Quote:
Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger
I feel like we are partly having a discussion that isn't aligned. I really didn't support any suggestions for forced surgery or debate that the woman physically carries the child. I really hate to just repeat the same thing over and over so I'll just say that I think you need to read my posts and think about rights and responsibilities and how they pertain to pre and post birth. Is it 50/50 the whole time? If not, why not? Do you honestly believe that it should be 100/0 in favour of the mother until birth, then it should revert to 50/50? And if you do believe the father should have no say in whether or not his child is born or is aborted, how do you justify forcing that father to take responsibility once the child is born?
I'm not saying I have any solutions. All I'm saying is that I can't imagine that it is fair to break down responsibility of conception/pregnancy/raising a child as 50/50 for conception, 100/0 mother/father in pregnancy then revert to 50/50 in childbirth.
I'd recommend that we make a new thread for this to stop derailing but I think keeping this discussion hidden in the Last Week Tonight thread has kept it low key and allowed for some pretty civil back and forth.
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The solution is obvious and should be available within the next decade. Temporary male birth control will allow men to have a much more reliable say in if they will have a child than they do today.
However, today it's just part of the risks involved. So long as you know the risks and your partner doesn't do anything malicious (like poking a hole in your condom,lying about birth control, etc) to force you to have a child, I think that ultimately you should be 50/50 responsible if she decides to carry it to term. I think that's fair. If you don't like it, have the discussion about what happens if she becomes pregnant before having sex. You can probably even make it legally binding to some extent. Legal precedent exists that your not responsible if your partner is malicious.
I don't think the consent argument here works any better than it does when people use it as an argument for abortion. Consent is irrelevant after you or your partner is pregnant. The only point i have any room for the withdrawal of responsibility for a potential child is before you have sex. Further, I think both sexes should be able to do so. However, I don't think that they should be able to do so completely. I think it's fair that a woman can require the man to be a primary care giver if she brings it to term and vice versa, but I don't think anyone should be able to get out of their financial commitments to a child they created. It's not fair to the child who will already be at a disadvantage being raised by a single parent.
Anyhow, why does a woman have 100% say today? Because she's the one affected for life by having the child (for good of for bad). As a man, your only affected for 18 years. A temporary financial commitment for a child you don't want is hardly the same as the permanent physical ailments some women get by having a child. Quite simply, the woman puts way more on the line (here life, quite literally) during pregnancy than the man and as such is given 100% of the final choice (though the law can require compensation if she goes against a contract she made with her partner).
So why then, does that change at birth? Simple, at this point, the question is no longer about the risks to the mother or the father, but rather, about the child. The question becomes, what is the best and fairest way to help this child become a productive adult. Until there is a way to ensure that the child is not raised in poverty because the father doesn't like the mother (or vice versa), it's only fair that there is an 18 year commitment to your offspring.
It's true that things are not equal the way they are. However, equality and fairness are often not the same thing. I vastly prefer a fair wold to an equal one, and I think the current compromise pretty much as close as we can get to fair until temporary male contraception is widely available.