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I cannot imagine not being curious about the child in those circumstances. But I know plenty of men aren't.
As someone who has worked in family law, I can offer one small insight into this issue. What I have noticed about men who disregard their children in this way is that they are invariably men who make no distinction between their relationship with their children and their relationship with the mothers of those children. It is as if they have no relationship with the children except through the mothers. To them, the man/woman relationship is everything, and the father/child relationship is merely an extension of that man/woman relationship. While these men are getting along with the mothers, they are often loving, attentive fathers. But if their relationship with the mothers ends, their relationship with their children also ends.
I think you are definitely onto something here. My brother hardly knew the mother. He had no feelings for her beyond sexual ones. She was completely disposable. Therefore, his child is disposable too. I just don't understand this way of thinking but like I said in another post, I think men view children differently than women do. The child is the one who suffers.
For starters, I have two children of my own and even if I wasn't with their mother, I couldn't imagine not being concerned about their well being. I will never understand how men live with themselves in those situations.
As far as the debate about the father's say in the possible abortion of the child, I believe this country is just backwards. I am certainly not advocating abortion, but I cannot wrap my head around how pro-choice advocates can justify a woman making a decision of life or death alone, but then in the same breath look for child support from the father. The decision to have a child is an important one and it does not just impact women. The fathers can be greatly affected, as seen by some of the examples written in here. Just because you have a few dead beat dads does not mean, that the role of a father should be neglected. I believe our country needs to be more balanced in the laws created for parenting. I believe it would make people think twice about having sex with random people.
This is my idea. If a father is going to be held financially responsible for the care of that child, then he should have equal say about what happens to that child. I think if a mother wants to abort the child, then the father should be able to agree or disagree with that decision. If he agrees then abort the child (which I think is just horrible, but I digress), but if he disagree then the mother has to bring the child to term and consider giving up her parental rights. If the mother wants to keep the child, but the father doesn't, then the mother can still legally hold the father responsible for financially caring for the child. I understand that some people will argue that it's unfair to a mother to have to carry a child, that she may not want to term, but I also say it's unfair to taxpayers to have to pay for children or even in some cases abortion for people who may behave irresponsibly. If more people were held accountable for their actions, there would probably be less men like the OP's brother, who will take the risk of having sex a bit more seriously.
2. The mans actions knowingly may result in a child.
3. Can a person shoot someone and say they weren't trying to and didn't mean to kill them, so they shouldn't be held liable for the death? Of course not.
4. As a man, if you have sex, an adult action, you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences of those actions.
5. If I shoot you, I better be willing to deal with the legal and psychological consequences of killing you.
6. I won't even get into the fallacies in the rest of your arguments.
7. It is not always available to them. Financially. Legally (there are places in this country where there are effectively no abortions provided).
8. Or morally/ethically/religiously (many people believe it to be murder).
1. Nope--I don't think so.
2. First of all, I am not sure that knowledge is relevant based on the current law. After all, if ignorance of the law is no excuse, then based on the current law, ignorance of basic biology shouldn't be an excuse either. However, ideally, I agree with you that knowledge should be relevant.
And Yes, the man knows that his actions/decisions may result in a child/person being created later, just like a gun dealer/car dealer knows that his/her actions/decisions may result in a shooting/car accident occurring. However, the final decision in regards to both of these cases is not the man's or the gun dealer's/car dealer's, but rather solely the woman's and the gun buyer's/car buyer's.
3. Extremely poor comparison here, considering that in this case (unlike with child support), the final decision in regards to whether or not someone got shot was the shooter's. Thus, of course the shooter should be response for the shooting and for the death which results from it.
4. Your statement here is no more convincing that telling gun dealers/car dealers to be prepared to deal with the risk of being forced to pay financial support to the families of the victims of shootings/car accidents.
5. Yep.
6. Actually, I would love to genuinely see if there are any fallacies in the rest of my arguments here.
7. Isn't this only true for some places, though? After all, I wonder how easy access to abortion is in U.S. states such as New York, Massachusetts, and California, as well as in the various countries of Europe.
While abortion remains/is legal, I support making it easy to access for everyone who wants it in exchange for giving males some sort of child support opt-out (and I am not talking about an opt-out which applies to all males).
8. As I already said more than once, the option of abortion is still available in cases such as this (if this is the only reason why a female does not get an abortion). Just because a female does not utilize this option does not mean that this option was not available to her.
As a side note, with my legal contract idea which I previously proposed here, most of these females probably wouldn't sign such a legal contract in the first place. Thus, the males that they sleep with won't get a child support opt-out even if they will want one.
2. and has the right to expect to be supported through childhood by those who chose to conceive him/her.
1. Yep, just like the child of a shooting victim/car accident victim had no choice about whether or not his/her parent was shot and killed.
2. Nope, considering that according to the pro-choice view of personhood, conception/fertilization does not result in the creation of a child/person. Rather, a child/person is only created later on.
1. I did a very quick internet search and it was just like I remembered --- there are far more adoptive parents trying to get a safe-haven baby then there are babies available. In the three sites that I checked, except for some babies spending brief time in foster care, 100% of the babies were adopted by a new family or returned to a biological parent or other biological relative.
2. We agree
3. I am not sure why I feel so strongly about "dead beat dads". No one is my family, even my extended family of cousins & second cousins was a dead beat dad or had a dead beat dad. Everyone supports/supported their children
4. There is one exception, I did have an aunt who got pregnant in approximately 1939 where the baby's dad refused to acknowledge his child. But that was 75 years ago and details from then were rather sketchy. My parents told me that my aunt was engaged to be married to the father of her child but his family forced him to leave her when she got pregnant (because she wasn't a virgin any more and he "claimed" that he was a virgin, saving his purity for his wedding night). Perhaps hearing this story was when I first realized that fathers should always be responsible for their children.
5. One of my son's best friends in college had a dead beat dad (but the story is rather complicated).
6. Perhaps, I feel strongly about it because I live in a large metropolitan city where there are front page newspaper articles again and again about the problem of "dead beat dads".
1. Didn't the taxpayers end up paying for these babies' brief time in foster care, though?
2. OK.
3. Good for them (not sarcasm).
4. I am sorry that this occurred. That said, I don't think that it's a good idea to use one case to make a generalization. For instance, I think that a case where a male wants a female to give birth only to change his mind afterwards should be forced to pay child support. In contrast, though, while abortion remains/is legal, I think that a male should not be forced to pay any child support in cases where both he and a female voluntarily sign a legal contract (which states that he will get a full, complete child support opt-out and that he will give up all of his rights to this child) in front of a lawyer/notary before the two of them have sex.
5. I am sorry about that.
6. That makes sense. It might be similar for me--the news sometimes/frequently mentions abortion and/or topics which relate to abortion (such as child support), which is why I myself am very passionate about these topics.
2. Condoms, if use consistently and correctly, are almost 100% effective. The failure rates given for condoms include people who don't use them all the time, plus people who use them incorrectly (e.g. with oil-based lubricants, which break down latex).
1. It doesn't matter if many people will do it or not. However, having it as an option would probably be nice.
2. Maybe you are correct on this.
That said, though, a female can force a male to properly wear a condom before she has sex with him. Thus, if a couple has sex without proper condom usage and a pregnancy occurs afterwards, then both parties are to blame for this, rather than only the male.
1. For starters, I have two children of my own and even if I wasn't with their mother, I couldn't imagine not being concerned about their well being.
2. I will never understand how men live with themselves in those situations.
3. As far as the debate about the father's say in the possible abortion of the child, I believe this country is just backwards.
4. I am certainly not advocating abortion, but I cannot wrap my head around how pro-choice advocates can justify a woman making a decision of life or death alone, but then in the same breath look for child support from the father.
5. The decision to have a child is an important one and it does not just impact women. The fathers can be greatly affected, as seen by some of the examples written in here. Just because you have a few dead beat dads does not mean, that the role of a father should be neglected. I believe our country needs to be more balanced in the laws created for parenting. I believe it would make people think twice about having sex with random people.
6. This is my idea. If a father is going to be held financially responsible for the care of that child, then he should have equal say about what happens to that child. I think if a mother wants to abort the child, then the father should be able to agree or disagree with that decision. If he agrees then abort the child (which I think is just horrible, but I digress), but if he disagree then the mother has to bring the child to term and consider giving up her parental rights. If the mother wants to keep the child, but the father doesn't, then the mother can still legally hold the father responsible for financially caring for the child. I understand that some people will argue that it's unfair to a mother to have to carry a child, that she may not want to term, but I also say it's unfair to taxpayers to have to pay for children or even in some cases abortion for people who may behave irresponsibly.
7. If more people were held accountable for their actions, there would probably be less men like the OP's brother, who will take the risk of having sex a bit more seriously.
1. I applaud you for this.
2. Some males might not be ready for fatherhood yet. This might help explain it in at least some cases.
3. I agree with you that the current law in regards to this should be changed.
4. Yeah, I agree that some/many pro-choicers appear to "want their cake and to eat it too".
5. Agreed.
6. I don't think that this idea of yours will work while prenatal human beings are not considered to be persons/worthy of having rights.
From a pro-choice view of personhood, I think that a better idea in regards to this would be my legal contract idea, which I already previously proposed here and which would work as long as abortion remains/is legal. While my legal contract idea is focused on giving males a child support opt-out in some cases, perhaps a similar legal contract idea can also work in cases where a male and a female both voluntarily agree that this female will give birth afterwards if she gets pregnant. Of course, such a legal contract (in regards to both) might have more problems than the child support opt-out legal contract due to the fact that it would be harder to enforce (the male might often never find out that the female violated the contract and got an abortion) and due to the fact that few females might sign it due to their concerns about unexpected developments (such as their pregnancies threatening their own lives, et cetera).
7. Well, at least the OP's better apparently pays child support to the child that he (otherwise) ignores.
Finally, I want to point out that if you consider abortion to be morally unjustifiable, then you can simply argue in favor of an abortion ban instead of your proposal here.
Suppose you got a woman pregnant and told her that you wanted no part of her or the baby. She moves away, has the baby, and you have no contact with either of them. Would you be curious about the child as the years go by or would you be indifferent to the child's existence? Do you think your feelings would change as you got older? Would you have any regrets?
BTW - I am not pregnant and my dad is very close to me. I am asking because my brother got a woman pregnant several years back and has no contact with the child whatsoever. The child is completely irrelevant in his life. I am just wondering what men's thought processes are in these situations.
Shouldn't it be all about the child and what's best for him/her? Every child wants his father to want him and be a part of his life. Your brother sounds like a selfish creep.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Futurist110
3. Extremely poor comparison here, considering that in this case (unlike with child support), the final decision in regards to whether or not someone got shot was the shooter's. Thus, of course the shooter should be response for the shooting and for the death which results from it.
4. Your statement here is no more convincing that telling gun dealers/car dealers to be prepared to deal with the risk of being forced to pay financial support to the families of the victims of shootings/car accidents.
Again, a horribly misplaced comparison. Gun dealers have no relevancy or analogies here. Neaither do car drivers. A gun dealer is a third person in the transaction, as is a car dealer. The only analogy here is between the two people having sex or the shooter and the shot. Or the driver and the person being hit. If you can't see that, there is no reason to deconstruct the rest of your arguments.
And no, abortion isn't available and even if it is, isn't a choice available to everyone. For many people it is NOT an option. You can say it again and again and again, it doesn't make it the truth. Abortion is NOT an option to many people. You know what is an option? For a guy not to have sex if he doesn't want to deal with the results. End of discussion.
Lets keep this simple. Don't have sex if you're not willing to deal with the consequences (a potential child) just like don't shoot someone unless you're willing to deal with the consequences of killing them. Simple.
Since you can't really seem to grasp basic obvious analogies and the flaws in yours, there really is no reason to deconstruct this further.
Of course, what you think doesn't matter. Even if the woman doesn't want to go after the man for child support, it is irrelevant. It behooves the state to do so. That will not change nor should it.
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