I have one of those penis dealies, and I’m pretty down with it, so the conventional narrative about Planned Parenthood is that they’re not really my thing. Planned Parenthood is often framed, both by supporters and opponents, as a women’s organization, and that’s one of those things that’s not really untrue, but misses a lot of the story.
Does Planned Parenthood provide tons of pelvic exams, pap smears, and contraception for women? Hell yes they do, and thank goodness. But they’ve also given me STI tests, allowing me to continue slutting my way around Portland with full confidence and a sense of ethical responsibility. They’ve provided me with so many deeply-discounted condoms that I couldn’t count them all. They’ve provided me with Plan B when some of those condoms have failed, and followup STI testing to make sure. They’ve also provided various forms of hormonal birth control for many of the women in my life, giving me (and the women) that nice belt-and-suspenders feeling of security. Planned Parenthood is also often framed as a sex-related organization, and while that’s not true of them in general, I confess that it’s been pretty true in my case. I have more and better sex because of them.
Planned Parenthood is easily demonized by… well, we all know by whom, and officially their justification is abortion. Thing is, there’s a couple niggling little facts that undercut that. It’s been established that whether abortion is legal or not has no effect on the number of abortions performed. What does reduce abortions? Easy access to contraception and sex education. And not a single pro-life group in the U.S., including Democrats For Life, supports more contraception and sex education. In other words, Planned Parenthood is doing more to reduce abortion than all of their opponents put together.
Of course, that’s assuming that being anti-abortion is the real agenda of the pro-life crowd. If we throw out that theory and assume that their agenda is anti-sex, that fits the facts a lot better. It certainly explains the opposition to Planned Parenthood; as I outlined in my second paragraph, my personal interactions with Planned Parenthood have not involved any abortions, but they have been a great support for my very pro-sex lifestyle. Can’t think why your average pro-lifer would have a problem with how I live… oh, wait, yes I can.
aliarasthedaydreamer
Ami Angelwings
Hershele Ostropoler
Cheradenine
jlandrith
kaija24
2020
noahbrand
Cliff Pervocracy
ozymandias
Shora
sirgabe
figleaf
John Hawkins
No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? 
Noah, if you haven’t seen this post of mine, you might enjoy it.
Regarding what you said about how to really reduce abortion, it’s not a coincidence that the countries with the lowest rates of abortion in the world — places like Belgium — all have good sex education and legal abortion.
I hadn’t seen that, Barry, thanks for the link! And yeah, sounds like we’re reading them pretty similarly. Have you read any of Fred “slacktivist” Clark’s writing on how pro-lifers’ actions really don’t seem consistent with their claim that they believe abortion is murdering babies?
Even more puzzling for me is why pro-choice pundits show so little interest in refuting the “abortion is murder” claim. Even on feminist websites I rarely see people arguing that a fetus is not a human person. Instead the question is usually ignored. Pro-lifers are eager to scream “a fetus is a human being”. Pro-choicers, at least the high-profile ones, neither confirm nor deny whether fetus is a person.
Compare the NRLC page on abortion:
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/index.html
With NARAL’s equivalent page:
http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/what-is-choice/abortion/
The NRLC is full of pages like this…
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/facts/fetaldevelopment.html
…I can’t find ANY page on NARAL which argues that a fetus is not a person.
I don’t understand this phenomenon. To me, the ridiculousness of fetal personhood sounds like a slam-dunk against the anti-abortion position. I suppose you could argue that women have a right to abortion even if it kills people, but I’ve never heard anyone defend that in real life.
Is there anyone here who is pro-choice AND believes that abortion kills a person?
[P.S. How do you make hyperlinks in these comments?]
Well, one does see a lot of lines here and there about “a blastocyst isn’t a human being” and so on, but you’re right that it’s not a central argument. I’m not privy to the inner workings of pro-choice groups, but my impression is that the fetal-humanity thing just comes down to “Nuh-uh!” “Yuh-huh!” pretty fast, and cannot be usefully resolved beyond that point. People who think that fetuses are people can’t really be argued out of that position, so it’s not a fight worth getting into.
If anyone’s got better information than that, let me know; I’m nobody’s idea of an expert on the subject. 🙂
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/06/killing-in-the-name-of.html
If abortion is today’s Holocaust, Scott Roeder is Claus von Strauffenberg.
Thanks, GudEnuf! I failed to bookmark those posts when I read them, and couldn’t find them when I needed them.
The thing I love about Fred Clark is that he is a devout, believing Christian and I’m a crabby old atheistic bastard, and yet his moral analysis and mine are very similar and frequently identical. That gives me an odd kind of hope. 🙂
I believe that abortion kills a person – for some definitions of “person”. But terms like “person” or “murder” are somewhat arbitrary conventions, and some of the interpretations are more self-consistent than others, but it’s pretty ridiculous to claim one interpretation to be inherently more “true” than another.
Personally I’m totally against abortions, and believe we must do everything we can to prevent it. Criminalizing abortion *doesn’t* help to prevent it. Also I admit that in some situations, abortion may be the lesser of two evils, and I believe that the people involved should be the ones to make that call (no forced abortions like in China, please).
So I believe that abortion kills a person, but I’m still pro-choice.
Your position reminds me of my late mother, who felt very similarly. She was absolutely against abortion in all cases, and firmly believed that it should be legal, because she didn’t believe that her opinion should be legally binding on everyone else.
Hi there GudEnuf. You can use HTML to create “a” tags in WordPress and Blogger… and don’t forget to end the “a” tag like I did in this blog a couple of days ago (thanks for the edit, team).
An excellent resource is here. It even includes a playpen to test out your HTML.
Note that I’ve had no success with lists within replies 😦
So you believe that a fetus is a person by some definitions but not by others. Okay, but that still gives born people a higher status than unborn people (since you and I are a people by all definitions. If I understand you correctly, you believe that a fetus’s life is worth more than nothing, but less than a born person’s. Is that correct?
I guess what I meant to ask is whether anyone thinks that fetus in the first trimester has as much moral worth as a infant who was born two years ago (which is what the anti-abortionists argue). I haven’t met anyone who believes this and still supports abortion. (Of course, I also doubt that pro-life people really believe in fetal equality. Compare how people react to a miscarriage verses the death of an infant).
Thanks for providing a man’s perspective, noah…very important and relevant to the discussion!
For all the hollering by extremists, my personal feeling is that no one is “pro-abortion”…the vast majority of people are most likely uncomfortable with the idea of abortion and all of us would love to live in a world where no one ever was in the position to have to consider it. However, what most pro-choice people believe is that as pregnancy, child bearing, and child rearing are a) dangerous and b) life-changing results of an unwanted pregnancy, that individual women are the only ones who can make that decision for themselves. Many people who really hate the idea of abortion are also uncomfortable with making blanket statements that restrict what women can and cannot do with their own bodies. I think many us would like to PREVENT abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies, and the way to do that is by good sex education and access to contraception for both women and men. Sadly, there are loud groups who are also against contraception and their solution is “Just don’t have sex unless you want a baby”, which is simplistic, judgmental, and unrealistic.
Wait, you mean that educating people is helpful? I am shocked! 😉
I think the fetus does have the same “moral worth.” I do not think, however, that it — a potential person — has the same “established life” as an existing and older person, and that considerations, however painful, must be made for the lives of those currently alive, sometimes to the expense of those who aren’t yet.
I don’t think anyone seriously is in favor of abortions as a positive act (“yeah! let’s have abortions!”). It’s simply an admission that sometimes difficult choices need to be made, and that in those instances, people need the right to make them.
Lists are done in this manner:
<ol>
<li>Item one…</li>
<li>Item two…</li>
…
</ol>
Substitute “ul” for “ol” if you want an unordered list instead of an ordered list. 🙂
Jinx? 🙂
Thank you!
It is an argument, but not a very good one because one must then determine when a fetus becomes a person and one must justify that determination. The other obvious problem is that the science shows that at early stages of pregnancy the baby behaves in ways we associate with consciousness. Another problem is premature birth. We get to physically see how functional a baby is even if the baby is born several weeks early. It just is not an argument that the pro-abortion crowd can win, which is why they focus on rights rather than the actual issue of the (im)morality of killing unborn children.
What surprises me is how deadlocked both sides are. The “pro-life” crowd will not budge even in cases of legitimate health risks, and the “pro-choice” will not accept that people have valid reasons for opposing abortion.
@kaija24
However, what most pro-choice people believe is that as pregnancy, child bearing, and child rearing are a) dangerous and b) life-changing results of an unwanted pregnancy, that individual women are the only ones who can make that decision for themselves.(Kaija24)
In a way doesnt this make Pro choice somewhat of a misnomer? In reality it takes 2 individuals to create the fetus/child but only one truly has the choice. Maybe a better term would be ‘My Choice’.
Careful with easy equivalencies there, Toysoldier. Just in the comments on this post there are multiple people who accept valid objections to abortion, who even agree with them and are anti-abortion, and who are still pro-choice.
It doesn’t take two individuals to go through the pregnancy and child-bearing parts. It just takes one — the one with the uterus. Pregnancy is hugely challenging for the body, and pregnancy/childbirth carries with it an (ever-smaller) risk of serious complications, including death. A pregnant woman will certainly have to take some time off work, will have to change her habits, will have to spend time, money, and energy on pre-natal care and then an even larger sum when the baby is due. Meanwhile, the man who provided the sperm has absolutely no physiological requirements. While I respect that he might want to nurture and rear the child, he doesn’t have to do the work, it’s not his body which is used for the incubation — and so it can’t, ultimately, be his choice as to whether the baby is brought to term.
This. If I could reproduce like a man–have sex and then that’s the extent of my physical participation then be the secondary parent (assuming traditional gender roles where the mother is the full-time homemaker and child-raiser and the father is the breadwinner who plays with the kid after dinner and on weekends and is peripherally involved in discipline and school activities, etc…I realize that most fathers of this generation are much more involved parents and that is a GOOD thing), then I might consider it. But there is no fucking way in hell I am going to a) go through pregnancy and childbirth and then b) be responsible for a child for the next 20 years. Motherhood is not for me and therefore I would not foist it on anyone else. It’s not like people are an endangered species…plenty of people want to have kids. And I contribute to the next generation in other ways; I teach, I coach, I mentor and I am a favorite aunt. 🙂
I hate to be the one to go down this road, but let’s take a hypothetical scenario: I’m in a committed relationship, and we agree that we don’t want kids. Something happens (the condom has a flaw? the pill fails?) and my partner gets pregnant. All of a sudden, she has a change of heart. I can’t force her to have an abortion, but she can force me to support the child we originally agreed we didn’t want.
What now?
I agree that that is a tragic situation. However unfair the consequences to the man who doesn’t want to support a child that the mother decides to have, the consequences of getting pregnant from sex are inherently “unfair” due to biology. Even if she decides that she “wants” the child (or more accurately, can’t reconcile an abortion with her beliefs) or will have the child and give it up for adoption, the physical and psychological impacts are unfairly situated on her. If I had the choice, I’d rather pay child support than raise a child…writing a check is inconvenient, but not as life-changing as being a parent. It’s another argument for better and more reliable birth control methods for men as well as women! Doubling up on contraceptive methods is a better bet too…if either one of you have qualms about “what would happen if we got pregnant?” then maybe using two methods of contraception or deciding that your beliefs are incompatible and you should be fucking other people are better choices. A guy who is very much against having a child or supporting a child should probably figure out where his partner stands on that issue before it comes up. Yeah, that’s hard, but so is dealing with an accidental pregnancy…
On the same subject, I often wonder how different our cultural views on parenting, gender roles, and sex would be if there was an equal chance of either partner getting pregnant when two people have sex…if I were God, I would have made it that way 🙂
DMB – How about this hypothetical scenario:
You’re in a committed relationship and your partner is struck with a degenerative disease. You’re “forced” to take care of them, even though that’s not what you had wanted.
Just like your scenario, the rules got changed without your consent; though it was always a concievable possibility under the circumstances. Life does that sometimes. You can be a mensch and deal with it, you can be an ass and run away from it, but it’s there.
The only difference is that, in your scenario, there’s a rational actor who you can encourage, though not force, to consider your feelings in their decision. Hopefully, someone you’d enter a committed relationship with would be receptive to, “I’m not ready for this / I can’t handle this / I’m not interested in this.”
@kaija: But that doesn’t really resolve the circumstances. 🙂 Even doubled- or tripled- or quadrupled-up on protection, there is a nonzero probability of an accident occurring, and despite any agreements ahead of time, there is a nonzero probability of your partner suddenly changing his or her mind.
I’ve been interested in the proposals of “economic abortion” that are discussed sometimes. Yes, pregnancy is “biologically unfair” and has non-symmetric burdens — I fully grant that. But it doesn’t give someone carte blanche to then dictate someone else’s unwanted eighteen year-plus economic investment in another person.
Hypothetically, if a woman becomes pregnant, and I’m informed within some time window duration (make it the same as allowing her to have an abortion if you like), I think I should be able to sign away my paternal rights in exchange for a lack of financial responsibility. If she then chooses to have the child, she’ll do so knowing that she’ll be solely responsible for it, or give it up for adoption if she prefers. Or, she can choose to have an abortion rather than do so.
I think it’s a double standard to say, “Men, you have to think before you stick your dick in it and man up if shit happens, but women get a way out no matter what.” It’s actually verging on slut shaming (“women, have sex without worry, but men, you better not”). And I think the concerns that men would use it as an excuse for unprotected sex are just as unfounded as those over women using abortions for the same. And regardless, in either case, we have to preserve both partners’ bodily and life autonomy.
@Groundedchuck: The analogy does not quite hold, unless you allow for my partner to “choose” to no longer be disabled. Are you allowing that?
DMB: unless you allow for my partner to “choose” to no longer be disabled. Are you allowing that?
I’m saying there are some situations in life where your choice gets limited by circumstances beyond your control (by intelligent actors or not) to “deal with it” or “be an ass”.
What if the kid was your niece/nephew/sibling and you were their only surviving next of kin? What if a house you built collapses and kills somebody? What if your dad’s pension gets cancelled and he can’t pay his rent? In every scenario, you could concievably leave (just like you can dodge child support payments–thousands of parents do every year), it’s just not the moral/ethical/legal choice.
Ideally, you’re sleeping with someone who, if they want a child, want whats best for him/her; and if they’re in a relationship with you, they want what’s best for you. But if she digs in her heels and says, “I don’t care what you think, I don’t care if my child has a father who resents him/her, I don’t care if all I get from you from now on is a monthly check, I’m doing this anyway,” then it’s just as out of your hands as any other scenario. It sucks, it’s life, deal with it or don’t.
DMB:
The problem is, the right to child support doesn’t belong to the mother, so she doesn’t have the right (in ordinary circumstances) to sign it away. You’re asking for you and the other parent to have the right to sign the child’s rights away before the child is born. But neither you or she has that right.
(There are limited circumstances — like adoption and artificial insemination — where exceptions are made to this rule. But they are exceptions to the rule, not the rule.)
Another problem with your proposal: If we had your system, men would have a lot less motivation to use birth control, and we’d see an increase in fatherless children. (Social scientists have shown that single-parent births are more common in states with weaker child support laws.)
Your logic is that we should make special rules to accommodate fairness for men, because men have less choice than women. But if “we should accommodate most those with the least choice” is the moral standard here, then being fair to the baby — who had far less choice than either of its parents — should logically be a higher priority than being fair to the father.
Alternatively, we could try and find a way of doing things that is fair to all three parties, or more accurately spreads the unfairness between the three parties. Your proposal essentially treats the mother and the baby more unfairly in order that the father not take up any burdens whatsoever. That’s not the fairest solution.
Personally, I’d like to see the costs of raising children generously socialized, so there was no chance that any child would live in poverty just because only one parent is willing to take responsibility for that. If that were the situation, then we could have “choice for men” without putting an unfair economic burden on children. (Plus, we’d probably see abortion rates go down.) But in the current US, your proposal would mean that we’d make a lot of children suffer a lot so fathers can avoid child support. That’s a lousy trade-off.
Finally, I think we also have to think of the emotional cost to children. When a couple (straight or gay) adopts a child, that child has two parents; parental responsibilities have been transferred, but they haven’t been abandoned. What you’re asking for is legalized child abandonment. So in addition to better financial structures to support children, we should also have better emotional structures to support children before we consider implementing Choice For Men.
Just to add: In an ideal world, yes, no child would be born without the consent and consideration of both parents. Much of why I’m pro-choice is because I think every child deserves to be wanted and loved–no child should be somebody’s “punishment”.
But life (and cultures, and politics) aren’t perfect, and shit happens. And if shit happens, I think you need to recognize the reality of the situation (biology, 2011 American culture, technological limits) and follow a realistic reaction rather than an idealized one.
If the mother chooses to have an abortion, she’s the one who has to go through it, and depending on where she lives, pay for it. That’s not fair either, but it’s still a consequence of biology more than ideology.
@Groundedchuck:
And I’m saying that you’re telling me to “man up.” That’s not okay.
@Barry:
This is all very true, but the “child support is for the child” argument overlooks the very real affect on the father, who will for eighteen years not have economic resources which he planned on having. Those resources will give him opportunities he might now have to pass up, restricting his life course much as pregnancy and childrearing restricts a woman’s life course. Should he lose his job or enter a period of economic hardship, he may even end up in jail when he can’t keep up his payments — not because he’s a deadbeat, but because the economy seriously fucking blows, and he has to keep a roof over his head and food on his table too.
I can’t imagine a “paper abortion” against the wishes of the other partner being anything other than a relationship-ending rift. A child whose father is willing to go that far is never going to have the love, support, and attention of that person — the most they can hope for is a check. That’s not protecting their emotional well-being, helping to raise them in a two-parent household, or making them feel more loved and cared for. The worst they can hope for is a man who stays, resentful, and hates them for existing.
I do not, I should mention, support “paper abortions” past the date at which an actual abortion can be reasonably obtained (so, if there’s a waiting period or mandatory counseling, that gets factored in too). This way, a woman can terminate the pregnancy if she was only carrying it to term because the man was going to stick around, and men can’t get out of supporting a child who’s already born just because they decided they don’t want to.
@Barry:
I’m not sure with how what you’re saying jives with present reality. Abortion is an equivalent “right to sign the child’s rights away before the child is born.” But we allow that.
This is begging the question.
If you use this logical argument, then you must forbid abortion as well.
No, my proposal provides a legal protection for an instance in which a mother would use her biological state against a father in an exercise of superior rights. It’s protection.
That’s begging the question that the mothers would have all chosen to have the children anyway knowing that they would be solely responsible for supporting them.
No. Don’t put words in my mouth.
This is begging the question.
OK – must have been the end tag for <>. HTML standards don’t require them, but maybe the rendering engine for WordPress etc does ?
End of “li”
DMB – And I’m saying that you’re telling me to “man up.” That’s not okay.
I don’t think that’s a fair way to categorize it because in any of the other situations I mentioned, gender doesn’t play a role. I don’t think it should be a gendered attitude (though yes, in many cases it is, even for me personally–I’m expected to tough out situations my sister is coddled through, and my father-in-law still has problems with his sister because of this issue 40 years ago), but I don’t think the solution is saying that no-one should ever have to tough anything out. Again, shit happens. So I guess I’m telling you to “person up”.
That being said, you’re describing a scenario where the person with the power is being bizarrely petulant, irrational and unempathetic. Why on earth would you enter into a relationship with someone with those characteristics?
@Groundedchuck — usually one gets into such a relationship and only finds out that the person is an asshole when it’s too late. This happens along a lot of different axes.
@jnakabb: Not to nitpick, but technically HTML does require them. All tags must be closed; some may be self-closing (but li is not among these). 🙂
aliarasthedaydreamer :
You know what just struck me as an awesome thing that should be taught in schools? Relationship ed.
It’s going on my “life skills” list, with “how to do laundry,” “understanding credit cards,” “general etiquette,” and “commercials are lying to you.”
Thanks for the clarification. And here I was thinking I had justification for being lazy (saving 7 keypresses) !
@Groundedchuck: People can turn when you least expect them to. And besides, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to assume that people are in a relationship? Women are still allowed to have abortions after a one-night stand, aren’t they?
Okay, one more, and then I really need to go figure out if these stock returns are corellated to oil prices.
DMB: I get where you’re going with this, I really do. I think, in a fair and ideal world, you’re right, the father should be allowed to demand, if not an abortion, then a termination of parental rights within the period in which an abortion would be allowed. I’d love to see that world someday, where there’s no difficulty getting an abortion or stigma attached to it, and there’s no pressure on anyone to have or not have children unless they want to. My objections are wholly rooted in the world as it exists now, and I don’t think you can fix your problem until you fix that one.
(Also, full disclosure: I vaccilate between totally wanting and totally not wanting kids. If my wife got pregnant and declared we were keeping it, that would make the decision for me and I could be happy with that. There’s something comforting about being told “Here’s what you have to do,” then succeeding or failing on the merits of that.)
This is more a reply to drmindbeam, but the nesting limit has been reached.
You said, “I don’t think anyone seriously is in favor of abortions as a positive act ”
That’s true, but there are plenty of people, myself included, who don’t think of it as a negative act. It’s about on the level with a root canal for me; unpleasant, sure, I’d rather spend my afternoon doing something else, but sometimes it’s necessary. I worry that framing abortion as Always A Difficult Choice silences women who don’t feel that it’s a hard choice, and puts pressure on them to feel guilty. I am really leery of that kind of emotional expectation.
DMB: And besides, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to assume that people are in a relationship?
You had that in your original scenario; I wouldn’t have assumed it otherwise.
You’re conflating the course of an entire pregnancy with a fetus that’s just a few weeks away from birth. Don’t do that.
@noahbrand
That is why I put “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in quotes. Also, that some people may take those positions does not change that majority of people who use those labels tend not to compromise on their positions.
@Amphigorey
I am not conflating two separate situations. Some of the factors that cause some people to oppose abortion occur early in the pregnancy, and many who support abortion do not place limits on when an abortion can be performed. Either way, the issue still comes back to whether one first views a fetus as a human being and whether our morals governing life issues should apply to the unborn.
Yet we already provide this to mothers. In many states women can legally abandon their child at a hospital, police station, or fire station and face no legal reprisals. Women can also place their children in foster care or up for adoption without any legal reprisals. None of those options address the abandonment issues the children might face (although since many cases involve infants this would be a moot point).
A law allowing men to forfeit their parental rights in exchange for not paying child support would simply be the male equivalent of what already exists for women.
I think it would be worth your while to look up when abortions are performed. The vast majority happen in the first trimester, well before any question of viability comes up. Some happen in the second, and it gets increasingly rare the later it gets.
It’s not actually true that “many who support abortions do not place limits on when abortions can be performed.” There are limits outlined in Roe v. Wade itself. Few people support elective abortions in the third trimester, for instance, and no doctor would perform an elective abortion that late on an otherwise healthy fetus, anyway.
Abortions in the third trimester (ie, “within a few weeks of birth”) are vanishingly rare, but it’s crucial that they remain legal and accessible. Late-term abortions only happen when the fetus is dead or otherwise unviable – as in, it has developed without a head. (Yes, this happens.) That’s why late-term abortions are performed, not because a woman decides in the 8th month that oops, she doesn’t want a baby after all. Late-term abortions are performed on WANTED pregnancies that turn out, sadly, to be unviable and dangerous to the mother.
@Groundedchuck:
I don’t follow your logic here. What is the “that one” problem to which you allude? The problem of, “no difficulty getting an abortion or stigma attached to it, and there’s no pressure on anyone to have or not have children unless they want to?”
These problems are completely unrelated to the one I raised. “No difficulty getting an abortion or stigma attached to it?” This will likely never be the case (at least, the “stigma” portion, so long as fundamentalist religious persons inhabit the country). And how does the “difficulty” (where?) and “stigma” (so?) surrounding abortion interact at all with the total lack of men’s rights for “financial abortion?”
As to “no pressure on anyone to have or not have children,” again, I don’t see this as something realistically solvable — or, forgive me, related to the topic at hand. What am I missing here?
Regardless, I find the notion of, “Hey now, you’re right that you have a problem, but it gets to wait.” offensive and fallacious. Is there something from stopping problems from being solved in parallel with each other? Why do they have to be solved in an arbitrary sequence? You say you want a fairer and more ideal world. That’s arrived at by solving problems when you see them, not shuffling them off.
Women are not allowed to put their children up for adoption if the father objects.
IIRC that might depend on the state. I seem to recall Utah being something of a haven for women who want to put their kid up for adoption w/o the father knowing. There was a court case fairly recently about this, woman puts kid up for adoption, father objects, kid stays with adoptive parents while the court tries to figure it out, eventually court decides that kid has been with adoptives so long that removing zir would be “damaging”
I just wish I could remember the names involved.
Not quite the case I was thinking of, put this article shows it’s definitly the case that a mother cant put the baby up for adoption w/o father’s okay.
I am aware of when abortions are performed. My point was that some of the factors that prompt people to oppose abortion occur early in the pregnancy.
There are abortion proponents who do not want any limitations on when abortions can be performed. Ironically, the wording of the Roe v. Wade decision prevents them from getting their way. While the decision does not prohibit any kind of abortion, including aborting a viable fetus, it does allow states to regulate abortions performed during the second and third trimesters. I found no evidence that am abortion doctor would not abort a healthy fetus. However, in many states doctors are legally prevented from doing by laws that some abortion proponents deem unconstitutional.
I could not find current statistics on the reasons for third-trimester or late term abortion. The only study I found is from 1987 and covers abortions performed after 16 weeks, which is problematic. However, of the reasons listed, only 2% of abortions were performed due to a medical issue with the baby. An additional 11% covered an unspecified “Other” category, which may include reasons related to women’s health. Yet I found nothing demonstrating that those abortions were performed on wanted pregnancies and solely because of health issues or medical complications.
Okay, I see how that is sexist against men. But I think it would be more reasonable to change the adoption laws than to grant men the rights to “paper abortions”. Either men and women should be allowed to put their kids up without the other’s consent, or neither should.
@GudEnuf: That still wouldn’t address the ability of a woman to get pregnant and then force a man to support her child.
As he can’t — and shouldn’t be able to — force a woman to go through the process of carrying a child and giving birth, so, too, should she not be able to force a man to go through the process of supporting a child financially after she has given birth.
Gudenuf:
“Okay, I see how that is sexist against men. But I think it would be more reasonable to change the adoption laws than to grant men the rights to “paper abortions”.”
Why?
Nesting limit reached – this is a reply to your later message.
Do look at the Guttmacher Institute if you want to find statistics on pretty much anything having to do with reproductive health. They are made of awesome and win, and they have LOTS and LOTS of data. That is where I got my assertion that late-terms were only done out of extreme medical necessity.
@Kaija24
http://titfortat6.blogspot.com/2011/02/can-equality-and-pro-choiceas-used.html
How about a document you can have the woman sign before you have smex? that way nobody’s “springing” nething on nebody and if they get pregnant and keep the child, then they’ve alrdy agreed before they smexed you that you won’t be financially or legally responsible? :] and if she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t have to smex you :3 (this is a generic “you” it’s not addressed to nebody)
I’m surprised nobody has brought up “paper abortions” for women yet. In the ideal world in which we are devising 😉 you could have a pregant woman who has decided that she does not want the baby (but committed/willing to carry it to term) signing it over to Dad pre-emptivly (and irreversibly), who is then left to descide how he wishes to keep the sprog or sign over his own rights by putting it up for adoption.
@Titfortat: Those are both wrenching scenarios with no clear solution, especially as it began with a mutual decision. 😦 However, as only the female partner can get pregnant and it is her body that is involved, I don’t think there can ever be a completely “fair” compromise. Maybe if we get to the point where we can incubate a fetus to full gestation outside of the womb, then this question will be moot.
@Kaija24
You are right that there can never be a completely “fair” compromise. My question is, if society deems a father to be accountable to the mother and child if “she” decides to keep the child, should she be accountable on some level to the father if “she” decides to abort the child? If the answer is no then obviously it isnt Pro choice for both, is it?
@Titfortat – “society deems a father to be accountable to the mother and child”
That’s not how it works. He’s not accountable to the mother at all; he’s accountable to the child.
@Ami:
Interesting idea! It might ruin the mood a little, but that probably would work. 🙂
@Doctor,
Ruining the mood would definitely reduce your chances of an unplanned pregnancy and potential childcare obligations – or any intercourse at all !
Reminds me of my father’s sage advice :
@Amphigorey
Yes that is true but it is only possible due to the unilateral decision of the mother.
@DrMindBeam:
If the child is aborted, then it will never be born, and never have any rights to be signed away. So no, it’s not the same thing at all.
One way you can avoid a child having legal claims on your support is to make sure no such child is ever born, through the use of birth control or of abortion. Another way is to wait until the child is old enough and then ask him or her to petition a court for independence. Another is to give the child up for adoption (in which case the child’s claim on it’s parents remains in force, but the identity of the legal parents has changed).
But what you can’t do is ask the mother to sign away the child’s rights to parental support. Because those rights don’t even exist until the child is born, and once the child is born the rights belong to the child, not to the mother.
No, it’s not. “Begging the question” refers to a type of circular argument, such as “This comic book is badly drawn because the drawings in it are poorly rendered.” What I just said isn’t begging the question at all; it was pointing out a known, measurable consequence of men having less legal responsibility to take responsibility for their children.
Nope, because an embryo isn’t a person with a right to be treated fairly, either in our laws or in my morality. The vast, vast majority of abortions happen before thought is even physically possible (you can’t have thoughts without a functioning cerebral cortex); there is no way to be “unfair” to an embryo, because concepts of fairness and unfairness don’t apply to embryos.
More importantly, I’m not the one endorsing the “the person with the least choice should be catered to” logic; you are. So by your own standards, shouldn’t the needs of the child outweigh the needs of the father?
I know, I know — you’re going to say that since women are allowed to abort, men should be allowed to abandon their own born children.
Here’s what you don’t seem to understand: children aren’t embryos. You’re saying that because women abort embryos, abandonment of born children by their fathers is fine. But that’s nonsense. Once the baby is born, it’s a legal person, and both parents have responsibilities to it.
Your claim doesn’t contradict my claim in any way. I don’t doubt that your proposal would provide a lot of protection to fathers, as you say, and this would avoid some unfairness to fathers. But the price paid is increased unfairness to children and to mothers.
We already know that states with weak child support laws have higher rates of single motherhood than states with strong child support laws. If you were right — if the amount of child support expected was a significant driver of women’s abortion decisions — then the reality would be just the opposite.
By the way, you keep misusing “begging the question.” I don’t think you know what it means.
That’s not putting words in your mouth; it’s an accurate description of the policy you proposed, which was “…I think I should be able to sign away my paternal rights in exchange for a lack of financial responsibility.” I admit you put some limits on it — so you’re not asking for an unlimited right for fathers to abandon their children — but logically, what you’re describing is legal child abandonment.
Of course, some states arguably have a form of legal child abandonment — “safe haven” laws, in which a newborn baby can be anonymously left at a hospital, police or fire station. But the reason we do that is for the best interest of the children, who might otherwise be abandoned to death, which is why those laws are typically named things like “Infant Protection Act.” And anyway, that’s not actually abandoning the baby; it’s actually a form of adoption, in which parental responsibilities aren’t abandoned, but passed on to other people.
What you’re asking for is legal abandonment, not for the best interests of children, but for the best interests of fathers. And what you’re trying to avoid isn’t babies dying in trash cans, but having to pay child support. So I think the case for your proposal is much weaker than the case for safe haven laws.
And a response to something you said in an earlier comment:
No, there’s just one standard. And here it is: Both men and women get to do whatever they want with their own bodies to prevent a child from being born, but neither of them get to do whatever they want to their sexual partner’s body.
So you (and I) have every right to use a condom, to get a vasectomy, to refuse to have PIV sex, and in every other way control what we do with our penises (sp?). And women have every right to use the pill, or other forms of birth control for women, to have their tubes tied, or to have an abortion, and in every other way control what she does with her reproductive organs.
But just as she doesn’t have the right to force me to have a vasectomy, I have no control over if she decides to get an abortion.
Also, women don’t have a way out “no matter what.” Once a child is born, women — like men — have strong legal responsibilities towards their child.
Look, if there’s a standard to get in the NBA which makes it possible for some physically gifted people to get in, and impossible for physically ungifted people like me to get in, that’s not a “double standard.” It’s just one standard — but it’s a standard that gives some people, due to their physical size and talent, options I lack. Abortion is the same thing. Even in a world with “single standards,” people will still have different gifts and abilities.
And it’s not as if it’s all disadvantage for men. As you acknowledged, the same biological differences that give women the abortion option, also give men the ability to become a parent painlessly and without physical risk.
Pingback: “Choice For Men” aka “Paper Abortions” Are Legal Child Abandonment. And Abortion Rights Are Not A Double-Standard. | Alas, a Blog
If abortion and child-support were open and shut cases they’d have been settled long ago. They’re not. So they haven’t.
It might interest people to know that this is what drove the most (genuinely, admirably) rad of authentic, non-“radfem” radical feminists, Shulamith Firestone, to argue passionately and almost Quixotically for the development of artificial wombs.
Her argument, like a lot of other egalitarians, is that a woman’s right to decline pregnancy trumps even a hypothetically human fetus’s rights because the fetus imposes a unique burden on the body that no other human being is ever subject to. The argument goes that unless or until we can oblige a parent (or any other person) to risk their lives and/or lifelong well-being by donating a kidney and any other tissue or organs to enable her or his child (or any other person) to continue living, then neither can we reasonably oblige a woman to “donate” her body to keep a fetus alive.
I think that’s a pretty compelling argument not least because even if/when you were to grant full citizenship to a near-term fetus (the strongest but least universal pro-choice position), viable fetus (anti-abortion “moderate’s” position) embryo, blastocyst, zygote (standard anti-abortion position) or that all-powerful initial blast of Patriarchal “seed” (the true anti-abortion/anti-contraception wingnut position) then you’re still looking at competing moral claims about human life rather than a unilateral one in favor of one or the other.
More specifically it creates a unique pair of moral claims that (again barring the invention of a moral requirement for potentially-fatal organ or tissue donation) are distinct from any other competing claims.
Because of this unique circumstance the parties making the moral claim can participate in the choice — the mother with all her resources and the fetal tissue at whatever stage with all of its resources. Pragmatic hint: despite being primarily hormonal, the decision-influencing resources of the fetal tissue are considerable and often compelling.)
And because it’s a two-way rather than unilateral decision this is why we can’t a) insist that a woman should bear a pregnancy to term but also unfortunately b) insist that a woman shouldn’t!.
It’s also, incidentally, why people involved in the nuts and bolts of pregnancy and choice (oh, say, obstetrics and abortion counselors) it’s a really, really not recommended to declare before the fact what one would or wouldn’t do if one became pregnant. That would include signing pre-sex agreements.
And, unfortunately but necessarily in my opinion, that is why should the fetal tissue “win” the decision neither of its parents can abdicate responsibility for its support: it might be incubating in her body but it’s their fetal tissue — his no less than hers — that’s carried the case.
In genetic terms (regular evolution, not “evolutionary psychology” ones) you can’t tell the father to “man up” after the fact because biologically he already has!
What, you think “no, seriously, what about the men” works only at the macro scales? Only in the social dimensions? Patriarchy, superstition, gender assumptions, and some uncritically-accepted feminist constructions tell us pregnancy is something that only happens to the woman. It’s not. Biologically it happens in the woman. (And wowzie is that pretty fucking relevant or we wouldn’t be having this conversation!) But, men, what’s happening is inescapably half us! And turns out it continues to be a highly relevant half even after it’s left our bodies.
Which
It also nicely ties back to Firestone’s genuinely radical call for artificial wombs. Because then, and only then, can the decision to proceed and/or terminate a pregnancy can be truly one or the other parent’s equal choice.
Until then there’s no way for either to shirk social and financial responsibility for child support, no matter how unintended.
figleaf
p.s. None of the above involve the rare but non-apocryphal instances of condom sabotage by either fathers or mothers. While those cases absolutely do create clear and probably actionable culpability after the fact they unfortunately don’t change the basic support equations.
@DMB and Amphigorey re: nesting comments.
Yes, nesting has its limits and deep threads like this one demonstrate why. So I support the decision to yank it. But DMB is it possible to find a plug-in or just tweak the templates so that each comment gets a unique number? That way we could say something like @Amphiborey#71 or @71.
figleaf
@jnakabb (July 7, 2011 at 3:57 am): Yup, looks like the key to making lists work in WordPress is closing those list and list-item tags.
fl
That still wouldn’t address the ability of a woman to get pregnant and then force a man to support her child.
“Her” child? I thought it was “their” child, but of course I have this thing about fathers as well as mothers having rights. Women do not “get pregnant” all on their own, as you imply. And the mother has to support their child too.
And as has been pointed out before, women as well as men are responsible – legally and financially – for their children, whether or not they deliberately had sex, whether or not wanted to be pregnant, whether or not they had the desire or ability to get an abortion, whether or not they wanted to put the child up for adoption. A mother’s or father’s obligations and rights do not hinge on “did you spawn on purpose?”
If you really approve of making parental obligations and rights fully disposable, then the fair solution is not “opt-out”, but “opt-in”. Fathers are presumed to have neither rights nor responsibilities until they affirmatively put themselves on the hook. Until they do so, the mother has all rights and all responsibilities toward the child, and she can keep and support the child or put the child up for adoption, as she chooses, without his say-so. He would have a limited time after learning of the pregnancy (or, if he isn’t told of it, after he is informed of the birth) to “opt in”. I imagine some would argue that this should extend to marriage, in the way that paternity is presumed in marriage.
Of course, “opt-in” marginalizes fathers, but so does any scheme that allows men only to walk away from the obligations to a child that every parent is now presumed to have. On the bright side, you’ll never have to pay for some brat you didn’t want!
I frankly fail to see how providing men an additional option takes away women’s existing options.
That’s because you appear to be presuming that an abortion is something a woman can have anytime she wants because, in certain circumstances, the government cannot ban her from having one. You also seem to forget that the timing of a “paper abortion” can be done in such a way that the woman doesn’t, in fact, have the opportunity or even legal right to an abortion.
Forcing me to pay child support for a child that we initially agreed we would not support or bring into existence is having someone “do whatever they want to their sexual partner’s body.”
Really. I’m interested to know in how you think that having to pay child support is equivalent to a violation of another person’s bodily autonomy. I guess that next time I get some bogus bill collector telling me that I owe money to a company I’ve never heard of, I should call them rapists.
By the way, you keep harping on child support as though that were the be-all and end-all of parenthood.
Sperm and egg donors sign away their parental rights before the child is born. Surrogates do as well, although they can refuse to comply with the contract and keep the child. Likewise, some women have sued sperm donors to force those men to pay child support, although those men legally have no parental rights to the child.
Fathers giving up their parental rights is not actually abandoning the baby either. The baby remains with the mother, unless the mother chooses to place the baby up for adoption or in foster care. The parental responsibilities are simply passed on solely to the mother. As for the child’s best interest, one of the reasons safe haven laws, foster care, and adoption exist is because it is the child’s best interest to be with parents who want to parent them. If a parent wants nothing to do with the child, it is a bad situation.
No, there is are two standards because women have options after the child is born that are not available to men. The solution would be to provide men with the same options available to women, i.e. if men feel incapable of or unprepared to care for a child they should be allowed to sever their parental rights along with any financial responsibilities.
But she does legally have the right to force you to be a parent against your will, either through rape or deception. Allowing men the options available to women would prevent scenarios like that from happening. Since the child remains with the mother, there is no real issue. The only contention appears to be that men, and only men, should be forced to parent children they do not want or are not capable of parenting.
That is impractical and illogical. Why would women not also begin with the default “do you accept this child, with the rights and responsibilities included” opt-in option? More so, most people who have children want their children. Few women and men abandon their children. The proper solution would be to allow men the same options of legal abandonment available to women.
That does not remove her opportunities to place the child in foster care or up for adoption. The “paper abortion” is more akin to the latter instances than actual abortion, particularly since the child is still alive.
You are forcing that person to use their body to provide you with something — namely money — and in DMB’s example you would do so after agreeing not to have a child.
@doctormindbeam: Is your statement really in line with this blog’s comments policy? If you’ve felt that I’ve said something that is improper I’d like to know what it is; your comment was not very enlightening in that regard.
@Toysoldier: Not quite; sperm and egg donors, by law, are presumed never to have been parents in the first place. Assuming their state has a law recognizing such, and assuming they fulfill whatever requirements the law sets to define somebody as a ‘donor’, then the law in effect says “These people are an exception to the rule that you are presumed to be a parent of your biological offspring.” (WRT your comment about rape, in my state – and we’re not the only one – the law similarly presumes non-parenthood between a rapist and a child conceived of the rape.)
It helps to realize that the whole legal framework for sperm donation came about in the context of a married couple where the father was infertile but the mother was not, as a way to preserve the marital presumption of paternity without having an actual, biological third party barge in and claim to be the father. To avoid creating a giant loophole in paternity laws (“I was a sperm donor! She’s lying!”), donor laws have very specific requirements about when somebody is or is not a sperm or egg donor – and if the ‘donation’ happened through sex, generally speaking, forget it.
I know a sadly large number of lesbian couples who conceived children via sperm donor when the law was less settled and/or when the LGBT community was less savvy about those things, and had a “donor” decide he wanted to be “daddy” after all – a desire that was backed up by the full force of the law, because of course, legally, he was not a donor.
That is impractical and illogical.
How so? It seems to me much more practical and logical than a system that, in real life rather than a rhetorical ideal world that doesn’t exist, hinges on whether or when a woman can get an abortion, whether the potential father has filled out the paperwork in the right period of time (“You missed the deadline!” “She didn’t tell me she was pregnant!” “I told you as soon as I found out!”, etcetera) and which errs on the side of protecting men who don’t want to be fathers, while also protecting the parental rights of men who would gladly have been fathers but had the existence or paternity of the child concealed by the mother. It also, happily, avoids the problem of a woman’s choice to abort or not being limited or eliminated by the timing of the man’s decision. Why do you believe this is impractical?
Regarding adoption or foster care – you can’t simply place a child in foster care that I’m aware of, and until the adoption happens the mother is still financially and legally responsible for the child. Amp is incorrect; “safe harbor” laws do not automatically sever anyone’s parental rights, they simply prevent the abandoning parent(s) for being prosecuted for abandonment.
And WRT child support, no, it is not a violation of bodily autonomy. You do not produce money from your body. If I am ordered to pay my husband child support, and I use a trust fund to pay it, how does that force me to do anything with my body? Call it an injustice if you want to do so, but I’m extremely uncomfortable suggesting that child support is somehow akin to rape. That seems to horribly minimize rape.
Wow, major conjunction fail in that first sentence. This is what happens when you spend too much time writing in brief-ese rather that English.
To be clear, I believe an ‘opt-in’ system is the one that errs on the side of protecting the father, avoiding bickering about whether or not the father opted out in time, and protects men whose welcomed fatherhood was delayed because of the mother’s fraud. An ‘opt-out’ system is fraught with problems. I don’t see the objection to an ‘opt-in’ system, particularly if it presumes a father’s right to ‘opt-in’ rather than requiring the mother’s permission for him to do so.
Regarding “paper abortions”:
While the current system where a man can be forced to pay child support is unfair, at this point it’s the least unfair option. If we could get somebody else (*coughthegovernmentcough*) to pay for the kid somehow I’d be all for it, but since that’s not the least bit politically feasible in the US it’s less fair to the child to not have the father’s support than it is to the father to have to support the child.
Regarding the dmb/mythago spat: I have to say, dmb, that you seem excessively hostile to mythago. She did make an argument. If you don’t think it was a good argument you can say so, you don’t have to insult her.
(Probably should note here that I’m not talking about that last post of dmb’s)
@Brian: Either parent can be forced to pay child support. Both mothers and fathers have legal responsibilities, including financial ones, towards their children. I know what you’re about to say, which is that the family-court system has an unfair tendency to give primary custody to mothers and require non-custodial fathers to directly pay child support to the mother – and we could get into how that is exacerbated and to what degree by marital role division and sexist assumptions and so on – but even acknowledging that, it’s not true that only fathers must financially support their children, and it’s not true that in the absence of a court order to the contrary that custody and financial obligations are ‘man pays, woman scrubs oatmeal out of hte carpet’.
WRT bodily autonomy, Amp was clearly talking about control over one’s body in terms of abortion or forced pregnancy or rape. It seems to me a rather ugly conflation of those by saying ‘making me pay child support’ is clearly and always a violation of bodily autonomy – whether or not I have to physically work for the money I would pay in child support doesn’t matter, a court is not going to say “Oh, and by the way, mythago, you’re not allowed to pay that money with inheritance or lottery winnings or anything else, you have to get your ass out of bed and earn a paycheck for it.’
And as to pregnancy and bodily rights, I think the ‘frozen embryo’ cases are a good illustration; I only know of a few, but the courts have apparently uniformly ruled that there is *no* right to implant an embryo absent the agreement of the father, even if he enthusiastically consented to the initial (in vitro) conception. Since the woman’s bodily autonomy was in no way involved – she wasn’t actually pregnant – she had no right to implant an embryo absent the father’s consent, even in a case where she was now infertile and there was no other way for her to have biological offspring. This, to me, seems fair. It is not a situation where there is a born child that requires parental support, or where the woman’s or the man’s body is actually involved such that something needs to be interrupted or a child will result.
A distinction you failed to make.
Until Toysoldier’s comment it didn’t occur to me that anyone would assume such permission was needed, anymore than the father’s permission for a ‘paper abortion’ would be needed – since we are talking about parental rights. To clarify rather than assume, an “opt-in” system would simply be the mirror image of “opt out”; all legal rights and responsibilities fall on the mother unless and until the father affirmatively “opts in”, at which point he is permanently on the hook (as it were) just as he is under the system we have now. Of course there would have to be a time limit based on whether he actually knew or ‘should have known’ (in the legal sense) of the pregnancy; we don’t want a potential adoption to be hung up because the potential father had until the kid is 12 to make up his mind.
I would imagine some would suggest such an ‘opt-in’ would apply only to unmarried fathers, because we have a system right now where paternity is presumed within a marriage, and we don’t want families where half the kids are acknowledged by the husband and half aren’t; this is fair because a man would have to affirmatively choose to marry and thus agree to give up his ‘opt-in’ in the process, rather than having it thrust on him regardless.
We’d also want to preserve existing laws that exclude certain limited categories of people from being parents – rapists, or gamete donors, and likely also fathers where the mother is married to someone else.
@mythago:
There are cases of women successfully suing sperm donors for child support. Likewise, there are cases of boys being forced to pay their rapists child support. While some states do have laws regarding parentage via rape, it does not not appear that those laws to apply male rape victims.
The “opt-in” concept is illogical because most people want their children and impractical because it creates a much worse situation than what already exists. You keep all the existing problems and compound it with paperwork and probably some test period to ensure men petitioning to be fathers are fit and willing. Rather than protecting men who do not want to be fathers, the concept assumes that all men do not want to be fathers, essentially penalizing most fathers. Opting out is the better solution.
As for adoption or foster care, while the financial and legal responsibility may remain in some cases for a period of time, many states do not necessarily pursue said responsibilities. States usually maintain custody of a child and provide for that child without severing the parental rights in the hopes of returning the child to their family. However, few people pay for their children’s costs while in foster care, particularly mothers.
Regarding child support, the vast majority of people do not have trust funds. Most people have to work to get money, and if a person must provide child support, there is a good chance the person must work more to cover the cost of child support. No one compared child support with rape. There is more than one way to violate a person’s bodily autonomy, and controlling how they must use their body — requiring them to work for something they did not want in the first place — is one of them.
@toysoldier: As the linked article makes clear, the ‘sperm donor’ and the couple didn’t follow the legal requirements for him to be a sperm donor; therefore, legally, he isn’t one. I know a number of lesbian couples who got this from the opposite direction: after their child was born, their ‘donor’ suddenly decided he wanted to be ‘daddy’, and because they had not strictly followed the law in their state regarding sperm donation, he had every right to insert himself into their lives as the child’s father.
WRT rape, your link is an op-ed from 2002, so I don’t know the current state of the law across the US, but certainly in my state a rapist of whatever gender is legally not the parent of any child resulting from the rape. All states should have such laws, and as I understand it they are starting to go that way precisely because of the cases you mention.
Your objections to ‘opt in’ don’t make sense. You will have plenty of paperwork in an “opt-out” system – in fact, you’ll have a lot more, because the timing will be even more crucial. It does not assume anything about men wanting to be fathers; what it does is err on the side of protecting men’s choice not to be parents, instead of assuming they must be parents unless they find some way out of it. It also avoids the very issues you brought up in your post: no suing a sperm donor for support, no insisting the boy you raped pays for a child you wrung out of him. The affirmative act of choosing to be a father isn’t ejaculation, it’s a decision to opt into a child’s life.
As for a “test period”, you’re the only one who has suggested such a bizarre requirement.
On adoption and foster care, responsibility “may” remain for a period of time? No, it does remain until the parent’s obligations and rights are removed. Parents in foster care may not pay for a child’s support, but that is because the child has been taken away from them and they are also losing their rights. The government pays the foster parent for the care.
If forcing someone to do anything they’d rather not is a violation of bodily autonomy, then I think you’re going a bit down an attenuated road you may not wish to. If I have to get a second job because my imaginary ex refuses to pay child support, is he liable not merely for unpaid support but for some kind of violation of my bodily autonomy?
@DMB, @Mythago, and to a lesser extent @toysoldier. While I haven’t been back in the picture long enough to be able to pointificate about our comment policies, and I’m probably still too jet-lagged to make a lot of sense. But it does seem as though more heat’s being generated than light on the question.
That said, could I suggest that you all take a four or eight hour pause to go write and/or comment on other posts and blogs?
And speaking of other posts and possibly even other blogs, since most of the comments lately (including mine so I’m not blameless) have not been about Noah’s experience with Planned Parenthood it might be a good idea to start a new post somewhere to hash this out in. After a suitable break.
figleaf
Before my comment was approved to appear here, I posted it on my blog. My thinking at the time was that I was so late in responding here that probably no one would see or respond to my comment. :-p
Anyway, anyone who wants to is welcome to post comments there. I’ll leave this thread alone from now on.
Huh. I find it interesting that people are throwing out “just give the baby up for adoption if the mother has low income.”
As an adoptee, having seen the hell my mother went through giving me up for adoption, and lack of emotional destruction my biological father went through— I don’t think many men understand exactly what we’re speaking about here. We’re talking about carrying an embryo through it’s fetal development into personhood. Most women begin to develop bonding hormones— hear the heartbeat, feel little legs kicking inside them, often create unspeakably deep emotional bonds before the birth even occurs… then going through labor, seeing the infant born and then either, having them wisked away forever more; or spending time holding and bonding with a new born infant, maybe nursing feeling the sweet hands wrap around your finger….
The kind of trauma involved for women losing children to adoption when they WANTED to parent but had low finances is NOT the same situation as it is for men to sign a piece of paper and walk away and never give a shit again. I’m not sure that you care at all what you would be sentencing women to with this “just give it up for adoption if your finances are so bad” but you could start with this:
Click to access Phillipa_Castle_thesis.pdf
“In subsequent in-depth interviews with 36 relinquishing mothers (relinquishment 10 – 33 years previously), 50% stated they had continuing feelings of loss, pain and mourning;
82% regularly contemplated the child and their development, wanted the child to know they still cared about them and stated that they would be interested in a reunion as long as the child wished; 95% stated they would like the information contained in agency records to be updated to reflect their current situations.”
“Blanton and Deschner (1990) went on to compare their findings to normative data for parents whose child had died and they found that the relinquishing mothers had a higher incidence of grief symptoms than those whose child had died.”
You can read the whole study if you’d like to actually know what you’re suggesting women do if they find they are unable to afford or go through with an abortion for whatever reason. Or, God forbid, they love and want their beautiful newborn infant but have low income and the fathers financial support could make the difference in giving the child a good life.
After having read another thread on reddit about a male rape victim, I had a thought.
How do we protect men from being forced into becoming fathers after having been rape victims? Rape doesn’t always end in a successful prosecution. And men being able to get a successful conviction against their female rapist is effectively nil. Therefore any laws against rape victims being held responsible for children conceived through rape don’t apply to male victims of female rapists. Not in a functional sense.
The only thing that will comprehensively protect male victims of female rapists is giving all men the right to a paper abortion. And that’s not even addressing the emotional and physical impact of unwanted birth on the rape victim.
Wow. Depressed now.
@Rox
I don’t think that’s the argument being made – the parity on decision making would hold up to the first trimester of pregnancy. Up to this point, both parents can determine whether they want to become a parent for the next 60 odd years, whether they have enough finances, whether they can take breaks from work and/or school, whether they are compatible enough with each other to continue their own relationship etc
These types of decisions constitute the largest proportion of abortions that are performed today. For a young couple who has unprotected sex – maybe they don’t know each other very well, maybe both are in school, maybe neither can afford to raise a child – prime scenario for first term abortion.
I personally think that this is a great idea as it forces both potential parents to truly examine their commitment to each other and to becoming a lifelong parent. Both need to be fully committed to continue. Where one is not, then their lack of commitment will be made very clear, providing the other with a much cleaner decision to make for themselves.
I work in raising awareness of issues facing adoptees and donor concieved adults. This is one area where adults “freedom” to do whatever they want, means very little to me when in order for the adult to have that freedom we are asking their biological offspring to suffer.
I do not believe that parenting being hard, or women not feeling like parenting is why abortion should be legal. Therefore it doesn’t jive with me that because women have an opportunity to opt out, men should be able to opt out. To me, abortion should be legal only because it’s difficult to prove in a way that everyone can agree on what makes a human life valuable of protection and when that should start. If it became suddenly “proven” whatever that would mean, that a three week old embryo possesed a level of awareness and sensation that could be agreed on consitituted a human life, I would be opposed to it. Science has so far given us the opposite of that from what we can tell, meaning we don’t see signs of awareness and sensation much at all in the first weeks/months of the pregnanc, and it’s highly debatable how and when these sensations and awareness become worthy of making an embryo or fetus worthy of protection.
I am also working to get better research on adult adoptees and donor concieved adults and believe that the process of relinquishment should involved giving honest information about the kinds of affects adoption and donor conception can have on the child throughout their lifespan. The same sort of process should be involved in a three month opt out option for men:
Detailed discussion of research on fatherless children, alternate ways that fathers can be involved, education about parental support programs, financial assistance for father who want to opt out due to financial reasons, counseling available to work through issues related to childhood family environment and taking on the role of being a father etc etc- awareness of all available family enrichment and support services in the area (CREATION of such services if there aren’t any!)
These are all things I’m fighting to make available to women in pregnancies and they are things I would like available to men too. But ultimately, if we set up a three month decision making period for men to sign away rights, I would be willing to bet that many men would grow to deeply regret the decision– and I would want to see research on how that process affects men and the child involved:
The same as I am fighting for research on how women’s relinquishment of offspring affects the woman and the child involved.
Cross fostering studies in animals (meaning taking a new born from a mother and giving it to a different mother who is also nursing)— causes very real biological changes in animals through the lifespan. Of course, being raised by a violent of neglectful animal parent will cause further behavioral and physical changes to the animal. So I’m not proposing people are dangerous or incapable of loving their offspring be required to parent. But I do think parents should be given information about the fact that this WILL affect the child.
I am working against pressure on women to feel they should give up their children because they feel inadequate and I would work against that pressure on men as well. If a person feels they have issues that are standing in the way we should have support services for that. If someone truly doesn’t care about their child at all— they should have to go throught hte process of child abandonment with awareness that they are in fact abandoning and child– that that has consequences– and that if it’s something you REALLY WANT to do, just because you don’t want to deal with your own child that you really are participating in sometheing that might be horrifically painful for that child to process at different points in their lives and it might be worth considering whether the person has a genuine empathy deficit and may not be capable af carign for any children unless they work through that.
@figleaf at July 10, 2011 at 3:21 pm :
The wise voice of an experienced parent.
Thanks for recommending a break from Teh Heavy, figleaf
@typhonblue: First of all that’s fucking catastrophically awful. Although at least its consistent with the widely held (and increasingly enacted) but equally disgraceful point that minors who are forced into becoming mothers are also kind of on the hook not only for child support but child birth!
So I think it’s totally missing the point to carp about who has rights after they’re raped. And put a little bit more than “but women do it too” about actually fucking dealing with rape as, you know, an issue in its own right.
Because, really, it’s bullshit either way that a victim should be forced into *being a victim,* let alone being forced to continue the assault on and on and on.
Of course as a men’s rights activist and a father myself the gender-norm busting solution I’d go for were I the boy and/or his parents is to petition the court for custody of the boy’s child and then sue the rapist for immediate child support if she didn’t go to prison, or for child support if and when she ever got out if she did go to prison.
Because, you know, the whole point is that not only the law but biology and common sense holds that both parents are biologically responsible for a new human and thus are responsible for (and generally perfectly capable of) that child’s upbringing. Circumstances permitting, obviously. Which in this case especially, would be exactly the right call.
—
Also: “The only thing that will comprehensively protect male victims of female rapists is giving all men the right to a paper abortion.”
Bullshit. In fact bullshit on toast with a side of bacon! Giving people the right to shoot anyone they see is not the only way to comprehensively protect robbery victims and so giving all men “paper abortion” privileges is not the only way to comprehensively protect male victims. For instance you could absolutely, completely and comprehensively protect male victims of female rapists simply by giving only victims of female rapists the right to a “paper abortion.”
figleaf
@Typhonblue: In fact, another way you could comprehensively protect male victims is to go to the legislature and lobby for a change in the law that holds minor victims of adult rapists responsible for child support even in the case of a conviction.
Which is exactly what happened in the case you cited above.
In fact if I’m not mistaken it’s what happened back around 2003, right after the decision was handed down.
And since, as far as I can tell, there has not (yet) been another instance of a male victim being held responsible for child support by his convicted rapist I’ll say once again that it’s not just a bullshit claim that the only way to “comprehensively protect male victims” is to give all men the right to
blanket abdication of parental responsibility“paper abortions.” It’s insincere, not-even-trying bullshit.figleaf
Update: the canonical review of the 2002 case wherein a man was held responsible for support of a child conceived when he was a minor (and the adult mother was convicted of statutory rape, no less!) is interesting enough that I broke down and paid for the full text of the article that keeps being cited around the blogosphere.
I’m preparing a post about it. My apologies once again to Noah for hijacking his thread. And for my impatiently intemperate language to TB.
figleaf
p.s. fun fact that nobody should make too big a deal about: Ruth Jones, the law professor who wrote the paper MRAs keep bringing up, is an unabashed feminist who once worked for the NOW Legal Defense Fund. I say no one should make too much out of her being the one to write the article: there are so few male lawyers specializing in family law that if Jones hadn’t written the article it probably wouldn’t have been written about at all.
“It seems to me a rather ugly conflation of those by saying ‘making me pay child support’ is clearly and always a violation of bodily autonomy – whether or not I have to physically work for the money I would pay in child support doesn’t matter, a court is not going to say “Oh, and by the way, mythago, you’re not allowed to pay that money with inheritance or lottery winnings or anything else, you have to get your ass out of bed and earn a paycheck for it.’ ”
Yes, inheritance and winning the lottery are weekly occurances…I live on the generosity of my dying family all the time. And I won the jackpot 25 times.