thanks for posting a great response
If men don’t want to support children they make, they need to vote in legislators who will support a system where the state supports children who, for practical purposes, have only one parent.
When children in fact, have only one parent, they do get support from social security, and other state systems.
Right now, the way society has decided that children are supported is to have support from both biological parents, or in the case of children who have been duly relinquished and adopted, both adoptive parents, or just one adoptive parent if that is the case for that child-- but that parent has been vetted pretty carefully, and the child was usually “hard to place” before adoption.
That’s what we’ve agreed on. If you don’t like it, you choices are to change it, to withdraw from society, or to game within the rules-- which is to say, when a father doesn’t want to support a child, he needs to find other support for it. A biological father who relinquishes a child to a stepparent adoption is released from his requirement to support that child.
In other words, if you are participating in society, it’s pretty much all or nothing. You don’t get to say you want to be able to drive on the nice paved roads, and vote, and get all the benefits of society, but not do your share-- not pay taxes, not show up for jury duty, not maintain car insurance, and not support your kids.
If there’s some requirement you don’t like, you vote for people who want to change it. You don’t just not do it. That’s another thing society has agreed upon.
Of course, if you choose withdrawal-- if you go live somewhere else, you may get away with not paying support, but you may be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Do you really want to live alone on an island, or in a 3rd world country from which you can never return?
So, men do have choices. They may just not like any of them.
I’m still waiting for someone to fill in option five (5)
I mostly agree with this, but I don’t think it’s an absolute. I think fetuses probably do feel pain in the same way that animals with less complex brains feel that sensation. The degree to which something is “alive” is a sliding scale. Legally, a person who is brain dead but without a death certificate still has rights, so it seems odd that an 8-month old fetus wouldn’t have some rights as well.
To be clear, I am mostly pro-choice, but I think it’s a mistake to write off the idea of regulating abortion as religiously-inspired infringement. There are compelling arguments against abortion, with or without religion.
I don’t believe males have a say in this unless he is the father.
I strongly believe in a woman’s right to choose. Nothing I have read so far has changed my view.
I don’t disagree. Do you also agree that females who aren’t the mother have no say?
It just seemed like an odd way to structure your sentence. What it seemed to imply was something much bigger than what it said explicitly. Or maybe I just have an overactive imagination and an eye for ambiguity in English sentences.
If I had sex that could end in conception-- we lost the condom, the diaphragm came out, and seemed not to have been inserted right-- I don’t know there are lots of scenarios. I would take the morning after pill, no question.
If I discovered I was pregnant, and were already a few months in, I’m not sure what I would do. I know someone who is looking to adopt right now, who is looking to adopt, and who I have known for a long time. If she would want to adopt the baby, I could see carrying it to term, because honestly, under different circumstances, I could see acting as a surrogate for he if she asked.
But if she wasn’t interested, I’m not sure I’d go through with it.
Here’s my situation, though:
I still am unfortunately have perfectly regular periods, and am proceeding on the fact that I am fully fertile, but I am 53, and going to be 54 in January.
I am in no position to be chasing a baby. It would be very wrong of me to have a baby and keep it. Not to mention that I would need to have every test under the sun, and if ANYTHING came up positive, I would have an abortion-- any trisomy of any kind? abortion. Any other birth defect? abortion.
The poor kid will have strikes against it already growing in an antique womb, so I don’t want to hit it with anything else.
I also don’t want to place it with an agency for a stranger adoption, just because I’m worried that it would end up being hard to place, and might languish in foster care.
It’s not as simple as not wanting it-- I COULD NOT CARE FOR IT. I’m just too old.
I also would not take my own life. I have a son who is a young teenager, and he very much needs me.
My son is another consideration. He does not need to be the big brother to what might end up being a minor media event as I set some kind of record for becoming the world’s oldest mother * (*without benefit of fertility technology).
How late do I notice the pregnancy?
Why don’t I have thoughts or intentions of having a child? Is it just something I didn’t think about? Financial concerns? Health concerns? Am I a teenager? Am I near menopause? Did we use protection? Was I raped? Do I not want kids because of a genetic concern? Has the unborn baby been screened for some disease, and tested positive? Do I not want to change my lifestyle? Do I already have children? Am I married to the father? Is there room in my place of living for the child? Are the landlords okay with that? etc.
You have asked me to pretend that I am another person, then to answer a very personal question. How can I answer without knowing more about this person? Because if this person were simply me but in female form, ideally I would not have sex at all without being prepared for the possibility of pregnancy.
~Max
I believe the issue to be a question of which type of right is the most important? For a while now our country has been pushing that sexual rights should trump all others. And I completely agree sexual rights are very important but I believe a person’s right to live outweighs the sexual rights of another person.
The pro-life/anti-abortion stance is very weak from a legal point of view; the constitution is clear that citizenship is granted at birth in the country. By definition, the unborn are not citizens and so are not protected by the bill of rights. So the ‘right to live’ is a moral argument, not a legal one.
But from a scientific point of view the pro-life position is very strong. Embryos have the same DNA as humans and meet the scientific definition of being alive, even before the heartbeat and brain activity begins. Whether embryos are human and alive is not something scientists argue about because it is unequivocally true. I too believe the unborn are both human and alive at conception and so the pro-choice argument is about as appealing as a pro-slavery argument to me.
With all that being said, in the past I have been in the position of being the father in an unplanned pregnancy. I’m ashamed to say a small part of me wanted my partner to get an abortion, without my consent, so it would all go away and I wouldn’t be the one making the decision. Pretty cowardly right? It absolutely was. What I actually told her was I thought we should give it up for adoption. We weren’t getting along at that point so she made the decision entirely on her own, to keep it. In retrospect it absolutely was the right decision.
The going legal argument, as I understand it, is not that the fetus has any right to life, but that the state has a legitimate interest in protecting the life of the fetus which may become a child. Especially after the fetus becomes viable. This state interest has to be balanced against the state’s other interest in protecting the mother’s health and life, and against the mother’s individual right to choose to terminate her pregnancy (part of the right to privacy, which is a form of liberty protected by the due process clause).
~Max
Since you are right, you don’t know the answers to any of these questions, then it seems your best bet is to leave the decision up to the one person that does.
Science doesn’t disagree with your statement that it is human and that it is alive. Science however, doesn’t support your statement that that backs the pro-life argument.
Right, and the ‘right to live’ is a moral argument, not a scientific one.
If you aren’t referring to rboyce, color me whooshed.
~Max
I don’t know if woosh has a color.
Your post had 16 questions in it that you presumably need answered before you would allow someone else to have an abortion.
No, it had sixteen questions that I would need answered, at least, before I can answer whether I would want to get an abortion. For myself.
(really two questions, most of them are just specifics for the “why don’t I want the kid” question)
~Max
Are you female? If the answer is “no”, then the other questions are moot.
The way rboyce wrote the topic starter, I assumed he was soliciting both male and female responses to the question, ‘what would you do if you were a woman who was joining with a mate but had no thoughts or intentions of having a baby and became pregnant?’.
To which I responded,
To which you (and k9bfriender) seem to respond with a non sequitur,
ETA: I might be wrong though. @rboyce, are you looking for men to respond to your questionnaire too?
~Max
I’m not sure if you quite understand the “putting yourself in another’s shoes” bit here.
My point is only that, as you said, you have all these questions that you would need the answers to before you would make a choice for yourself. As you don’t have the answers to those in any other cases, then you should not be making the decision for them.
I treat matters of public policy differently than matters of personal opinion. Here and on other topics.
Sometimes my opinion on the law conflicts with my personal opinion. I’ve come to accept that as part of life.
~Max
Thanks for your post. I had not considered the scenarios you stipulated. I have to reconsider my view on this topic. In any case, I believe the mother should have the right to choose because the child will need her love and if the child was forced upon her that love may not be there. Still it “is her choice to make.