Discuss.

Since when have men not been allowed to have a say on abortion?

I guess it's a hypothetical situation - woman decides to have the baby without asking the guy's opinion.

Answer: yes. Abortion is not birth control. If you don't want to be a parent, use birth control. If the birth control fails, have the decency to support someone who is in an even shittier situation than you are.

I don't see how abortion is relevant at all. Typically (not always), a man that pays child support didn't want to have a baby in the first place, anyways.

If they don't want babies, they should use birth control methods. They don't have to pay child support if they marry the mother. Abortion is traumatic, men should have no say in it.

They are held accountable for being the parent of the resulting child. However, they have no right in saying what the mother decides to do with her own body (ie, abortion). Men should not have the right to force a woman to have a potentially dangerous operation against her will.

If men don't want to pay child support, they can use birth control or get sterilized or avoid sex with fertile women or only have sex with prostitutes.

Again, men have a responsibility to the child. However, that doesn't give them any rights over the bodies of adult women. Just as men wouldn't appreciate women having the right to force them to be sterilized against their will. Only you own your body.

I don't understand how it could work - a man who didn't want to pay child support could always say after the fact that he had wanted the woman to get an abortion and thus he's off the hook?

Yes, that's the suggestion.

They are accountable because of their part in it. It's like when you say mean words to someone without thinking it through and then wish you hadn't opened your mouth but there's no way to take them back, pretending that wasn't what you really wanted to say only adds insult to injury, so to make up for it you spend the next 18 days being really nice to them.

Men can have a say in abortions the day they invent a procedure to transfer the embryo to a man's body. When they're the ones risking their lives and bodies, they get to choose what happens in their bodies.

The woman is rarely the only one with the power to decide that. Men have the power to put on condoms, to get vasectomies, and to refuse to have sex when their partner isn't using birth control. If you have unprotected sex with someone of the opposite gender, with both of you being fertile, then you've accepted the potential fact of parenthood.

The man is still held accountable because he is partly responsible for the situation having arisen. His right to choose not to be a parent should have been exercised earlier.

How do you enforce a termination onto someone? Do you want to be able to ask for a termination at any moment during a pregnancy because you want to have a choice? Maybe guys should make choices based on things that they have control over like method of birth control not things that are completely out of their grasp.

Contained in a condom?

There are legal avenues you can pursue to be legally unaccountable for the child. Like I mentioned in the other thread, donors and recipients have to sign forms stating that the donor is not responsible for anything beyond shedding an oocyte. Men can go to the courts and get a similar waiver.

Sorry, bro, but when you play coochie roulette, even with birth control, you're rolling odds that you're going to produce life. If the idea of helping support a child that you had a hand in creating is such an unfathomable idea, think with the big head and not the little one, develop some self-control, sleep with women that you're not terrified of seeing the next morning, or any combination of the three.

Biologically, men only have one point at which they have input: conception. Women have 9 months of input. That's a fact of life. Men don't have the option of having an abortion, so they have to plan better before conception.

The fact that a man doesn't have control over a woman's reproductive organs, doesn't mean that he has the right to ignore the child. A child which is born has the right to be supported. That's why we have the concept of child support.

There's a lot more to being a parent than writing a check every month. That would be the bare minimum of responsibility. And men duck out on paying child support all the time. If someone does that, they have to own it, that they're in the wrong - not expect society to say 'oh, that's okay, we understand that you don't want to be a grown up."

Playing devil's advocate, what if the man was led to believe that he was engaged in contraception? What if the woman said, "I'm on the pill, don't use a condom" and she wasn't using any form of contraception? If the man has absolutely no say in paying child support on the basis of "well, he could have used contraception" then wouldn't a woman lying to coax the man into practicing a form of sex that reasonably be expected to lead to conception be less liable? What if the man isn't even involved with the woman any longer, say he was married previously and had his semen taken by a fertility clinic - such a thing would be an asset in the divorce, fair game, right? Or what if it wasn't even him (or her), what if his (or her) father belated fathered a child through such means and his unasked for child, presumably needing child support and such things being absolute and entirely sacrosanct as I understand some of your opinions, incurred child support costs presumably owed by his estate, which could mean they'd transfer to his children the same way other debts can? What if a man had a reasonable expectation of a presumed abortion, a conversation between himself and his partner that could be understood to be an agreement to have an abortion - the same way people engaging in BDSM can presumably engage in sexual relations that other people might regard as battery or detention against their will? What if the semen was saved by a savvy partner (or outside party to the copulation) with all presumably reasonable means of preventing conception present - someone slipping in after the fact and whisking spent condoms away for use later on as a means of becoming pregnant?

I'm not coming into this one with strong feelings on either side, just trying to brainstorm up some actual controversy besides some dudes going "No way!" and having people yank a baby out of someone. The child support issue is more complicated and nuanced, I think. It's the place where the actual issues and imprecision of the way we treat consent, property, and liability might sometimes fall apart in fringe cases. I think most of the things I presented are unlikely and pretty much absurd, but OTOH that's the justice system in a nutshell most of the time. If things were easy to resolve you wouldn't need a judge or legislation.

I don't think your various scenarios are that farfetched except I don't think the duty to pay child support would extend beyond the grave. I agree that there is unfairness for the male factor in the birth equation. If I was being sued for child support by someone I wasn't in a relationship with, I suppose the best thing to do would be consult an attorney and ask for a DNA test to establish paternity after the child is born.
Maybe the solution is for every sexual encounter that involves semen in vaginas to be preceded by a contract signing by the female - I hereby swear that I am ingesting birth control pills on a daily basis" "I hereby swear that after this sexual encounter I will proceed to a pharmacy and procure the morning after pill.", etc.

Not using a condom is still stupid. Ever heard of diseases? If he doesn't know her well enough to know whether or not she's actually taking the pill, he doesn't know her disease status.



No. If she takes his sperm after separation proceedings have begun - and the fertility clinic would have a record of this - with the purpose of extracting more money from him, she could potentially be penalized for it.



No, and I've never seen something that stupid. Yet.



Then he can go to the courts and make that claim.



Fertility clinics no longer allow people to do that.

Have you been haunting MRA forums? Because this really sounds like what they say.

You know what, you're right. It's not fair that women get to have abortions while men can't. You know what also isn't fair? That one gender has to risk their lives to procreate while the other doesn't. You know what pregnancy can do to your body? My mom got some of her stomach muscles popped out of place. She had to have surgery a few years ago to get it fixed. Pregnancy can mess up your pelvic floor, making sex less enjoyable or making it harder to hold your bladder when you go over a speedbump or cough. There are conditions where a woman gets severe enough nausea that she can't eat or drink anything for nine months. Even if she doesn't eat, the retching doesn't stop. And, of course, there's the chance that the pregnancy will end up in a Fallopian tubes, so as the baby grows, it could tear her uterus apart. And then we come to the childbirth itself. You know how when you squeeze a bottle of toothpaste from the bottom, the toothpaste starts coming out? A baby does the same thing to the large intestines and bladder, so a woman has to lie in her own excretions in front of strangers while she's giving birth. The perineum usually tears apart, which is about as painful as anal sex with no lube. If the delivery goes too fast, her vagina can tear and permanently damage things.

Oh, and then you have to deal with the infant itself. You know how annoying TS2 infants are, when you can't see their needs? Imagine that you have to care for one 24/7 for several years. Sleep is interrupted at best. There's also the social implications; if you work while you have a child, you get yelled at for not properly caring for it. If you don't, you get accused of being a welfare queen/setting feminism back (because being free to make our own choices means that we can't choose to take care of kids!). Then there's the breastfeeding. If you do, you're probably not allowed to in public, so you have to feed your baby on a toilet whenever you go out. If you don't, then obviously you're not taking care of your child properly. And then there's the fact that a lot of women can't breastfeed, or it takes a long time and then they feel like failures on top of getting shamed for not breastfeeding.
And you know what, that's only a fraction of what women go through when they become mothers. I don't know; my only experience is being on the other side, and she obviously thought it was hellish enough to kick me out and trap me in a place where I'd previously tried to commit suicide to avoid, just so she could get some comfort back.

Yes, it's totally unfair that a woman gets to terminate her pregnancy while a man has to pay child support, because the possibility of death, pain, and giving up your life is way less important than a monthly check to support your lack of condom.

You seem to have created a rather artificial disconnect between sex and babies here, as if they often happen at around the same time but one does not cause the other. It's very odd.

Mistermook, those are certainly more complex situations, no doubt about it. Essentially, in those situations, the man involved didn't have the opportunity to choose whether or not to be a parent. In such a case - excluding the inheritance one, which is covered by inheritance law - I'd say that the moral duty is probably to support the child, if you can. Whether or not it should be a legal duty, however, I'm not sure.

Ooh, here's a question: if a woman gets raped and conceives a child, then is it unfair to make the rapist pay child support? Because obviously, he couldn't choose not to become a parent.

It's funny, really. Over the years in the UK, there's been a lot of protest over the family court system from a group called Fathers4Justice. They argue that child custody hearings are discriminatory: they are unfairly weighted in the woman's favour, so it's usually mothers who get primary custody, with fathers restricted to visiting rights. They want the system changed to give fathers a fairer chance at being allowed to bring up their children. Never before have I heard anyone claiming discrimination on the grounds that they're being forced to have too much contact with their children.

Over here, we also have a similar problem with Mens Rights Activists. They claim that women are evil shrews who will marry them and take their children, not allowing them to gain custody because the world is misandrist and hates men. They also say that women are evil because they will get themselves pregnant and then force the guys to pay child support for children they didn't want.

Ironically, while they say that feminists are trying to suppress mens' rights and are thus evil (they need better vocabularies), they're actually on the same side on many issues. The reason custody is given to women more than men is because women are traditionally seen as the ones who're supposed to take care of the kids while men are the distant breadwinners. That's a dynamic that feminists are trying to change, because it's patriarchal. And MRAs are divided by circumstance on abortion; when the man wants it, it's good and when he doesn't, it means that the evil woman is preventing him from having the baby that he clearly wants.