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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?
No. I'm saying that it's perfectly fine for the government to ban abortion or not and to require financial support from parents or not, and it should do whatever it can in that space of policies to limit the consequences of unintended pregnancy from affecting me.
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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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