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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.
Pound sand.
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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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