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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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