Yes, it happens every day? Having sex is a much smaller decision than having a child. In actuality, the decision to have an abortion seems to me more mature. Often times teenage girls think of a child as a novelty, and don’t think about the future for themselves or a child. I guess I don’t need to tell you that I am pro-choice.
As for the issue raised, I don’t think it is anyone’s decision but the person who is pregnant. Not only do the men not go through the actual physical prgnancy, which is not a natural state and is very bad for the mother’s health, but they often don’t have to pay for it for the rest of their lives like the women do. Child support payments are often paltry sums, not nearly enough. The man goes on with his career and does what he wants with his life, while the woman’s life takes a turn right there, and for the next 18+ years. I know, many men stick around, but it is still the mother who is expected to play the most part in the raising of the child. So, if the mother has big plans in mind for her future, they are out.
I also don’t think that it is the decision of the Supreme Court, the government of my state, or anyone else but ME. It might not be fair to the man to not have a say, but it is not fair to even discuss what happens to someone elses body, as if it is a legal issue. My body is not anyone’s battleground!
No, it doesn’t directly follow. But it does follow that any system that is created must be speedy. And as of yet, nobody has come up with a system, other than allowing abortions without judicial review, that is sufficiently speedy to do the job.
Agreed. But it does make relevant the “hard cases” that you tried to suggest should be treated as sufficiently rare as to be irrelevant.
This is an issue that I once had a very real and personal interest in. About 22 years ago I got involved with a woman who turned out to be a lunatic. If you’ve ever seen Fatal Attraction you’ll have a very good idea of the personalities involved. Once I was able to recognize the real nature of this person I broke it off and she tearfully moved back to Houston. That was it, or so I thought. After a few months she started showing up at my door at what seemed to be random times. I would later come to realize that her visits were coming exactly 28 days apart. She would always be dressed to kill, and ready to, um, have a good time. Sometime after the third visit she called me up to tell me she was pregnant, and by the tone of her voice I knew that I had been screwed in more ways than one. She had intentionally gotten pregnant, and she knew she had me by the balls, and she was going to use this pregnancy to force me to do her bidding or punish me if I didn’t.
I obviously didn’t want this child, or more accurately I didn’t want two decades of having to kowtow to this nut case. What she had done was wrong and was grossly unfair to me and the child to be. Ultimately I had to pay child support, and the mother moved as far away from me as she could and made sure that any attempts at visitation would be unpleasant to both the child and me.
This incident has caused me to think about a lot of things, including whether or not the father in such a case should have any say regarding an abortion. In my opinion, as unfair as this situation might be – or appear to be – the woman’s decision trumps the man’s wishes. Even during those times when my emotions were running scalding hot, I couldn’t envision a scenario in which it would be justifiable to strap a woman down and force her to have an abortion.
Others in this thread have suggested that the father in cases such as this shouldn’t be required to pay child support. While there is something fundamentally not right about rewarding such a slime ball by sending her money every month, the inescapable fact is that there is a child at the heart of all of this, and that child needs financial help.
So, yes, there is something fundamentally unfair about situations such as this, but until we figure out a way to abort only half a fetus, we are left with no choice but to try to make the best out of the situation.
Now for the good news. The child in question is all grown up and living with me, my wife and our two younger sons; in fact right now she’s in the bathroom next door getting ready to go out with some friends. I can hear her giggling as I write this. We have a great relationship, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that things would work out as well as they have.
I’m rather nervous about this whole matter. Alarmed, even. As a non-citizen, I have no rights that are protected by law? None whatsoever? Why didn’t anyone tell me this sooner? :eek:
Gee willikers. I wonder if my co-workers knew about this? About 20% of them are non-citizens as well. 
There’s a child after 9 months, yes. But why not allow the man to opt out of fatherhood before the child is born, i.e. during the same timeframe as abortion is an option?
In principal, the father should have a say. But in reality, he doesn’t. What if the woman is strongly against it? Do you propose that they actually physically subdue her, spread her legs open and force an abortion upon her?
I had hoped the context was clear from the post I quoted: I believe the man should be able to give up his claim to fatherhood and get out of paying child support, not to terminate the pregnancy.
The choice of whether to have an abortion would still be up to the mother, though she might make a different decision after learning that the father won’t be around either physically or financially.
I don’t see why a man should be any more able to get out of child support before the child is born than after. To allow men to do so encourages abortion, which even most pro-choice people will agree is a bad thing. And a prenatal opt-opt after the point which elective abortion is illegal is indistinguishable from a post-natal opt-out, the public policy implications for which have already been discussed. I am forced to conclude that allowing a prenatal opt-out would be harmful to society as a whole (greater number of unsupported children; more abortions), and benefit only a small handful of (mainly) irresponsible men. Not exactly a winning argument.
If you don’t want to pay child support, don’t have sex in contexts that could lead to reproduction. It’s your sperm, be responsible with it. The form of selfish irresponsibility that you are demanding is just not one that you’re entitled to. It amazes me that this suggestion is taken even remotely seriously.
Oh it gets much worse than that my friend.
Those laws banning animal cruelty? Unconstitutional!!!
So I guess if you wanna send Fido or a New York City taxi driver through a wood chipper, have at it! Neither of 'em have citizenship.
A lot of people have heartfelt, sincere, and reasonable objections to abortion. For them, opting out of parenthood is not a possibility. It wouldn’t be fair to make them raise the child by themselves, and as ** KellyM** point out, what you are proposing encourages irresponsibility on the part of men everywhere.
** KellyM**, I think the reason that you’re seeing suggestions such as this is because we have come to believe that, for all of our problems, if you look hard enough there is a reasonable compromise that is fair to everyone. Such is not the case here. A child is an all or none deal and can’t be divvied up like most things we are familiar with.
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bnorton: I dunno, as I see it the “reasonable compromise” is letting the father get away with just paying child support. An unreasonable one would be to force him to marry the woman whether he wanted to or not, and actually participate in raising the child. Which is, pretty much, what we had before. Men should be happy for the compromise that allows their parental obligations to be reduced to a monthly check.
If you don’t want to give birth, don’t have sex in contexts that could lead to reproduction. It’s your egg, be responsible with it.
This was the argument used before abortion was legal, and is the same argument you are using on men. It was a stupid argument then, and is a stupid argument now.
I’m willing to accept that the scales must be tipped towards the woman’s desires since she does have more invested in the outcome. The way things are today, the man isn’t even in the same room as the scale, he only gets to watch the woman decide. Based entirely on her wishes he can be a father, with significant long term responsibilities or he can see his potential offspring vanish before his eyes. He has zero input into a decision that will permanently affect his life and zero control over how that decision will affect him.
He was a 50/50 partner in creating the pregnancy (please note that the woman was involved too). Once the deed is done, though, he becomes nothing more than a checkbook for the woman to use, if she decides to have the baby. I do not consider that fair, not in any way. There may not really be a better option out there, but don’t pretend that the rules are just and equitable.
Why is it a stupid argument?
Yep. That pretty well sums it up for me.
KellyM: I dunno myself. Child support for 18 years is an enormous price to pay for something you never wanted in the first place. And there’s always more to it than that. I doubt there are many fathers out there who aren’t significantly effected by knowing that they have a child somewhere even if all they are doing is paying child support. Unfortunately there are a lot of moms out there who will use that against the fathers to manipulate and punish them.
bnorton: I am going to be spending a lot of money (and enduring a lot of pain) getting rid of a penis I never really wanted. That’s not even remotely my fault. I don’t have much sympathy for someone who incurs even substantial costs because of a mistake (no matter how reasonable) they could have avoided.
“Entirely”? Do have some plague of men accidentally tripping, falling onto nude women and ejaculating into their vaginas? I don’t think so. It takes two to tango, and while I am as pro-choice as anyone, I also think that if you don’t know someone well enough to know their position on abortion or childbearing, it probably isn’t a good idea to fuck them.
Of course he has input: He and his sexual partner can discuss the potential fallout of pregnancy, and what responsibilities it would entail, before any penises and vaginas are exposed.
After that, though, well, it’s simply a biological fact that women carry and give birth to offspring and men don’t. It isn’t something women cooked up to hurt men, or some plot to separate men from their paychecks. It’s biology. Allowing a man to make the decision on whether a woman is going to keep his child, or abort it, or whatever, is effectively telling people that a) women do not control their own bodies, and b) children are property.
The child support thing, though, is a non-starter. It is in the best interests of the child to be supported by both of its parents, where the identities of those parents are known. I can’t conceive of a logical argument against it. Punishing a child for the transgressions of its parents is . . . I don’t even think there’s a word for it.
Uh, unless they decide to get married, or cohabit, or she gives him liberal visitation rights, or custody, or whatever.
It’s only fair for the woman to treat the man as a checkbook to be used. After all, the man only used her for his sexual gratification. That seems to be the general tone of these situations: men who use women for their own amusement, and who end up whining about having to pay for their sport. (People like bnorton, who don’t end up whining about it, are not the problem.)
Solving the social problems that lead to an atmosphere in which men (and women) feel that they should be able to have consequenceless sex is not going to be helped by shifting the financial burden of the consequences of sex from men to the government, which is exactly what the prenatal opt-out does. I’m not fond of the use of abortion as a means for women to avoid the consequences of sex (and in fact am not fond of abortion at all), but the alternative, in my mind, is far worse. Until our society stops punishing women for having children, we have to provide this option.
I’m genuinely sorry that you are having to go through all that, and I hope you don’t consider the rest of my response as frivolous.
There is a logical fallacy that this falls under but I can’t remember which one it is. Basically it goes like this: Problem B is much worse than problem A, so why are we spending our resources on problem A? But problem C is worse than problem B so why are we worrying about B, etc… Try to keep in mind that there are paraplegics out there who might consider your plight trivial compared to theirs, and then there are quadriplegics who might consider the paraplegics to be a bunch of lucky bastards, and so on until you get to the most miserable sonofabitch on the planet.
Finding yourself face to face with an unwanted pregnancy can be a shattering experience for both men and women, and I don’t think it’s fair to trivialize their plight.
bnorton: I think as long as we can expect people to bear the costs of the circumstances of their birth on their own, it’s entirely reasonable to expect people to bear the costs of the circumstances attendant to their poor judgment as well. The demand for a “right to abandon your child” that advocates for prenatal opt-out voice is just that: a demand to be excused from bearing the costs of the circumstances attendant to poor judgment. Society is free to refuse to give people “get out of jail free” cards, when doing so would unnecessarily harm society (either by encouraging bad behavior, or by simply stretching limited resources too thinly).
Note that the mother doesn’t get a “get out of jail free” card. Abortions are dangerous and expensive. They’re not free.
I don’t see how it’s any worse than encouraging childbirth.
If the woman really wants a child that much, she can raise it herself. If she got pregnant intentionally to screw the man out of his money, maybe she’ll change her mind about having the kid, and that sounds good to me - what would you think if you found out you were only born because your mom wanted to get even with your dad?
If she’s opposed to abortion on moral or philosophical reasons, well, now it’s time to weigh her principles against her practicality. I don’t think you’d excuse the man from his responsibility because he’s morally opposed to paying child support.
This “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” mentality can be used just as effectively against the woman.
Just like childbirth, right?
(BTW, some states will pay for an abortion depending on the circumstances. Washington is one of them.)