Should a Man be Forced to Pay Child Support for a Child He Wanted to Abort?

It is in my eyes :shrug:

I don't understand how you can say the dad must give money to the mother simply because to do otherwise would "stiff" the child. Am I understanding you correctly this time?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

actually i already posted my opinion

that i think if two people are in a commited relationship then the decision should be a JOINT one, thats my only opinion on the matter.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Much as my wording implied law, I was thinking more morals. I have sympathy for the guy working in the gas station who had a quicky with A FEMALE LAWYER and gets slapped with chipping in a portion of his salary for the quicky behind the rest rooms with someone he did indeed talk about abortion with and he used a condom.

I know six guys in that exact situation. (oh, all right, I'm lying)

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Notes Around

That's your problem. Don't make it anyone else's. In fact, go get the vasectomy. Don't ever have kids.

Nope. Not quite.

• • •​

If you say so.

Meantime, have you thought of an equivalent principle yet?

• • •​

Fair 'nuff.

Indeed, I have sympathy for guys in certain of these situations. But, still ... we take the risks, we answer for the outcomes. Doesn't mean I have any less sympathy for them. At least, until they start excusing themselves, which is another point altogether, which happens to be my disgust at the general discussion, which, as I noted, is beside the point of your particular point. Or ... um ... something.

 

what do you mean tiassa?
what like the proposal that sterilisation procidures shouldnt be carried out on either gender with out the concent of there partner?
that was a serious proposal a few months ago

 

on autonomy i was atempting to find a link to the proposal i was talking about about partners concenting to sterilisation and i found this:

http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lrc.nsf/pages/R49CHP7

 

Same reason the father can get nailed for child support by the adoptive parents of the baby or the state, becuase the law and ethics are often divorced from each other.

Hell we learned that in the discussion of if a man should pay child support if he was raped.

 

In neither case should he have to pay, and in neither case should the mother have to pay.

 

A fundamental weakness of the general proposition

I mean that this entire argument is out of our league. That is, as men, we are beyond the limit of our knowledge, and operating purely on superstition, stereotype, innuendo, and other shaded exploitations of the notion of truth.

The proposition of an equivalent principle is intended to consider that we have no means by which to truly understand the decision to abort or carry to term a pregnancy. The argument seeks to establish a certain dominion for men: if we do not have a say over what takes place inside another person's body, we ought not have any responsibilities resulting from such decisions.

This notion is fallacious at best, and smacks of calculation. It asserts a standard of moral and ethical propriety that, unsurprisingly, coincides with certain men's self-interests. To consider Betrayer0fHope as an example, when he responded to the proposition that, "Justice is not always about the self", by declaring, "It is in my eyes", he undermines historical triumphs of justice such as the abolition of slavery and civil rights for blacks. Indeed, these assertions of justice, which could not have come about without the acknowledgment of white people—who are not black, and who stood to lose certain advantages that they might or might not have chosen to exploit—are, by Betrayer0fHope's assertion, illegitimate. That we do not sell our daughters into loveless and exploitative marriages in order to increase our political and economic standing is an injustice against men; that we cannot force our wives to give us sexual satisfaction whenever we choose is, by that logic, similarly unjust.

Thus I assert that justice is not always about the self. Indeed, the only thing that is important, in consideration of a woman's body and a living child in the world, seems to be—by the discussion at hand—men. I consider this not only absurd, but dishonorably so. The care and protection of new generations of humanity is, evolutionarily speaking, the duty of our species to its own perpetuity. That we can elect, as no other species seems able to, to terminate ourselves—erase humanity from the Universe—does not mean that we should. (Not every mountain need be climbed simply because it is there.) Showing such contempt toward our young and our species in order to serve our immediate self-interest is nothing more than a juvenile rebellion against nature itself. After all, the fact that perpetuity of species is the purpose of life and the cornerstone of the concept of evolution does not in any specific sense bind humanity to any sort of allegiance to the idea. We certainly can choose to live in the moment and damn the consequences. This is not wise, but it also is our right.

In that sense, then, the question becomes, "What if it was you?" But there is a problem here, because men don't get pregnant, and have never encountered such contexts of nature as are involved with carrying a child. So the problem that comes with the question is a blank space: "What if it was you? What if _____?"

What goes in that blank space? What is the equivalent principle that could help men understand the magnitude of nature under such circumstances? Presently, I assert there is none, and if you—or anyone else—can fill in that blank with something that legitimately equals the magnitude of the decision itself and the natural influences that affect one's perspective in such a moment, then, perhaps, we might be able to put the general proposition of this discussion into some kind of relevant perspective.

As I noted in considering a point of Visceral Instinct's:

Any guy who is willing to blindly climb on as soon as he hears what he wants—"Of course I'll have an abortion"—is simply fooling himself. Now, maybe the woman does go on to have the abortion. But he should not be surprised if nature wins out when the woman faces the choice directly. If he has failed to account for this possibility, instead pretending that nature—of which humanity is a mere component—is wholly subordinate to abstract human will, whose fault is that?​

The whole time we argue about how cruel to men is a woman's decision to not abort a child, we have no idea whatsoever what we're talking about.

Which means that the moral or ethical proposition that oh so conveniently coincides with an immediate and ephemeral assertion of tangible self-interest is founded in, and calculated from, ignorance.

Which, in turn, renders the proposition itself somewhat despicable.

And that infamy can be mitigated somewhat if someone can explain an equivalent principle that exists in men's lives, so that we might consider a similar usurpation against our own bodies and lives, and decide whether we would trade that in order to excuse ourselves of our responsibilities.

The proposition of this discussion addresses a fundamental difference between women and men. So let us consider another fundamental difference between the sexes: men evolved for a specific reason. And on the eve of that reason being made—at least in principle—extraneous, we find ourselves complaining about the fact that we exist at all. It is beyond ironic that we should do so. Indeed, it is infamous.

Of course, this is exactly what happens when we invoke principles that presume the Universe itself exists solely for our individual benefit, which is in turn exactly what our friend has proposed in his declaration that justice is entirely about the self.

 

So women love their children more than men? Because you definitely imply that when you say that men cannot understand how it feels to abort a child like a woman does...

 

here is an observation for you tiassa,

PB and i have been arguing constantly about wether when we have kids she should have an elective c-section

now i have more medical knowlage than she does symply because of the training im getting and im against it because a) the rehabilitation required after that sort of surgury
b) because of the damage not being born vaginally does to the child

are you trying to say that i shouldnt have an opinion on that either because im not HER?
what about the gynocologist?

what about psychologists? can they have an opinion about mental illness when they have never suffered them?

its silly to sugest that because you arnt the person that you cant understand them and STUPID to suggest that you cant understand your own partner to a higher level than a random stranger. as i said there was one time i tried to hide something from her, it was that i was suffering depression again, she knew straight away what was up because she can read me like a book.

 

are you seriously comparing your input as an EMT trainee to people who have a medical school degree? You can have an OPINION but that's all it is.

 

a) i wont be an EMT, i will be a paramedic trained to a higher diognostic standed than nurses (our job is closer to that of a doctor\cop than a nurse thank you very much, most doctors are only good for drip stands in the field)

b) i watched a med student try a put a drip into PB when she had a UTI and i could have done it BLINDFOLDED compared to this moron. she couldnt even FIND a vain

 

Hope you didn't go off your rocker there mate.

 

actually it was quite funny, when she finally decided call the registra i was just about to stop her doing it because she had already tried 5 times and hit nothing but mussle.

whe the registra got there some how it came out what i was studying (possably because i was wearing my uni uniform

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

) and she says "you should have just done it"

only problem would have been that i get trained to go for the biggest vain not the most comfertable because some of our drugs are VERY narcrotic if they get into the tissues rather than the blood stream


futher more we were having a lecture by the medical director of the abulance service and he (who is a doctor BTW, and the chair of the national resusitation commission) was the one who pointed out how useless doctors really are at car acidents or in diognosing and treating heart atacks.

in fact most doctors (GP's im talking about) just want to get the pt out of there surgury as quickly as possable so that they arnt called on to help while the ambos are there trying to get O2 on to the pt and the heart monitor\defribulator so that if they do crash we can start treating as quickly as possable

futher more i know for a fact (from the mouth of the medical director who is one of the doctors who run it) i know that only ONE shrink in the whole state has actually done the emergency care course.

now this isnt to say that all doctors are usless, the head of A&E at FMC and the RAH for instance DEFINITLY know what they are doing but the majority of doctors spend there time treating zits not critical care pts where as ambos arnt only expected to know what every medication a pt could possably be on MEANS (ie if you give a paramedic a medication they should be able to make a good guess at the condition its being used to treat), what interactions these drugs cause like an RN but also how to diognose vertually anything you could possably imagin and do it FAST and know how to treat them.

Futher more we are expected to know how to deliver a baby to the same standed as any gynocologist or midwife

oh and lastly we are expected to be able to look at any form of scan except an ultra sound and be able to tell a pt what it means because we often end up being give them in the field by confused pts or there families. one case my lecturer had when he was working in england was a sucide of a man in his 50s and his wife was trying to understand why he did it. she knew he had just been to see a doctor but hadnt told her why or what the results were. my lecturer got his hands on the scans the pt had taken home and diognosed that that he had terminal cancer and that the probable reason he commited suicide was because he wanted to spare his wife and himself the pain of going through that.

futher more one of our jobs is to try to make sure that pts who dont need A&E treatement dont go there unessarly. this means we have to be 100% sure of the probable seriousness of the illness

i DISPISE people who put ambos down as just "strecher barers"

 

oh one last point, there are alot of ambo's running A&E's in the bush because of the shortage of doctors and the fact that job subsitution reduces the cost burden on goverments. they do it with a high level of clinical care to the same standed that any doctor would give

 

another great story about doctors,
PB had to go to a dermitologist about a growth on her ear. while she was there the dermotologist told her to strip compleatly so that she could do a full body examination (im kind of glad that she was a women because at this point i would have had some doubts about her motives concidering that her ear isnt on her vagina).

anyway after compleatly examining her she was told to put her clothes back on and she was sitting there while the doctor was debating what to do about the growth. i turned to PB and suggested that while she was there she should get the doc to look at the boil like things which she has on the inside of her thighs.

the doc now thinks these could indicate polly sistic ovarian syndrome which is nither hear nor there. my point was that she had examined that area of PB's body and yet she either didnt see them or she was a lesbian more interested in looking at her vagina or god only knows what. what the hell is the point of doing a full body examination if you arnt even going to take notice of whats there????????

i have a very low opinion of doctors in general, one of them almost got me killed when he ignored an alergic reaction i had to vB12 shots and put it down to anxiaty rather than an alergic reaction. it was only because i pointed it out to another doctor who said i DEFINITLY shouldnt have the rest of the shots if had that reaction because the next time i would probably go into cardiac arest.

 

Endless (I)

You miss the point so easily, Betrayer, that one might think it deliberate.

However, perhaps you might do us the honor of explaining how the proposition that one cannot comprehend what one cannot experience translates into "women love their children more than men"?

Or, perhaps, if we might take your response as an objection to the principle, perhaps you might explain how you could do anything more than imagine what any given woman's mind and body experience when she becomes pregnant?

• • •​

I will put to you one of the questions I have asked of our friend Betrayer0fHope. Would you please explain for us how you might do anything more than imagine what any given woman's mind and body experience when she becomes pregnant?

Let us consider a few examples to clarify the point.

• On one occasion, a sex abuse survivor was trying to explain to me some aspect of how she saw the world. I nodded and said, "I understand", about as casually as I would in any other discussion of some importance. She snapped back, "No, you don't." And you know what? She was right. Because I have never vomited up my own father's semen. Because I have never been held down while my own father violently shoves his erect penis into my body repeatedly. Does that make sense to you?

• Once a friend and I were discussing the effects of racism. In part because of the story I have just related, I felt he was giving me too much credit. Certainly, I have felt the effects of racism in a small town where people hate the Japanese because of Vietnam. Indeed, I still find it strange in a way—based entirely upon whining justifications put forth by my assailants after a fight—that white people never beat each other senseless for being a honkey, or a Mick, or a Kraut, or a ... what do we call Brits, Crownies? But I can never, ever understand what it is like to be black. And I know well from watching the world around me that compared to my black neighbors, I had it easy. After all, as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. noted in Hocus Pocus, Asian-Americans—especially of Chinese and Japanese ancestry—at some point become "honorary white people". And it's true. Aside from the blatantly distorted incident report, the police officer who arrested me for DUI twelve years ago was the height of courtesy. No matter what I am accused of doing—speeding, running a light, driving with a taillight out, whatever—the first thing I hear is, "Good evening, sir. May I see your license and registration, please? ... Do you know why I stopped you this evening?" What I never hear on a routine traffic stop is, "Step out of the car, please." Okay? When I get busted for something—aside from the DUI—I drive away with a written or verbal warning. That's right. Not even a ticket. The thought that I should be arrested for missing a changing signal while trying to negotiate a dying, smoking—possibly burning—vehicle out of the street would never have occurred to me, except that it happened to a black man I know. (When his family's lawyer showed up and the police department realized who it was—the son of a former county sheriff's deputy—he suddenly stopped being a black man and became a human being again. Instead of felony endangerment, he got a ticket for running a red light, which is, at the very worst, what he should have gotten in the first place.) I've never been waved through a concert search only to have one of my friends hear the gate staff joking about how it's better to let the niggers do whatever they're going to do than listen to them bitch about their civil rights while being searched.

• There was, in the '80s, a terrible comedy called Soul Man, starring C. Thomas Howell and Rae Dawn Chong, and James Earl Jones. It's about a desperate favorite-son white law student (Howell) whose parents, for whatever reasons, cut him off just as he's about to go to Harvard Law. In order to stay in school, he uses an experimental tanning pill to turn himself into a black man, and hilarity ensues as he suddenly learns what it's like to be on the other side of the racial divide. In the end, he finds himself before one of his professors (Jones), trying to explain what has happened. And Jones proposes that he's learned what it's like to be black. In his redeeming moment, Howell explains that he hasn't, because he could stop being black the day he decided he couldn't take it anymore. Now, I appreciate this point tremendously. Because when I was in fifth grade, the principal of my school explained that the problem was that I just had to try harder to be accepted, and used a rich white guy with a German accent (basketball star Detlef Schrempf) as an example. After all, Mr. Denton pointed out, when people made fun of Schrempf's accent, he went and took speech lessons. Even then it seemed clear to me how much bullshit this was. When you're six foot ten and becoming a millionaire, people don't give you a whole lot of shit about anything. However, even though I was appalled some years later when I saw a news story about Asian-Americans having their faces surgically altered to look more European, I can't say the idea was entirely shocking. After all, they were just trying harder to fit in. They could stop looking so Asian and, in desperation, took the chance.​

Now then, I can't be a woman. Neither can you. No matter how much you sympathize or synchronize with your partner, you will never be her. You cannot know. You might be able to imagine certain things with a functionally-useful degree of accuracy, but you cannot know. Even if you go get a surgical gender reassignment, you can never know.

Look, there are certain things I can share with my friends. For instance, the black friend I referred to is a man, and we can always sympathize on that level. He has bisexual tendencies that are even more closeted and confused than my own. I certainly can sympathize with him on that level. But even when we are in sympathy and synchronization through our common identity bonds, we're still two totally different people. So even then, we cannot know. We understand as much as we can, and we sympathize as much as we can. But we cannot understand completely.

I wish I could serve a song for you right now. It seems to characterize very well the conflict between the shared and disparate aspects of the human drama. The live coda goes,

Why don't you form a line,
Form a line, and swim?
Ah, now, form a line,
Form a line, and swim.
Ah, you see me kickin' at a tin-can,
Yeah, and I blame it on the sea.
You see I'll never know when,
I'll never know why,
I'm never gonna be you...
No, I'm never gonna be you.

And all of us go down slow,
Then we rise again.
Just like a tide out at sea,
We lower and rise and again.
I said the days go by
And the nights all feel the same;
The beast in your eyes slowly becomes tame and dim.

(Floater, "Endless I")​

I understand that you hold your experience with your partner in high esteem, and that is, in principle, as it should be. But I promise you, sir, that until you find a way to live in her mind, be completely immersed in her thoughts and experiences and history, and have no conception that you will ever be yourself again, you will not know.

Now then, having addressed your digression, might I please do myself the honor of putting to you once again the question of an equivalent principle?

 

tiassa, whats the point of going to a psychologist then?
do you think my shrink has ever had the people he called friends run away from him and lock him away from them on a daily bases?
do you think he ever had his head slamed into the ashfelt by someone he never even spoke to and to this day i have no idea WHY it happened. i was knocked clear unconcious and only have two memories period from that day and dont even know if they are real
do you think he can understand being a 12 year old and moving to a new school only to be invited over to someones house and having a rope put around his neck?
do you think he can understand having to walk the whole way around the block rather than straight to his house three doors from the school because of that child?
do you think he understands hiding in a bush on a daily basis while the old man who lived there made sure the kid was gone before being able to walk up the road back to my house (again 3 doors from the school)
do you think he can understand having your teacher tell you when he has left so that you could go home rather than the school actually dealing with the situation?

do you think having experianced all this i can understand PB when she tells me how her whole school surounded her and yelled at her, degraded her for what?????

no one can fully understand another person, you might as well say that no women could understand what a man feels when told she is pregnant while he has been doing all in his power to make sure she doesnt GET pregant

and im sorry but to compare RAPE to a couple making a joint decision about pregancy is a cop out.

im sorry tiassa but in spite of what you might think but not all of us are rapists and not all of us are irrisponcable. i got degraded in another thread about 3 rugby players who are being investigated for rape for surposedly concidering all women to be innocent victoms

well maybe you should think about the fact that not all men are rapists and for most of us women are just as likly (more so in my case) to want to engage in sexual activity as men are

i always love hearing women say that a man can never understand the pain of child birth while other women say that kidney stones are more painful

i always love the focus on PND while no resorces are focused on men who might or might not be suffering the same lack of sleep, the same finantial burdens, as well as caring for there partner after birth

can a women ever understand the pain a man would go through when he has wanted a child for ever and when his partner gets pregant she decides to abort it just to cause him pain?????

to bring rape in to counter my point that in a partnership these decisions should be MADE as a partnership is dishonest

 

Wow

Professional assessment, advice, the peace of mind that comes with confidentiality. If you want to believe the professional sitting across from you knows your thoughts and perspectives so intimately, hire a psychic and convince yourself it's legit.

It's possible. It's possible. It's possible. It's possible. It's possible. And ... it's possible. Even then, though, it would be from his own perspective.

You can understand certain aspects.

In the 1980s, for instance, certain rock bands (e.g., Twisted Sister, Savatage) relied on a certain communal sense of we. This had a strong binding effect among the fans, created a strange sense of solidarity. It's not that the kid with the alcoholic dad can understand the school outcast can understand the sexual abuse survivor. It's a very general sense of understanding. We're all tired. We're all sick of hurting. We will hold together so that we have something and someone to hold to. I remember one time, at a Floater show, a woman in mourning, wailing as she passed through the crowd, stopped and stared at me for some reason. I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I gave her a hug and let her cry on my shoulder for a while. I cannot conceive of what it is like to lose a child. But I know a little bit at least about the pains of the soul. And all she wanted was someone to acknowledge her wound. What could I tell her? At some point, things will get better. We both have notions of psychospiritual pain, but I can't possibly know her individual pain, because of certain fundamental differences, I can't sympathize with her maternal anguish.

The more you have in common with people, the more you can sympathize with their feelings. But certain gulfs exist. From one person to the next, in general, is an abstraction we can set aside: there are certain things you cannot have in common with another person, and these disparities only widen the chasm between where you are and what that other person knows.

No matter how much you understand your partner, Asguard, there are circumstances which you cannot understand. Now, as women are as diverse among themselves as men, it might be that if she becomes pregnant, nature's influence will not be overwhelming in its magnitude. But if it is, friend, don't hold it against her. Those are the sorts of wounds that take a long time to heal. It is not a betrayal if she abides by nature's demands.

And, frankly, I think that superficial perspective, as well as the whole of your post, constitutes a cop-out of its own.

For instance—

—these are all fine points, but for a different discussion. I, too, have heard that childbirth is not acutely painful. But I guarantee you that, if I'm ever taking part in a natural delivery, that point is not going to be part of the pep talk.

(Seriously, I dare you. If she's huffing and straining and trying to push the baby out, I dare you to say, "Come on, honey, it's not all that bad." Okay, I don't dare you. Because even if she doesn't kill you on the spot, she's going to remember it for the rest of her life, and you will never fully escape the aftereffect.)

Yeah, well, take it up as an affirmative public cause. Don't make it about being jealous of women. Maybe the doctors down under have missed the point—after all, you hold them in such low esteem—but around here its widely recognized that there are natural forces at work in post-partum/post-natal depression. A good part of it is caused by biochemcial factors, so don't go chucking those out just because it's convenient to do so.

That would be hilarious except for its morbidity. In the first place, I only hear of this in the theoretical. To the other, presuming it's real—I asked for statistics and examples months ago, and have yet to see them—I would think you would be among the first here to recognize the influence of mental illness. Come on, dude. All of a sudden, mental health is a non-factor? Give me a fucking break. "I'm mad at him, so I'm gonna have an abortion! Take that, you grumpy, masculine asshole!" Seriously, what about that idea doesn't strike you as completely nuts?

But, oh, to hell with mental illness. A woman with mental illness is a violation of my rights as a man!

(chortle!)

And if a woman has lost a pregnancy of her own to factors beyond her control, yeah. She understands it better than he does.

Lastly, of course, if a woman is so sick in the head as to terminate a pregnancy just to piss off the father, what the hell was he doing slicking up to that in the first place? Again, he chose to get on a beast like that, which comes back to his own perspicacity and judgment.

Should, should, should. Pout a little more, man. Tell you what, dude: you put your will up against nature itself. Love ya, man, but I'm betting on nature. I'm loath to raise the one circumstance I can think of where you'll win.

I've never been raped, Asguard. There might be a couple of occasions that, if I want to split hairs, qualify in some bizarre context as violative of my will. But no, I have never been raped. Convince me, sir, that I can know what a rape survivor feels. Convince me that I can understand what it feels to have nightmares of gagging on my father's cock when I was two years old. Convince me that I can understand what it feels like to come to my natural sexuality, enduring even the innocent innuendo of youthful horniness, knowing that my vagina is amiss and my uterus damaged. These are things that, in all the world, I simply cannot know. At thirty-five, it is unlikely that I'm ever going to be raped. Even if it happens, though, I won't ever understand what went through a sixteen year-old girl's mind as she weeps on her lover's shoulder because she wasn't a virgin for their first time together. I might bear my own scars from that moment, but they're different scars, received in a different context, and nursed to a different standard of recovery.

Likewise, I have never been pregnant. I will never be pregnant. Convince me, sir, that I can know what it feels like to have the weight of nature crashing down on me.

As one who is intimately familiar with the power of brain chemistry, you ought to know damn well that people who do not share your condition simply cannot understand intimately what you feel. Have you never, for instance, wanted to smash someone's teeth in because they told you to just "be happy" and to "stop worrying about things so much" when, in all reality, you can't? I've had those days, man. I have every reason to believe you have, too. But I will not for a moment pretend that I have any substantial clue how the fluctuations of body and brain during pregnancy feel. Would you?