A mother or father would be able to surrender their obligations up to 6-8 weeks after conception. I think that’s a reasonable amount of time.
What burdens would be increased upon the woman, exactly?
Men should use birth control options if they want to avoid a birth. It’s reasonable to require a man to use preventative birth control if he wishes to prevent fatherhood. If it is believed that this should be a prerequisite to exercising surrender, then I can go along with that.
I believe a child has a right to support, in general. I just don’t believe the child has a right to support from either/both of it’s biological parents, specifically. The biological parents, or the mother alone, have full determination over whether this right exists for the child, and can effectively null-and-void this right completely. Therefore it’s not really a right, since someone else (a parent) can effectively eliminate it. The right that parents cannot eliminate are the rights to support, in general. But I think that distinction is important, especially when attempting to make the specific claim that “A child has a right to financial support from it’s biological father”.
The short version: Biological parents should have the right to surrender their parental obligations within 6-8 weeks of conception.
And if I don’t know a man’s who I slept with’s name, there is no way for me to collect child support. Both parties are capable of skipping town, hiding out, or refusing contact. If a guy gives me a fake name and no real contact information, there is nothing I can do. What men can do is what women have had to do for all of human history- choose trustworthy partners, and be very careful about how and when you have potentially procreative sex. It’s all either one of us gots.
Again, the situation of “I had no idea i had a kid and then she gave it up for adoption WAH” happens to at best a handful of guys a decade. THe problem of men choosing not to support their children happens to millions of kids every day.
Ed, you are not a deadbeat dad. And I don’t think you will find anyone here who doesn’t believe that fathers should have equal custody rights.
But stop making stuff up, because it hurts the reasonable among you. It is absolutely not true that a woman in your situation would not need to inform the courts as to where she is. Anyone who has a child support order would have to do that, and if you had full custody (which maybe you should have) she would be in your shoes.
Many women do not know they are pregnant during that 6-8 week period. Skipping a period is not unusual and wouldn’t automatically cause a woman to check.
It really would help if you knew more about the real life issues.
No, they don’t. Otherwise the State would not be able to force child support. If a woman chooses to keep the child a man can be compelled to pay for it.
I don’t think it would be reasonable to have a parent surrender their parental obligations after 3+ months into a pregnancy, because a woman might not be able to get an abortion at that point.
Ideally, parental obligations should be decided between a couple before conception, and formed into a legally binding contract. But I’m willing to have that extended to cover the first trimester of pregnancy as well.
Also: A woman of reproductive age who has skipped one (or two!) menstrual periods while being sexually active should probably get a pregnancy test.
This is nothing like your original stance, you’ve dropped the whole ‘but it’s such a hassle to think of this when you’re drunk’ part of your argument. You’ve dropped the post-birth walkout as well. Thanks for having the maturity to change your mind.
There are many practical reasons why the custodial parent cannot sign away the rights of the child to support from its non-custodial parent. They’ve been laid out in this thread many times already.
Yes, it would be lovely if every woman checked for pregnancy every time she had sex. It would be nice if there were no false positives, false negatives, if all women had regular periods all the time, if all women stopped having periods when they were pregnant, if people didn’t lie about fertility and so on and so on. It’s a bit like your statement that only women know their risk of fertility, so completely wrong for so many reasons that I can only suggest you educate yourself before making further comment. Please.
But it wouldn’t change the fact that any resulting child is still entitled to minimal support. Current laws and societal expectations lay this contribution on the father.
Well… I started this thread with a question, not an answer. While I haven’t received answers to all the questions that I’ve had, I have certainly learned a lot in the process. I’ve only really come to form my own opinions recently.
But I honestly don’t recall making any sort of argument for irresponsible drunken sex at any time Nor do I recall ever explicitly supporting a “post-birth walkout”: I think parents should be able to surrender their children for adoption (which obviously takes place post-birth) – but I do believe that the decision itself should be made pre-birth.
If the custodial parent is a woman, then she can:
Keep the father’s name off birth certificate.
Anonymously abandon the child.
Receive artificial insemination from an anonymous sperm donor.
These 3 decisions by the mother effectively eliminate the rights of the child to support from his biological father. My argument is simply that if a mother, based on her choice, can do this… then it is not really a “right”.
I didn’t say that my time-frames were ideal and without issues. If necessary, I’d be totally okay with extending the window of opportunity to accept/reject your parental obligations all the way to before childbirth, if necessary. This acceptance or rejection should obviously be done before conception if possible (though this is not always practical)… but I see no real issues with this extension.
Of course, once committed to a child there’d be no going back. Therefore it would be in the best interests of both parents to have regular and frequent pregnancy tests so that in the case of a positive result, they’d still have plenty of time to consider all the options.
I still stand by my opinion that: Only a woman can make an informed assessment of the risk of pregnancy at all times.
Who is she? Which qualifications does she hold? Which organisation does she represent? What is her reason for promoting ths particular viewpoint?
Without knowing the above, she’s just some anonymous person giving an opinion that goes against many of the facts current laws and are based on.
Seriously not going to listen to 18 minutes of opinion in the hopes of finding a fact.
And if a man honestly can’t trust a woman’s word on her fertility, and has ill protected sex with her anyway, how does that make him *less *responsible? If you can’t trust the person you’re fucking, protect yourself.
That’s irrelevant. I did not submit that video for the purposes of a background check, character analysis, or ad hominem attack… but merely for the content and the arguments contained within. She can summarize a view that I 90% agree with, much faster than I could ever type it out. I added it for the purposes of optional listening and convenience.
I specifically linked the the part of the video where the relevant 5-minute segment occurs so that no one would have to listen to the full 18 minutes. But as I said, it’s purely optional.
A man can trust the woman, but the woman can still lie.
For all I know she’s just some loon with a diploma in palmistry from godissoocute.com
If you can’t trust the person you are fucking you need to take responsibility for your own fertility, or take responsibility for the possible outome. That’s what this whole thread is about - taking responsibility for your actions, not deciding later that you no longer want to accept the risk.
Sex causes babies. Most contraceptives, even if used correctly, are less than 100% effective. A sexual act between a man and a woman may result in pregnancy.
The more you say women can’t be trusted, the higher you believe the risk of potential pregnancy to be - because sex causes babaies and less protected sex cause more babies.
Again, how does this make men *less *responsible for engaging in an action that could produce a child? Why is the rest of society handed the bill for their lack of judgement?
Women can trust men who lie, too. People are not always nice.
But you’re the one arguing that sex should have serious consequences and that pregnancy has entails an inevitable financial burden on the man. What do we call a man that wants to have sex and have the state pay for it? A slut?
For the record, I obviously agree that it would be ideal if every child had two or more adults completely invested financially and socially in their child and I find men and women (mostly men, for biological reasons) that shirk that responsibility gleefully reprehensible. I know one guy that has six or seven children by as many different mothers. None of the women were raped, but I place the blame solely on the guy’s lack of responsibility (well and the environmental factors that caused him to think it was a good idea). On the other hand, I have massive respect for a friend of mine that quit being a drug dealer and got a really tough (5am starts) construction job in order to support his pregnant girlfriend.
That said, I don’t think there’s any reason to assume if a man eschews his social obligations that he’d have any desire to make financial commitments. While the state’s burdening him with financial commitments may increase contraceptive use, it may also encourage him to avoid social commitments out of fear.
Yet one can never know if they chose a trustworthy partner. Both women in my case had been a few months long relationship. The last one was really strange, she cut off all communication, but oddly she kept playing Words With Friends.
They may not give the child up for adoption, but if people are willing to walk away from relationships then why wouldn’t a woman just say screw him, it’s not worth going after support if he’s not going to pay. Especially if she has a family that’s willing to do that. I’ve been trying to find any good cites for deadbeat parents, yet they all seem to have one of two positions, either it’s people bitching about deadbeat dads, or people bitching about paying too much. So far I’ve only come across one page that isn’t too bad.
Really? I know of one case in which it is true. How normal it is I couldn’t say, but I know of at least one case where the father has custody of the children, the mother was not going to pay support for at least the first year and they have not gone back to court to start support. I’ve seen the court documents myself as it dealt with my ex. I asked my lawyer about it and was told it’s normal. Whether or not my lawyer fully understood my question I don’t know but I was confused about it.
I know I’m coming at this from a different perspective, I don’t know anyone who’s had a child with a one night stand, or even a short relationship. It’s been my experience that women are just as bad about being nasty as guys are.
These threads pop up over and over. Generally speaking, it seems to me that the ones who believe men are being unfairly put upon hold this view at base:
“I am entitled to have sex exactly how I want it, and it is up to the women to take care of protecting me from suffering consequences.”
IOW, she should be on birth control, she should have an abortion (and no doubt pay for it), she should give the child up for adoption, she should bear all the costs of pregnancy/child raising.
Any suggestions about ways the man could have taken responsibility – use a condom, get a vasectomy, chose partners/ways of having sex that cannot result in pregnancy – are all considered “too much a burden” for him to have to do.
You know what it makes me think? These guys are behaving like little BOYS. “I want the fun, YOU provide it and take care of everything” is the way children interact with their parents/caregivers. “I want to eat, YOU buy the groceries and do the cooking and clean up afterwards, too. I just want to eat.”
If a safety net is in place (contraception provided by insurance, child support by tax payer) then surely all these sluts will go around having sex with reckless abandon!
Let’s roll these programs back to the 50s, when there were no unwanted children or abortions and all sex was conducted in marriage through a hole in the sheets for the purpose of propagating the species.
In order to get him to raise your kids and pay for everything under the above scenario, you would have to relinquish your parental rights. They wouldn’t be your kids and you would have no more right to see them and be around them than a stranger. Therefore, the father could take out a restraining order against you and even have you put in jail. So it would be far from the easy ride you imagine.
Nor do I recall ever explicitly supporting a “post-birth walkout”: I think parents should be able to surrender their children for adoption (which obviously takes place post-birth) – but I do believe that the decision itself should be made pre-birth.