I am pregnant, almost 3 months along, and the father of this unborn child wanted to have this child but changed his mind when I was already pregnant. I guess he realized how much it’ll cost to raise this child specially now that he’s attending school full-time. Half of the times he wants this child but half of the time he doesn’t.

We moved from one state in the west coast to another state in the east coast to start our lives together.
Things haven’t been good, we’ve been argueing all the time and now with this child-to-come we don’t know which way to go. He has asked me to leave, as we live in his relative’s house I would be the one that has to go, many times and I can’t do it, starting because of financial reasons.

I do not agree with abortion. But the father of this unborn child has been making me feel horrible and guilty for this pregnancy and for not opting to have an abortion. But as I said, sometimes he likes the idea of having the baby, sometimes he doesn’t.

I love him but we can’t continue to live the way we’ve been living. He says he loves me too but has asked me many times to leave him. And stating not to care about where I go or what I do.

What can I do? If I had his help with money I would leave. I have no place to go to, my family lives in another country and can’t help me, and I’m this situation without any help, whatsoever.

The right being sought is not properly analogous to the woman’s right to an abortion, but to those laws in almost all jurisdictions that allow a new mother to drop off her baby at a firehouse or hospital within three days of birth and … just … walk … away … with no legal rights or responsibilities after that [except that in California they can retrieve the baby within the first 28 days].

The fact that men can’t do something a lot like that is fundamentally unequal treatment under the law.

The 72 hour clock should start as soon as the man first finds out about the fatherhood. In the case at bar that would have given the woman plenty of time for an abortion. In all cases it gives the mother an incentive to tell the father early, rather than create one of those ambush situations that one occasionally hears about in child support cases. In the status quo women have two incentives to delay notification: the men won’t bond which means the judge is unlikely to award any visitation which gives the woman one less problem [from her standpoint] and a larger support check, and she gets to see if he’ll become a high earner which may make support payments lucrative enough to make it worth the bother of dealing with him and risking some co-parenting.

-dk

“This is a real case from Canada: A 68 year old bed ridden man with a part time home visit nurse. She upped his meds and forced sex to bet pregnant. She did get pregnant. She also got a massive child support award.

He had zero say in whether or not he was going to have sex: He had zero say in whether or not he was going to be a father.

Now, according to the opposition to male reproductive rights, this is right, proper and fair.

So, what neo-con and the rest are actually arguing is that no male is human enough to be worthy of one of the basic human rights. That is, the right to choose to be or not to be a parent. This argument is a pro-slavery argument, not a medical argument.”

So the government is looking out for its own interests, in reality, instead of the child’s? You got some legal inconsistencies here.

But anyway, if you don’t want courts to do it, try to find me a LEGISLATURE that is going to vote for new laws under which fathers can opt out of child support by contracting with the other partner before sex.

Well, that is the point, isn’t it in the end. Things are moving in that direction. Public awareness has been sparked through that lawsuit case, debates like this one. This is all a preview to getting the legislature to do something.

It’ll still never happen. No legislature wants to take back to the taxpayers an argument that runs, essentially, like this: “We don’t think it’s fair that fathers should have to pay any part of the cost of raising children they didn’t want or intend to conceive. When a mother can’t cover the cost alone, we think you, the taxpayers, should help to support the kids so their fathers don’t have to. So here’s your new law and your increased tax bill for Medicaid, AFDC, and other children’s services. Pay up!”

Well, people said abortion couldn’t happen either, but look what happened. People said the KELO act couldn’t happen either, but then it happened. So tell me exactly, why this will never happen?

The point I am trying to make is that the government has a self-interest here.

Well, it seems to me that the reasons you and Neo gave about not letting men opt out was because of child’s rights, now you say it is also because the government is corrupt and won’t do jack. If it is both, then perhaps both should be changed, eh?

It’s certainly unjust, for one thing, that only the woman must undergo pregnancy or abortion, while the man who made the same choice escapes all physical consequences (and then complains when he has to experience any consequences at all!) For that matter, it’s unjust that men can’t experience the joys and rewards of pregnancy.

You’re using unjust as interchangeable with unfair. I tend to think that will become a problem. And given that I read the end comments here, I’m right, it did cause a problem and I thank others for mentioning it so I don’t have to.

In response to Niko, I do appreciate his insights and his knowledge of the law. It has helped me understand greater the possibilities. It doesn’t mean I agree with him, but it does mean that I like information regardless of the source. So long as they aren’t part of a PsychOps that is, always gotta be careful about those ; )

— insisting that anybody who believes that the male parent ought to bear some part of the burden must be just as benighted as the supporters of slavery — and a hand-flapper to boot! — really doesn’t do a whole lot to advance your point of view.

Well, to defend Sally, that’s not what she meant. If I may speak on her behalf. I do tend to read a lot and have better reading comprehension given the amount of time I spend on science fiction and debates. So, the way I percieve it, is that Sally said that your defense of your position is just as invalid as the defense for slavery. She didn’t say you had the moral problems of slavery in your position, simply that your defense of society is the same in terms of lack of validity as the defense of society used for slavery.

Her problem, to me, is that you try and defend your position using things that don’t work and shouldn’t work. Your position, as far as I know, is simply the note that trying to change things shouldn’t be done. A conservative and a status quo position. You may be open to solutions, but there are a manifest of reasons you think those solutions probably will NEVER work, as you said before.

I guess I’m not, at least not on subjects like this one where nothing close to a moral consensus exists.

A lot of people who do support legislation giving men rights or are willing to, are Constitutionalists. Some may do so to stop abortion, some may do so because they believe it is as just as you can get with abortion, and some may just be lazy men who don’t want to pay. Regardless, probably the majority are believers in the Constitution, like me. And believe that law should be Constitutionally derived, not derived from judges, lawyers, and the whims of legislatures.

A lawyer probably does not have the freedom to believe in the Constitution, I understand that, I just think it is a loss.

Btw, moral consensus isn’t really the benchmark. Constitutionality, however, is. Constitutionality isn’t based upon mob rule, for good reasons.

t’s ironic that what triggered this discussion is the recently-filed federal lawsuit in which Mr. Dubay, a father ordered to pay child support, is appealing to the courts — not, you will note, to legislators — for change in the child support laws.

As you noted, Niko, the legislatures are too greedy and politically afraid to do anything. So we use fire to fight fire. If the judges want to proactively make shit up as they go along, we must take whatever advantage in the media and in the courts as we can get. Especially with 2 new Supreme Justices.

Just because I dislike the tactics of terrorism, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t cut off a terroist’s head on national tv to support the war effort. Apply it as you will, to disliking judge made laws.

I submit, because it’s the only way he might possibly win.

If you read the article Neo linked to, they said they probably knew this wouldn’t win. They wanted to generate a public debate, because they knew the media would not give a damn about a Bill when they would about a lawsuit. It is clever and effective. And it works, proof example this debate here and among elsewhere.

like I said, his lawyers don’t have the luxury to believe in the Constitution as we do. I don’t blame them for it, they are lawyers after all. They got their own thing to do.

About the deadbeat dad scenarios. Current law discourages dead beat dads and encourage women getting pregnant from dead beat dads. Until you change that, complaining that dead beat dads would benefit from a change in legislation is being inaccurate. What you actually want is a law that encourages good dads, punish bad dads, encourage women to marry good dads and punish women who marry bad dads. That is what the law should do, rather than try and engineer child support as if we were back in the 50s and women couldn’t work and were ostracized for being divorced.

Times have changed, laws should change with them. But just because the law has changed, doesn’t mean you can bypass Constitutionality. A judge should conform to the Constitution as the law of the land, not make up whole new laws. If a judge conforms to his balance of powers, then I have no problem with victories derived from judges.

It’s heartening that that has not happened here.

It is mostly because Neo writes via the long essay format. Semi-literate profanity users tend to avoid having to read long stuff. And when the comments are just as long, if not longer, than the OrigPost, then profanity users like the KosKidz tend to become disorientated.

She still gets emails, of course. People will email her things they would never say in the comments, since they would get eviscerated.

Just one more thing: I appreciate the care that the commenters here have taken to keep this discussion civil. It’s an intensely emotional subject and in many parts of the Internet it would have descended by now into insults and profanity. It’s heartening that that has not happened here.

Regardless of dictionaries, “fairness” is all too often used in a childish way to complain about the nature of things, as in the observation that only women give birth, whereas “justice” is something that’s in our hands to produce — or not — given the nature of things.

Beyond this, I’m just repeating myself, so I’ll stop shortly. But I did want to make one last attempt to be clear about the point at issue here — it’s NOT about just removing all burdens from the “male parent”, for example, nor about fathers who simply “do not feel like supporting” their children. Right? Can we all be clear on that? The very fact that you and others on this thread repeatedly fall back on the stereotype of the “deadbeat dad” illustrates the blinkers that you’re wearing here. I’ve said repeatedly that there’s no question that men should be held to their legitimate family responsibilities — so the question comes down to what exactly is “legitimate” in these situations. And my point, one more time, is that, SINCE there now exists a choice about whether or not to bear a child even after pregnancy (which there wasn’t before), THEN to exclude men entirely from that choice is to render their coerced support for it illegitimate.