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Notes -
Sex is risky in many ways besides the obvious. Yes, if you choose not to be celibate, you choose to take on risk.
If you hook up with a malicious actor, you might get screwed over. This is true for women just as much as men. The nature of the screwing might be different, but for every story of some poor fellow who got drunk at a party and wound up stuck with 18 years of child support, there are plenty of stories of women who got drunk at a party and wound up with a child and a deadbeat dad. Or a stalker, or an abuser.
Men and women can be extraordinarily shitty to each other. Without being a conservative myself, I think there is much to be said for the traditional concept of, you know, being careful and selective about who you hook up with. This does not, of course, guarantee that one doesn't wind up with a bad partner who screws you over in the end, but it greatly reduces the likelihood.
I have little sympathy for anyone of either sex who wants to go sow their wild oats and not be held accountable for the reaping.
@KulakRevolt's screed is as usual as entertaining as it is devoid of rigor or probity. It's just another fist shaken at society, another reason why we should burn everything down. And all the people with deep grievances against women coming out, as they always do in threads like these, are missing the point of child support, as they always do in threads like these. The point isn't to "hand your money over to a woman," it's to avoid having unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. You want to get your dick wet, you know there is a possibility of producing a child, and if it's not your responsibility (jointly) to provide for that child, then whose is it? I see no reason why anyone else who wasn't involved in the bumping of uglies should have to pay for it.
Sure, I see your edge case of one woman in one case who was held not responsible for children she was forcibly impregnated with by incest, and I'll agree that there's a certain inequity there when compared with your other edge case of one guy who got drunk at a party and woke up a father nine months later. The law isn't an algorithm, this is like comparing that one man who shot someone in Kansas and got a suspended sentence and that other woman who shot someone in Florida and got life. Even if we agree that the cases are roughly comparable, this does not mean the law treats women murderers more harshly than men and thus laws against murder are sexist and terrible.
None of the men moaning that it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities after a hook-up would be satisfied by a law carving out an exception for male rape victims.
(Helpful reminder to the thread that even off Reddit, we still don't downvote for disagreeing!)
Pretty clearly we do!
(Seriously, has ever been so. There is no amount of pleading or haranguing that will make people stop doing it. Just as a certain number of people will always report others for disagreeing.)
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And yet every single state in the US has safe haven laws where a woman can just hand away the kid after birth and is left with zero (0) consequences. The father doesn't even get to choose to keep the child, the mother can just hand it away. Those children become the state's responsibility as well but nobody cares about the hypocrisy.
That's because safe haven laws are there to stop women dumping unwanted babies who will then die. They have different goals. Remember the legal system is not monolithic. It has been built by people with varying goals and ideas, who have assembled a patchwork of interlocking systems at different times, from different parties and different ideologies.
Having said that, do note, that the other parent may be able to petition for custody and in some states the State must specifically check with the other parent before revoking parental rights. It does vary by state. So it is not necessarily true that the father does not get to choose to keep the child.
Then why isn't their a provision to allow fathers to dump unwanted babies who will then die? If you're going to say it's because the mother may want them then the same argument also applies in reverse. And even given that some states allow the other parent to petition for custody, this isn't true in all of them.
Safe haven laws as far as i can tell don't specify which parent can use them. So men can use them its just much less common.
While many of these safe haven laws technically are gender neutral in wording, in many states unwed genetic mothers by default get custody. The unwed father has no such automatic right. He has to establish paternity and petition in court before being able to have rights over any child born out of wedlock. Mind, too, that women control information about and access to the kid and therefore can very easily block such a process.
As an example, Arizona's law states that "If a child is born out of wedlock, the mother is the legal custodian of the child for the purposes of this section until paternity is established and custody or access is determined by a court."
https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506194043/https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
This situation allows the mother to abandon the child or alienate him from it early on. On the other hand, if the father wants to avail himself of these safe haven laws which are technically open to him, he'll have to take the child out of the mother's custody - unlawfully - and in doing so he can be charged with custodial interference or kidnapping.
That previous Arizona law I cited also states that custodial interference is committed when someone "Takes, entices or keeps from lawful custody any child, or any person who is incompetent, and who is entrusted by authority of law to the custody of another person or institution." Anyone in violation of that opens themselves up to felony charges.
So while Arizona's safe haven law is on its face gender neutral, subject to the previous Arizona law I cited in my first comment, unwed fathers in Arizona who take the child out of the mother's custody to put it in a safe haven can still be prosecuted for custodial interference, whereas unwed mothers early on can unilaterally put their children in safe havens without anyone's consent and escape any prosecution because they are the default custodian until the father pursues access and custody.
Additionally, here's an adoption lawyer in a forum for legal advice answering a question about whether a father can give up a child to a safe haven without the mother's consent:
https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-a-man-access-safe-haven-laws-without-the-moms--3458852.html
"Do you want to be arrested? Because if you do, that is a sure fired way. When a woman gives birth and the parents are unmarried, the woman has presumed custody. If you did this you would be facing criminal charges as an unmarried father has no rights unless he pursues then in court."
And this article provides a generalised rundown of the situation:
"Though written in gender-neutral terms, many American states now effectively permit the abandonment of newborns to be undertaken solely by genetic mothers. These acts usually foreclose, without notice or a chance to be heard, any legal parenthood for genetic fathers who are fit and willing to parent and who may even have attained federal constitutional childrearing interests, as through, for example, marital presumptions. Genetic mothers can walk away from parental responsibilities early on in a child's life, whereas comparable desertions are usually forbidden for genetic fathers in cases where the genetic mothers maintain custody, as well as for genetic mothers once their children are a little older."
"While a genetic mother having child custody may employ Safe Haven laws to escape parental responsibilities, genetic fathers without custody typically may not walk away in the same fashion. They cannot escape child support obligations, even if they never attained childrearing rights. They cannot desert their genetic offspring, even if they were fooled into conception and were forgotten (or avoided) during the pregnancy and at the birth."
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/80506024.pdf
In other words, men are not able to access safe haven laws the same way women can in practice.
Again you're going up against biological reality. The one person that is definitively the parent is the one who gave birth. Given that means fathers usually have to be registered particularly in the non married situation most common and that safe haven laws are the politicians response to heat when sympathetic often post partum mothers got prosecuted for abandoning new born babies mostly soon after birth then again there is no reason mothers and fathers should be treated the same.
The issues with safe haven laws stem from the biological reality that the first parent acknowledged is going to be the mother. It isn't symmetric.
Point is, people can't pretend (as they often do in these discussions) that the system allows men and women to abandon children equally when in actual practice this is not the case. In practice, the ability to walk away is by and large reserved for the biological mother.
It's mostly accessible to mothers sure, but not necessarily because of safe haven laws themselves. And fathers in certain circumstances can access them, but it will be rarer. A father where the mother died in childbirth and so on.
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And I want to point out that this is how the conservative movement in the USA tends to see things. A man or teenaged boy who chooses to have sex is choosing to at least potentially make a baby. So is a woman, but most conservatives don't support abortion rights.
If you wanted to make a law that male rape victims can't be held responsible for child support, I suspect that the American conservative movement would go "ok, makes sense, but it's not the world's #1 problem". But this idea that sex can possibly be without commitment or "no strings attached" or whatever is absolutely foreign to conservative sentiment. Sex makes responsibilities. Some of those responsibilities are babies, sometimes those responsibilities are just to your partner, but they're always there and you shouldn't try to wiggle out of them.
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All this is well and good, if we lived in conservative world absolutely men should take responsibility for their offspring. But we don't live in conservative world, we live in the hyper individualist progressive world where accountability is a dirty word and men are noticing that everyone else gets to reap the rewards of this tradeoff except themselves. All these universal values that we're supposed to stoicly bear when they're against our interests seem to turn to sand the moment a situations comes up when they might defend our interests and we're starting to see that the game appears to be rigged. That if there is an universal value in play it is that we will do what is best for women and this is only not said aloud as to dupe credulous men. alimony seems very much to be less about the kid and more about the state leaning on it's monopoly of force to skip out on a bill that is the obvious consequence of its other policies.
If consent to sex is consent to a parenthood then lets live in that world, if it's not please stop pretending that we do when it harms me.
What would this world that you don't think exists look like to you, besides banning abortion?
Something more like socially enforced monogamy, premarital sex being looked at more like experimenting with opiods than some life phase important for self discovery. I'm not really one of these conservatives, my preference is for the more freedom oriented world we do live in, I just find the inconsistent application of values grating.
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Correct; the meta-rule is just "you lose". It's not so strange that leftists endorse this situation. It is strange that conservatives do also.
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Do you have similar feelings about revenge porn? After all, if she didn't want those pictures out there, she shouldn't have had them taken in the first place. I find it rather perverse that men who engage in oral sex with condoms are considered to be freely giving "a gift — an absolute and irrevocable transfer of title to property from a donor to a donee", so have no legal recourse should she decide to use the sperm to later artificially inseminate herself and burden him with responsibility for a child while women who consent to recording sexual activities are protected from his later use of said recordings.
I don't think revenge porn is directly comparable, but yes, I do think it's pretty stupid to put your nudes out there if you expect them never to be shared, and I also think that someone who shares someone's nudes nonconsensually is a scumbag.
As for these edge case scenarios people keep bringing up like the woman who digs a condom out of the trash to impregnate herself, I think the law probably should make exceptions for truly involuntary cases of impregnation (male rape victims, stolen condoms/sperm, etc.), which would be equitable with the right of women to use abortion to avoid involuntary pregnancy. That the law currently does not address these rare cases "fairly" is not a compelling argument to me that therefore all the other men who'd like to sever paternal responsibilities should be able to do so.
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And if and when she did, the system won't hold her accountable. It offers her plenty of outs, such as 1: abortion, 2: safe haven abandonment, and 3: adoption, all of which she has a unique ability to access because she carries the child, and additionally any child born out of wedlock is in her sole custody by default and thus she won't be guilty of custodial interference by taking advantage of safe haven laws. Pray tell, why has your hypothetical woman not taken advantage of any of these options available to her, if she does not want to care for a child and the father is out of the picture? And which analogous "ways out" are fathers allowed?
Yet safe haven abandonment is explicitly allowed, and these laws absolutely create unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. I suppose that by the same token, you oppose safe haven abandonment as a method of surrendering parental responsibility for women, correct? If you have decided not only to perform the act that resulted in conception but also have carried the pregnancy to term and have eschewed every option to terminate up until that point, then you absolutely have the responsibility to care for it. Under this worldview, that is.
I'm not going to lie, this entire "personal responsibility" screed you've produced here sounds like an awfully convenient way to avoid the clear double standards that exist surrounding this entire thing.
If you look at it in isolation, perhaps. Looking at the entire picture, it forms part of a much larger pattern wherein women are treated with far more leniency and are granted far more options when it comes to abrogating parental responsibilities.
Sure. They're claiming it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities because women can.
The law does hold women accountable for providing for the care of their children. Women have options men do not have for terminating pregnancy because men do not get pregnant.
Only a handful of infants are surrendered every year under safe haven laws. I doubt many of those were produced by fathers who otherwise would have been willing participants in the child's upbringing.
The double standard is one enforced by biology.
But they don't actually care about this, they just want to be able to have consequence-free sex and leave the woman stuck with the responsibility of deciding what to do if she becomes pregnant. I believe exactly zero arguments based on "unfairness."
The point you carefully elide is that in those cases where a woman can sever her responsibilities, she's also terminating any responsibility the father has as well. You also speak of adoption and safe haven abandonment as if this is a common and casual option, like Plan B.
It's really strange how when this subject comes up so many people transform into BASED proponents of natural law.
Rape should be legal. Why would men be stronger than women if it wasn't to physically dominate them?
Nah, see men have two reproductive strategies and fucking everything that moves willing or not is just one of them.
Hobbes would justly point out that it is our duty to civilize and attune ourselves to the best parts of our nature, which here is clearly the second one where people marry and don't destroy each other in the chaos of the war of all against all.
Natural law isn't the state of nature.
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That's a weird take and I don't think it's an ingenuous one.
Recognizing that biology has a material impact does not mean being a proponent of "based natural law" and fantasies about reverting to Hobbesian savagery.
It's perfectly ingenuous.
I don't see anyone throwing their hands up and saying "well men are just stronger than women are so there's really no point in trying to resist that fact with law we just have to recognize biological reality" but people like yourself seem perfectly happy insisting that biology wrote our laws regarding paternity established family courts and decided their policy and there's just nothing we can do about it.
I do not think "biology wrote our laws regarding paternity established family courts" (sic).
I do not think there is "nothing we can do about" inequities that may result from biological differences.
I think laws need to reflect facts like, for example, that women can get pregnant and men can't.
If you really are sincere about "Laws against rape, or laws recognizing only women get pregnant: choose one," well, that is certainly a take.
And I think that they should also reflect facts like, for example, women are the sole authority over the reproductive process from start to finish, where such facts are applicable.
Get bent.
Get bent.
You are not allowed to talk to people like this here.
If you said this to anyone else, I would give you a 1-day ban. Since you directed it at me, I'm just going to issue a warning.
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In my opinion, abortion is a far more morally fraught method of surrendering parental responsibility than legal paternal surrender (LPS). There's the worse issue in abortion of "maybe we're killing something here that deserves rights" which simply isn't present in LPS. Perhaps hardline pro-choicers who don't see the unborn as being deserving of rights at any stage of development and don't see any moral greyness in any part of the issue would disagree, but IMO that's a thorny issue which is very unique to abortion. It actually appears to me that abortion is a more questionable practice than LPS. There are very few methods of surrendering parental responsibility that don't invite moral objection.
And that debate aside, the existence of abortion as a unique option for women that already exists by virtue of them getting pregnant raises the question as to why women have further additional methods of surrendering their parental responsibility that men do not after birth.
By bringing up safe haven abandonment I'm not arguing that women are giving babies away that fathers want (though that is a distinct possibility and IIRC in the case of adoption there have been cases where biological fathers were alienated from their children - the rights of fathers are often not appropriately respected in these proceedings). Rather, I'm arguing that if a woman does not want a kid she's given birth to, she can abandon it, and put the burden on the state to deal with it.
If we were to be consistent with the principle that taxpayers should not be obligated to pay for children that aren't theirs, she should not be allowed to access safe haven abandonment at all. She should be made to keep the kid that she chose to carry to term, and help the state identify the biological father so the child can receive support from both parents. That this is not the current system is pretty incongruent.
I'm a pretty strong supporter of LPS myself from a moral consistency standpoint. I'm also very certain your characterisation doesn't accurately portray my motivations for arguing in favour of it, given the fact that I don't have any desire to have "consequence-free sex" with women. Or just sex with women at all.
Very few of the policies I argue in favour of with regards to male-female relations actually end up benefiting me.
Correct. She is allowed to sever her responsibilities if she wants, and also terminate the father's responsibilities in the process. None of this contradicts my assertion that women have an array of options they can utilise to terminate their parental responsibilities, some of which they can utilise even after birth, and men typically cannot do so at any stage of the process without also having the woman's cooperation and consent.
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Which doesn't apply to the rape victim cases.
I think that if the law had an unprincipled exception exactly for rape victims and nobody else, these men wouldn't be happy. I also think that if the law had an exception for rape victims that was based on principles, then the kind of principles that would support an exception for rape victims would inherently change the rest of the system, in such a way that they'd be happy.
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