More on abortion
Feb. 24th, 2006 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumAs might be expected there's a lot of talk about abortion in the blogospere right now.
In a few places I have seen the perrenial question, "What about the man's rights to help make the decision?"
As I see it, he doesn't have any. It's a binary choice. This isn't deciding how much money goes on one credit card or the other, or which movie to see tonight.
It's an either or. Either she carries it to term, or she aborts it.
Only one person gets to make that call. There's no way to split the Solomonic Ideal.
But, goes the cry, if she decides to keep the baby, he has to pay for it!
Qu'elle horreur. Shit happens. There are risks to sex. Pregnancy is one of them. If he didn't want the risk of a pregnancy, he ought to get cut, or buy a doll. Yeah, the good one's cost five-grand, but that's cheaper than food, clothes, daycare and college.
And, goes the flipside, what if he wanted the kid and she didn't? Well, he can talk to her, try to arrange a deal where he gets sole-custody, and she owes him nothing, but if she doesn't want to do that, he's SOL.
The argument also gets made, "He ought to be allowed to opt out."
This is the one which probably irks me more than any other.
It usually goes, more or less, like this.
In exchange for offering to pay for an abortion, he gets to walk away. If she takes it, he's out the cost of the abortion and no more.
If she doesn't, he's scot free. He, you see, "did the right thing." He offered to clean up the mess. She refused his noble offer, so she gets nothing more.
Bullshit. That's extortion. Being a single parent is hard. It limits things (jobs, housing, committed relationships) and makes life harder. He gets, in that scenario, to hang that over her head, get the abortion or suffer.
Reprehensible.
I feel for those people who want to make things just; who think that as two people are affected by the decision, two people ought to be involved in making it, but this is that simple. If abortion is an option, the woman gets to choose.
Is it better for the principles to sit down and talk about it. Probably, emotionally they probably both feel better afterwards. But it can't be required.
In a properly run world, abortion wouldn't be a real issue. Single parents wouldn't be any worse off than dual parents. Birth control methods would make accidental pregnancy more rare (and education would make BC more effective because people would use it properly).
But this isn't a perfect world, which means one person has to make the call, and that one person is the woman; she's pregnant. She is going to get stuck if he walks away (in theory he'd have to pay child support, but "dead-beat dads" wouldn't be a recurring theme in Time, and on the evening news if that were the case). He will be seen as the victim when she tries to get that child-support. She will be cast as a tramp and a harlot, conniving to get pregnant so she can live the easy life of a single mom without a husband to clean up after and all his money letting her stay at home and waste her life away on booze and other men.
It's about responsibility. One engages in risky behaviour, and one accepts the results.
In a few places I have seen the perrenial question, "What about the man's rights to help make the decision?"
As I see it, he doesn't have any. It's a binary choice. This isn't deciding how much money goes on one credit card or the other, or which movie to see tonight.
It's an either or. Either she carries it to term, or she aborts it.
Only one person gets to make that call. There's no way to split the Solomonic Ideal.
But, goes the cry, if she decides to keep the baby, he has to pay for it!
Qu'elle horreur. Shit happens. There are risks to sex. Pregnancy is one of them. If he didn't want the risk of a pregnancy, he ought to get cut, or buy a doll. Yeah, the good one's cost five-grand, but that's cheaper than food, clothes, daycare and college.
And, goes the flipside, what if he wanted the kid and she didn't? Well, he can talk to her, try to arrange a deal where he gets sole-custody, and she owes him nothing, but if she doesn't want to do that, he's SOL.
The argument also gets made, "He ought to be allowed to opt out."
This is the one which probably irks me more than any other.
It usually goes, more or less, like this.
In exchange for offering to pay for an abortion, he gets to walk away. If she takes it, he's out the cost of the abortion and no more.
If she doesn't, he's scot free. He, you see, "did the right thing." He offered to clean up the mess. She refused his noble offer, so she gets nothing more.
Bullshit. That's extortion. Being a single parent is hard. It limits things (jobs, housing, committed relationships) and makes life harder. He gets, in that scenario, to hang that over her head, get the abortion or suffer.
Reprehensible.
I feel for those people who want to make things just; who think that as two people are affected by the decision, two people ought to be involved in making it, but this is that simple. If abortion is an option, the woman gets to choose.
Is it better for the principles to sit down and talk about it. Probably, emotionally they probably both feel better afterwards. But it can't be required.
In a properly run world, abortion wouldn't be a real issue. Single parents wouldn't be any worse off than dual parents. Birth control methods would make accidental pregnancy more rare (and education would make BC more effective because people would use it properly).
But this isn't a perfect world, which means one person has to make the call, and that one person is the woman; she's pregnant. She is going to get stuck if he walks away (in theory he'd have to pay child support, but "dead-beat dads" wouldn't be a recurring theme in Time, and on the evening news if that were the case). He will be seen as the victim when she tries to get that child-support. She will be cast as a tramp and a harlot, conniving to get pregnant so she can live the easy life of a single mom without a husband to clean up after and all his money letting her stay at home and waste her life away on booze and other men.
It's about responsibility. One engages in risky behaviour, and one accepts the results.
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Date: 2006-02-24 07:30 pm (UTC)TK
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Date: 2006-02-24 08:03 pm (UTC)""Nearly all of their savings comes from this cut to total discretionary spending," Riedl said. "That does nothing for the real long-term problem," which the Bush administration acknowledges to be entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security.
Many of the tough cuts the president did include were rejected just days ago, when Congress gave final approval to a major budget-cutting measure. Lawmakers left out the White House's proposals to cut agricultural price supports and food stamps, and to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
After a difficult political struggle that badly divided congressional Republicans, lawmakers muscled through savings from Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, federal child support enforcement and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Before Bush has even signed that legislation, he is coming back for more. His budget proposes to wring out $4.9 billion more in savings from Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, $17 million from child support enforcement and $16.7 billion from the federal pension insurance program through 2011."
Okay, on rereading they don't directly call child support an entitlement program (merely SocSec & Medicaid), but they are cutting child support enforcement, not to mention Children's Health Insurance and WIC.
"Responsibility" like this is what drives women into poverty, with the hard right spitting on them all the way for either not being able to hold onto their man or being slutty tarts for having sex.