a large brush by people. I wanted my children, knowingly. But the system is bias towards women. When I move I have to go to court, in person, and say where I’m moving to. If I change jobs, I have to go to court, again in person, and say where my new job is at. Women do not need to do so. If I am lucky enough to get half custody even though my ex makes a ton more then me, she will not have to pay child support, though I’ve already been told by my lawyer that I will have to say that I want the children because I want them, not because I don’t want to pay support.
This whole system is screwed up, though I have no way of fixing it.