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As a man with a kid I will emphatically tell you that there is an extreme asymmetry between being a father who is the sole financial provider and being a woman who carries a pregnancy to term, delivers the baby, and breastfeeds the baby, so much so that it’s basically nonsensical to see the financial aspect and the physical aspect as analogous issues.
If you look at the risk of death, the asymmetry is quite small. In the US, the CDC gives maternal mortality of 22 per 100,000 live births (which is probably overstated). The BLS gives an annual workplace mortality rate of 3.7 per 100,000 FTE workers. An absent father is going to end up spending roughly 4 years working to pay child support (20-25% of after-tax income for 18 years), which would give a death toll from paying child support of 15 per 100,000 live births if child support defendants had average workplace death rates. Since men work much more dangerous jobs than women, the true figure is probably higher than the maternal mortality rate. But the crucial point is that the risks of dying due to giving birth or paying child support are of the same order of magnitude.
Except they have to work anyway, and would die anyway. The number of men who die on a job who would not be on that specific job if not for child support payments is likely not that high. Unless there's some society with a much lower workplace death rate that has divorce banned I'm unaware of.
In America (and, to a lesser extent, other 1st-world countries) the socially acceptable way to not work because you don't need to is to retire early - there used to be a soft norm that blue-collar guys retired at 60 if they could. There are plenty of men in their 60's working who would be retired if they had been able to accumulate more wealth, and for a lot of them the reason why they couldn't accumulate wealth was divorce or child support obligations.
I think you are right that the average guy who is irresponsible enough to knock up a sloot is going to spend the money he saves by avoiding child support on driving a bigger truck rather than saving for retirement. But this doesn't affect the moral point I was making, which is that the male role as breadwinner and the female role as mother have similar death tolls.
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That's a bit harsh; although I can see the argument that being a sole financial provider for 18 years is a worse deal for the father, the asymmetry isn't so great that you can entirely discount women's contribution.
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