We have this situation related to Abortion Rights where after penetration, only one party gets to decide whether that episode of intercourse ends in a baby. All things considered, things like bodily autonomy, that’s the way it should be.
I’ve got a somewhat controversial opinion about how we could solve this. It’s based on my belief that you can’t force someone to parent a child, you can only really force them to pay for one. I think it might be better if we replaced that money from an unwilling parent from some sort of social fund which paid at the average rate of child support.
That way, some people would get more money than they ever would from that individual because the other party earns less than the average working parent. It would remove any incentive to conceive by deceit and giving up your parental rights would require acknowledgement you are the parent, by DNA or mere admission.
I think that will force individuals into accepting the reality that even revoking their responsibility in this way won’t really change the fact that they made a baby. It destroys the cognitive dissonance they have to employ so any choice to surrender their rights is informed.
A lot of my beliefs around this are based on my view that it is more harmful for a child to be privy to a parent who is partially on the scene, but unwilling to engage with the child. In my opinion, knowing your dad is forced into giving your mom money, but wants nothing to do with you otherwise, is more damaging than not having anyone on the scene at all.
We’d just have to change how we speak about one’s decision to be a single parent. We see people opting for single parenthood through IVF or surrogacy and we have a template for the conversations they have with their children about where they came from. We could use this.
My utopia would be Socialist, so the idea of removing some of the financial need to try and force someone into actively parenting seems like a good one to me. I think kids might be happier if there were fewer situations where a parent, usually the mother, is fruitlessly trying to make a father be a involved parent. You can’t make people develop a parent-child attachment by making them pay money.
I think a lot of these mothers wouldn’t bother if they didn’t need money from them, or childcare so they can earn money or perhaps just rest in between earning money and parenting. It’s poverty, or the risk of poverty, that keeps them in a cycle of needing to badger their co-parent into stepping up.
But this is beside the point. I’m only pointing it out because I do recognize that men have little say in whether they’re parents or not after agreeing to sex with someone who can conceive. They’re solely dependent on any preventative measures they take working effectively.
It’s not a conspiracy against the cis male, it’s just a consequence of not being the one with the uterus. This is a way one could address the issue at a societal level.
However, we’re not there yet, and perhaps not ever. At this point, for good reason, cis men don’t get a say in whether a conception becomes a baby. They can only control who they have sex with and how they have sex with those people.
Still, that’s a pretty good way of controlling who you impregnate. In order for someone to “force fatherhood” on you, they have to sabotage your condoms, or go some way into tricking you into believing that they’re consistently taking hormonal contraception so you forgo barriers.
If we’re being pedantic about risk, and counting any risk as a high risk, then they’d have to both sabotage the condoms and lie to you about hormonal contraception too. Simply because you’d be covering all bases if you were really against conception occurring. You’d stamp out the chances of it occurring to as close to zero as you can.
I hope you see where I’m going here, and I’m not just speaking to guys. Recently I read something where a lot of cis women commenting didn’t seem to understand that a guy who isn’t wearing a condom hasn’t been “forced” into fatherhood. Especially where he knows the person isn’t using other methods.
I’m not saying there weren’t guys who failed at understanding this too. There most definitely were. But they’re just trying to escape accountability. I can’t understand the people who can conceive and hold this view to the detriment of themselves and other people who have a uterus. This (internalized) misogyny is vile!
Seriously, someone who is able to consent to sex knows that sex without “protection” can result in pregnancy. The fact the guy engaged in sex, probably even initiated it, is him taking on the risk of a child being born.
Sure, if he does everything to minimize the risk, and it still occurs, that’s real unfortunate. I’d go as far as to say it’s unfair. And that’s why I’d want a society where there is less need to make futile efforts to create a parent out of someone who just showed up for sex.
The unfairness doesn’t mean he should have more say over whether the person aborts the pregnancy or not, that should still be the choice of the pregnant person. Even where there is disagreement between the pair. But I’d support a way for voluntarily dropping all parental responsibility, including financial obligation if we had a suitable replacement for the money they’d get.
There are very few situations where the guy had ample reason to both trust the other person was being truthful about contraception, had the same general views on how to handle accidental conception AND took sufficient risk to minimize the chance of pregnancy with barrier contraception. Therefore, the majority of unplanned births have nothing to do with anyone being “forced” into fatherhood.
It’s usually that some dude took a gamble and lost. Let him pay his dues for that.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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