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Your characterization is highly uncharitable. When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.
For a young woman that has any sex life, the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant loom large. If the woman doesn't want to have children (yet), abortion is the safety net of last resort. The most commonly available birth control methods--condoms and pills--have a typical-use failure rate of 13% and 7%, respectively. That's the proportion of women who become pregnant within the first 12 months after initiating the use of that birth control method. Even with perfect use, those rates are 2% and 0.3%, and every woman should ask herself how sure she is that she is using them perfectly. IUD's have much better rates (1%), and 10% of US women of reproductive age have them installed, and hopefully that number keeps going up; nevertheless, that rate is not 0.
Every young woman who is having any sex with a man has to ask herself what will she do if she gets pregnant. It's no surprise that so many want to keep abortion as an option.
Plenty of pro-life advocates understand this perspective, and are taking a constructive approach. Around where I live, I see bill-boards advertising support services for any woman who is pregnant and is willing to carry the baby to term. They arrange health services and adoption (if the woman wants to give the child away), or connect to support services for mothers with infants.
I don't know how good any of these services are, but I like the principal of this approach. There is a huge penalty for a young woman to complete the pregnancy (financial, physical, and mental), and this supportive approach reduces some of that penalty.
This is not the term used on left-leaning Reddit though. It is increasingly framed as “(women’s) reproductive rights”.
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I remember reading for years that men that wanted financial abortions should just not have sex if they couldn’t deal with the possible consequences.
The thing I really can't stand is that I've had hours long debates with feminists about legal paternal surrender, and they'll continue to employee the exact mirror-image rhetoric of "women should keep their legs shut", and they just don't get it (in my experiences). It just feels wrong to them to allow financial abortion, and they won't budge no matter how much one points out how much they sound like the traditionalists on the other side that they decry so much.
The fundamental conundrum is that
the father can't unilaterally physically abort the child even before it attains sentience, let alone later - abortion requires the woman to undergo a particular medical procedure, which is certainly cumbersome and not entirely safe;
child support is framed as being for the sake of the child, not the mother.
You are compelled to pay up because you caused the birth of a human with rights; you don't get the right to prevent the birth after conception because that would amount to compelling a human with rights to put themselves at risk. In the trolley problem space, this is somewhere in the "fat man on bridge" class - you set a trolley (reproductive process) in motion that will eventually run over (leave in need of support) a human tied to the tracks (the child), which could be stopped by pushing a fat man (the woman) onto the tracks (abortion). The fat man decides not to jump, the human gets run over, and now you want to be absolved of responsibility because the fat man could have chosen to jump.
"Getting an abortion is roughly similar to jumping off a bridge and being crushed by a train" seems to take it a bit far?
I only said "somewhere in the class", and aren't trolley problems supposed to isolate moral intuitions by way of hyperbole anyway? Putting it differently, what level of sacrifice do you think it is okay to demand from one person to save another from a major financial onus that they knowingly exposed themselves to the risk of? Losing a limb? Taking a strong emetic? Getting punched in the gut? Surely an abortion can at least be somewhere between the latter two in terms of risk/cost.
This argument is always such a mind-bender. You're getting the causality exactly backwards—her choosing to give birth is what engages his financial obligation under the current legal scheme, not the other way around. This obligation can be discharged without affecting her ability to choose.
The engine drives the transmission, not the other way around.
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My personal answer is 'zero' -- but it's for deontological reasons, framing it as a trolley problem is anti-convincing for me.
Child support probably shouldn't be enforced unless both parents are given the opportunity for 50% custody though. (and if the father wants to take on 50% custody then child support should be zero)
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Except the sexes aren't "exact mirror-images," and even those who tend to hold it in theory pretty much don't actually treat the sexes as interchangeable in practice (as your feminist interlocutors demonstrate).
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This is the definition of "privilege". It can't generally be revoked without at least some organization; unfortunately, men have yet to evolve an in-group bias.
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They are right insofar as it's not in their class interest. Who, whom.
Arguing against power is pointless really. If there's one thing trying to maintain Liberalism through argument has taught me it's that.
if you want to get feminists to give this to you, you're going to have to hold something hostage or give them something in exchange.
In the IRL battle of the sexes, Team Woman always wins because that's the team most men are on.
Majorities rarely win. It's not about numbers, it's about organization.
Feminists in particular and women in general are a lot more organized today than men, whose special advocacy groups are a joke.
There has been entire eras and civilizations that regarded either sex as most suspect or despicable, so I'm not sold on the idea that this can't be changed. Sex relations may exist on an innate substrate but the lines of how they play out can move a lot.
Perhaps, but we'd need at least multiple generations of favorable cultural iteration before reproductive autonomy for men isn't a fringe lunatic idea. I imagine that by then the issue wouldn't practically matter anymore.
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Because as a man, to me, a 'financial abortion' is still a fundamentally irresponsible act.
Getting an abortion if you get pregnant and don't want a child, putting aside morality, is a responsible act.
Walking away from a child you've created and that will be born is an irresponsible act.
At what point, chronologically, from conception to birth does a embryo/fetus become a "child" in your model. Also, if you feel like it, please explain why.
To me, the crux of the abortion argument is "when does life start?" People get uncomfortable in defining that because it's a bit of a philosophical issue, a lot of people don't realize how early a lot of human features emerge (and, so, they find themselves accidentally advocating for "post-life-starting" termination), and advances in medical care will mean that viability will keep getting earlier and earlier.
It should be. But pro-choicers really seem to love arguments that imply (or make explicit) that abortion should be permitted in all circumstances regardless of the sapience of the child. I take this as strong evidence that they're being disingenuous when they claim not to believe that the child is sapient. I think abortion is primarily a religious (Satanic) rite of child sacrifice.
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I don’t think of abortion as responsible. Instead, it seems like someone did something irresponsible. Then instead of taking up the consequence of their irresponsibility they terminate the life of an in utero’s baby life. Seems the height of irresponsibility.
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I'm sure that plays well to traditionalist boomers. I really don't know what load-bearing social scaffolding in modern times you expect to bolster this sense of responsibility.
Well, responsibility isn't needed in a world where you can be made to be financially responsibly by the state.
First of all, the social sanction that outside of small communities like this, men who try to find ways to not pay their child support are largely seen as terrible human beings among all ideologies, races, and income levels. About probably the only thing a non-college educated Trump-voting guy making $40k and a PMC woman whose still sad Hillary lost that is making $250k can agree on is guys who don't pay reasonable child support and try to avoid it are a-holes.
Plus, the collapse of cash-only jobs means it's impossible to have any income that make senses that avoids wage garnishment.
Yes, most people have been socially conditioned to still expect men to carry the weight of themselves and others. Even those who have gotten completely tanked on "Women don't need men" narratives for the better part of a decade or more clearly believe this. This doesn't make it right, fair, or justified. Nor is there any assurance that this state of affairs is permanent.
I'm not sure how much weight being a self-interested asshole will carry in the future when we have turned into a nation of self-interested assholes. Or when the thing you're banking on to carry forth this duty (masculinity) has been discarded as either a historical myth or a vacant shape not exclusive to one gender ("girls can be just as strong/powerful/responsible/horny/aggressive as men"). I need to pay child support because I'm a man, but 'man' doesn't have a definition any more, traditionalism is dead, and I'm supposed to keep this going because Outlaw83 prefers it this way?
Good luck with that. No way this will ever collapse, I'm sure.
You vaguely gesture towards some "responsibility" that you can't even coherently define. And when pressed, you collapse into threats from the state and just-so social sanctioning. You can't offer anything else, just sticks. Said threats are certainly salient to this dynamic, but if that's all that's on offer, then I wouldn't be be so assured of this being an enduring constant.
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Guys are assholes until you find out most child support is owed by blacks. https://www.irp.wisc.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CSRA-22-24-T7-01042024.pdf
Then the issue is suddenly genericized and pivoted. Child support should be enforced, but if it is specifically black men that do not pay child support then it is all men who are evil. This pivoting is glaringly obvious to any in the system, and the disingenuity suggests that society is not even with its castigation, even if one population still 'suffers' more by population proportion, because their criminal proportion is still not accurately captured.
One compelling reason for the stateification of social more enforcement is because community social sanctions do not work evenly, and if some communities display greater failure rates in internal prosocial behavior enforcement then it becomes appealing to use the state as the mediating entity. Reworking extant incentive structures is difficult in the best of times, and we plainly are not living in such an era of boundless abundance and social trust.
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The costs are not symmetric, and the woman bears costs no matter which option is taken.
Okay, put a hard number on the medical risk of Abortion, which I'm told is significantly safer than carrying and delivering a child to term. We can discount malpractice and similar, which should obviously be covered by the abortion providers' insurance. It seems to me that the monetary value of any remaining medical risk would have to be orders of magnitude smaller than the expected cost of 18 years of child support.
Problem solved, no?
You don’t need to do this math—there is a market for surrogates. NPV of child support is significantly larger than the cost of a surrogate.
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Pardon, but the consensus is that it isn't a child, which is why we allow routinely allow doctors to cut such entities to pieces with surgical implements and then sell the resulting offal as pharmaceutical raw ingredients, an entirely normal and unobjectionable practice that social consensus strongly resists critiquing.
Likewise, whether or not it will be born is entirely the mother's decision. Financial hardship is a generally-approved motive for termination. Why would it be irresponsible for to allow the man to be absolved of financial responsibility for the potential child before they are born? If the mother does not wish to finance the child's rearing on her own, she is still free to choose to terminate. Why should she be allowed to compel the father to finance her unilateral choices?
Because there are differences between cis-men and cis-women, the responsibility differs - with women, the responsibility continues through the pregnancy with the option for termination, but the man, because he's not carrying the child, the responsibility begins the moment he chooses to have sex with a woman.
Also, a truly financially destitute man won't really be on the hook for more than a meager amount of child support.
...And ends the moment he makes it clear that he doesn't want to raise or support a child, and has offered compensation for the remaining medical risk inherint in terminating the pregnancy, minus that covered by the doctor's malpractice insurance. The fact that biological reality makes perfect symmetry impossible does not salvage even a fraction of the asymmetry you are endorsing. The woman still has all the choice, and there is no principled reason to finance her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support.
What relevance does this have? Rich women are still allowed abortions. Whether the man can pay for a child's rearing has zero bearing on whether he should have to, any more than it does for whether women should have to carry a potential child they do not wish for. The established standard here is not hardship, but mere perception of inconvenience.
It seems to me that your arguments would work a whole lot better on a 90s-era Evangelical social conservative; maybe if that was the sort of person you could reason with, you should have made some effort to preserve their continued existence.
If the choice is between the father financing her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support and me and you financing her unilateral choices... I say the father.
Legal paternity surrender would increase the number of abortions (great!), but also increase the cost to the taxpayer (bad!) There's no principled reason either that someone should be able to get an abortion or that someone should be free from financial obligations: the government should just do whatever makes for a better society.
As long as truly not a single red cent comes out of my pocket to fund her reproductive choices, these terms are tolerable.
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Aren’t you just saying choices have consequences but are willing to remediate those consequences for women?
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There's nothing that says a woman wouldn't be able to choose to get an abortion after the legal paternal surrender, knowing that the man is choosing to not be involved. The man surrenders, and then the woman can then choose what she wants to do accordingly. If she chooses to have the baby at that point, knowing that there's no father, then she would be the one choosing to do the irresponsible act.
This is legitimate logical argument in theory, except it appeals to nobody outside of like, nineteen people in a Discord, because both pro-life and basically 98% of pro-choice people think forcing a woman to have an abortion via pressure is a terrible thing to do.
I guess. I mean, we could talk about what it means to "force" someone to do something. Is a woman forced if she chooses to have an abortion because she knows she can't make ends meet, even if she did have child support from the father? Can someone be forced simply by the circumstances of their life? Anyone can choose to have a baby or not regardless of their lot in life. I don't like that we are less willing to ascribe agency to women than men. I want to be consistent, but no one else wants to be.
Also, regarding responsibility, I don't see why we should make it illegal for someone to do something simply because it is irresponsible.
But I also wanted to add that I sense that my original argument of "feminists just don't get the parallel between LPS and abortion rights" probably doesn't apply to you, since you are likely a traditionalist (?). I'm basing this assumption on that I don't believe that a feminist would generally argue about laws being made based on whether they are responsible actions or not.
Most feminists tend to argue for abortion from the basis of "human rights", whatever that may mean. And I see no reason why the human right for a man to decide his own destiny is any less important than for a woman to decide her own destiny.
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Uh, is the bias of a ready-for-relationships-but-not-ready-for-kids young woman not obvious here?
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It’s good advice, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
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Indeed. That is why one should not have sex unless they are prepared to face the potential consequences. It's not like women simply wake up pregnant and had nothing to do with it.
I consider abortion to be infanticide. I know you probably don't, and we don't have to try to argue with each other on it because it won't be productive. But I imagine you can understand how thoroughly unpersuasive your argument is for someone who thinks as I do, right?
I agree.
Whatever the prevalent culture war rhetoric around sex and abortion, it seems that young women are actually more likely to follow that ideal than previously. Teen birth rates are way down, a quarter of what they were in 1991. Teens are less likely to have sex than before, those who do have it later than before, and with fewer partners source. The number of abortions is down by about a third, compared to early 90's.
These trends don't count as a culture war win for conservatives because they weren't achieved through wider adoption of conservative ideals. But these trends are a definite win for the goal of reducing the deaths of unborn children. Wider adoption of IUD's will further reduce these deaths.
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“Don’t have sex unless you want to procreate” is just a really unpopular stance towards sex in the western world
It's unpopular to say to women.
Yeah, the male sex is famously averse to having sex for purposes other than child rearing
That's not the point. Saying it to women is unpopular in normie society in general, saying it to men isn't.
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More accurately, "don't have sex unless you can handle procreation if it happens". And yeah it's unpopular, but that doesn't make it incorrect. Being an adult means being prepared to handle the consequences of your actions.
The consequences are you get an abortion if you get an accidental pregnancy. We have the technology.
We also have the technology for nuclear bombs, but you don’t get to bomb civilians with nukes if their head of state pulls out of a trade deal.
What? I fail to see the correlation.
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"You have to be an adult and handle the consequences of your actions" and "an unborn child has rights" are two separate clauses and will have to be argued separately.
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That is not true. The potential consequence is "you are pregnant", getting an abortion is one answer to the consequence. It isn't the consequence itself.
Well how far down the ladder do you go on something like that. The consequence may be an expensive unwanted burden, a cherished child, an abortion, a miscarriage, nothing at all, and on and on. An abortion may be one consquence of sex.
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Too extreme an assumption. It could simply be "don't have sex unless probability of a child is acceptable to you."
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I'm glad you helped straighten that out for me.
She could choose not to have sex. That people believe a lack of sex is impossible to live with shows how obsessed with sex society has become. I'd also argue that if a woman does not have the emotional maturity to be firmly committed to accepting the consequences of her actions - whatever their probability - she shouldn't be engaged in whatever those actions are.
While I, of course, support adoption infinitely over abortion, we have to face facts and realize that foster systems and adoption have statistically significant higher rates of abuse etc. It takes a lot of love and effort to raise a child, it takes even more to raise someone else's child.
Just to be clear, "penalty" here is the life of a human infant, correct?
That's exactly what's been happening: the trend among young people is to have sex less. It's even possible that the political divergence between young men and women will contribute to this trend.
I agree that the ideal is for both parents to raise a wanted child. In case of an unwanted pregnancy, the best outcome is for it to somehow become wanted.
Healthy babies are in high demand for adoption, and don't last in the foster system. Normalizing the option of carrying the pregnancy to term and then giving the baby up for adoption not only would reduce numbers of abortion but would help satisfy this demand. I doubt that adopted healthy babies are more at risk of mistreatment than babies who stay with their mother, and a quick online check bears that out.
The other advantage of normalizing giving-baby-up-for-adoption option is that a woman goes through massive biological changes during pregnancy which increase the likelihood of her wanting to keep the baby after all. That's the unwanted-pregnancy-becomes-wanted-baby scenario.
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The objective sex fulfills is emotional self actualisation. The biochemical serotonin and dopamine hit of an orgasm is the same whether it is organically or externally derived, and oxytocin release can be achieved by simply being a fucking human being and having close connections. The narcotic hit of the chemical rush obtained during a tinder hookup is fun, but the consequences are so manifestly bad that it can only be peer pressure (including social media) continually reinforcing toxic positivity about the joys of a hoe phase and situationships.
Re adoption, these remain incredibly popular but specifically for babies. Babies are awesome, and raising a baby is infinitely easier than undoing toddler behaviors that have not been managed, much less children or adolescents with deficient emotional regulatory abilities.
Having said that, despite my pro-infant rhetoric, I find abortion to be a hugely necessary component of modern failed society. Without communities and with perverse incentives, restricting abortion results in more children horn to unfit mothers and absent fathers. With social welfare systems present in multiple facets ,(calorie provision, shelter provision, even automatic school grade promotion in particularly crunchy lefty societies) the cost of bearing a child is borne not by the woman but by society. Forcing these women to carry a child to term will be more taxing on contributers, and so abortion is a necessary release valve.
There are preferred optimalities, such as better deployment of aid resources and education, but direct social shaping tends to fail in heterogenous societies with competing value systems/resource payouts.
By right the optimal solution should be a homogenous overculture with universally accepted standards for compliance and sanction, so a neighbour can castigate a deviant as freely as a mother, or total removal of the social ill. Sex is the most human of desires, so that is never going away. Instead I forcefully propose self terminating 12 year lifespan virtual companions for q3 year olds and state provided sex toys to let them bitch at and get off with, and they are only allowed to have IRL experiences before 25 if both virtual companions sign off on compatibility.
No one said my state provided waifu had to be a real woman.
I like it.
I assume this is supposed to be "13"
It brings up an interesting consideration. Would the ever increasing availability of porn, weed, online gambling, and now AI-waifu girlfriends be the minimal "cost" that hard pro-lifers must be willing to pay to reduce abortion? Hmm.
JD Vance wants to ban porn, so unfortunately he may be an enemy. Given his SV adjacency he may be open to customizable fuckbots, so lets see what Altman et al posit regarding future human relationships. We may all end up dating ScarJoAtHome. Not the worst option but this may be what finally breaks my F2P streak.
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Adoption and the foster care system are very different things. Foster care is mostly for children who have been removed from their parent's home, or otherwise become wards of the state. It's dealing with a population that's selected for a bit more than bad luck and is usually selected into it at an older age, and it's also not typically intended to be a permanent placement. Foster kids can and do get moved, and ideally reunited with the parents(in practice, the parents usually don't get into fit shape to get their kids back, but that's the theoretical goal of the system).
Adoption, on the other hand, is a permanent placement with a new family. Adopted children are usually adopted as infants, or otherwise too young to remember, and domestic adoptions are basically selected for a birth mother in unlucky circumstances.
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I'll step in and say this seems uncharitable and worded to gain internet points. Though I have been nodding in agreement with many of your earlier posts.
It may sound harsh and uncaring but sure, yes, an unplanned pregnancy taken to term can seem like a penalty, a life-changing penalty, particularly if the father has fucked himself right off, the woman's parents are judgmental or absent, and she is faced with raising the child essentially (or actually) alone. This shouldn't be so difficult to grasp, unless you simply don't like the wording.
This is partially for internet points, yes. I also think that waging a culture war on an anonymous forum is pretty low stakes, so I don't mind chucking grenades over the wall that I wouldn't in person. Perhaps that makes me an anonymous digital coward, so be it.
I understand what you're saying. I've seen it up close. Appalachian extended family. 15 and pregnant happened to a cousin. Dad was dead, Mom was in rehab. The extended family stepped in and ... it almost ruined like three families financially. So, I guess not only do I understand what you're saying, I can confirm it.
But my prior also happens to be that human life is sacred and priceless. I also wouldn't assume that every woman who gives birth in dire situations sees their life satisfaction plummet. I'll acknowledge again that a hard pro-life stance easily comes off as hard hearted. It's difficult for it to shake that.
Not a coward, but this place is not for explicitly waging the culture war. Please do not try to "score Internet points."
Most of your post was fine, but the parts that weren't (the "waging culture war" parts) are precisely what makes most abortion threads turn into shitty exchanges of bad-faith straw men. "You think a child is an inconvenience that should be casually disposed of!" "You just want to control women's bodies!" Usually both sides actually have a pretty good understanding of what the other side actually believes (and doesn't) , but "chucking grenades" is more satisfying.
Don't do that here.
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Dude, I agree with you. But this isn't the place to wage the culture war. There are lots of incredibly relevant points you can make without waging the culture war, much less actively admitting you're violating the fundamental rule of the site.
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