I have one of those penis dealies, and I’m pretty down with it, so the conventional narrative about Planned Parenthood is that they’re not really my thing. Planned Parenthood is often framed, both by supporters and opponents, as a women’s organization, and that’s one of those things that’s not really untrue, but misses a lot of the story.
Does Planned Parenthood provide tons of pelvic exams, pap smears, and contraception for women? Hell yes they do, and thank goodness. But they’ve also given me STI tests, allowing me to continue slutting my way around Portland with full confidence and a sense of ethical responsibility. They’ve provided me with so many deeply-discounted condoms that I couldn’t count them all. They’ve provided me with Plan B when some of those condoms have failed, and followup STI testing to make sure. They’ve also provided various forms of hormonal birth control for many of the women in my life, giving me (and the women) that nice belt-and-suspenders feeling of security. Planned Parenthood is also often framed as a sex-related organization, and while that’s not true of them in general, I confess that it’s been pretty true in my case. I have more and better sex because of them.
Planned Parenthood is easily demonized by… well, we all know by whom, and officially their justification is abortion. Thing is, there’s a couple niggling little facts that undercut that. It’s been established that whether abortion is legal or not has no effect on the number of abortions performed. What does reduce abortions? Easy access to contraception and sex education. And not a single pro-life group in the U.S., including Democrats For Life, supports more contraception and sex education. In other words, Planned Parenthood is doing more to reduce abortion than all of their opponents put together.
Of course, that’s assuming that being anti-abortion is the real agenda of the pro-life crowd. If we throw out that theory and assume that their agenda is anti-sex, that fits the facts a lot better. It certainly explains the opposition to Planned Parenthood; as I outlined in my second paragraph, my personal interactions with Planned Parenthood have not involved any abortions, but they have been a great support for my very pro-sex lifestyle. Can’t think why your average pro-lifer would have a problem with how I live… oh, wait, yes I can.
“It seems to me a rather ugly conflation of those by saying ‘making me pay child support’ is clearly and always a violation of bodily autonomy – whether or not I have to physically work for the money I would pay in child support doesn’t matter, a court is not going to say “Oh, and by the way, mythago, you’re not allowed to pay that money with inheritance or lottery winnings or anything else, you have to get your ass out of bed and earn a paycheck for it.’ ” Yes, inheritance and winning the lottery are weekly occurances…I live… Read more »
Update: the canonical review of the 2002 case wherein a man was held responsible for support of a child conceived when he was a minor (and the adult mother was convicted of statutory rape, no less!) is interesting enough that I broke down and paid for the full text of the article that keeps being cited around the blogosphere. I’m preparing a post about it. My apologies once again to Noah for hijacking his thread. And for my impatiently intemperate language to TB. figleaf p.s. fun fact that nobody should make too big a deal about: Ruth Jones, the law… Read more »
@Typhonblue: In fact, another way you could comprehensively protect male victims is to go to the legislature and lobby for a change in the law that holds minor victims of adult rapists responsible for child support even in the case of a conviction. Which is exactly what happened in the case you cited above. In fact if I’m not mistaken it’s what happened back around 2003, right after the decision was handed down. And since, as far as I can tell, there has not (yet) been another instance of a male victim being held responsible for child support by his… Read more »
@typhonblue: First of all that’s fucking catastrophically awful. Although at least its consistent with the widely held (and increasingly enacted) but equally disgraceful point that minors who are forced into becoming mothers are also kind of on the hook not only for child support but child birth! So I think it’s totally missing the point to carp about who has rights after they’re raped. And put a little bit more than “but women do it too” about actually fucking dealing with rape as, you know, an issue in its own right. Because, really, it’s bullshit either way that a victim… Read more »
@figleaf at July 10, 2011 at 3:21 pm :
The wise voice of an experienced parent.
Thanks for recommending a break from Teh Heavy, figleaf
I work in raising awareness of issues facing adoptees and donor concieved adults. This is one area where adults “freedom” to do whatever they want, means very little to me when in order for the adult to have that freedom we are asking their biological offspring to suffer. I do not believe that parenting being hard, or women not feeling like parenting is why abortion should be legal. Therefore it doesn’t jive with me that because women have an opportunity to opt out, men should be able to opt out. To me, abortion should be legal only because it’s difficult… Read more »
@Rox I don’t think that’s the argument being made – the parity on decision making would hold up to the first trimester of pregnancy. Up to this point, both parents can determine whether they want to become a parent for the next 60 odd years, whether they have enough finances, whether they can take breaks from work and/or school, whether they are compatible enough with each other to continue their own relationship etc These types of decisions constitute the largest proportion of abortions that are performed today. For a young couple who has unprotected sex – maybe they don’t know… Read more »
After having read another thread on reddit about a male rape victim, I had a thought. How do we protect men from being forced into becoming fathers after having been rape victims? Rape doesn’t always end in a successful prosecution. And men being able to get a successful conviction against their female rapist is effectively nil. Therefore any laws against rape victims being held responsible for children conceived through rape don’t apply to male victims of female rapists. Not in a functional sense. The only thing that will comprehensively protect male victims of female rapists is giving all men the… Read more »
Huh. I find it interesting that people are throwing out “just give the baby up for adoption if the mother has low income.” As an adoptee, having seen the hell my mother went through giving me up for adoption, and lack of emotional destruction my biological father went through— I don’t think many men understand exactly what we’re speaking about here. We’re talking about carrying an embryo through it’s fetal development into personhood. Most women begin to develop bonding hormones— hear the heartbeat, feel little legs kicking inside them, often create unspeakably deep emotional bonds before the birth even occurs…… Read more »
Before my comment was approved to appear here, I posted it on my blog. My thinking at the time was that I was so late in responding here that probably no one would see or respond to my comment. :-p
Anyway, anyone who wants to is welcome to post comments there. I’ll leave this thread alone from now on.
@DMB, @Mythago, and to a lesser extent @toysoldier. While I haven’t been back in the picture long enough to be able to pointificate about our comment policies, and I’m probably still too jet-lagged to make a lot of sense. But it does seem as though more heat’s being generated than light on the question. That said, could I suggest that you all take a four or eight hour pause to go write and/or comment on other posts and blogs? And speaking of other posts and possibly even other blogs, since most of the comments lately (including mine so I’m not… Read more »
@toysoldier: As the linked article makes clear, the ‘sperm donor’ and the couple didn’t follow the legal requirements for him to be a sperm donor; therefore, legally, he isn’t one. I know a number of lesbian couples who got this from the opposite direction: after their child was born, their ‘donor’ suddenly decided he wanted to be ‘daddy’, and because they had not strictly followed the law in their state regarding sperm donation, he had every right to insert himself into their lives as the child’s father. WRT rape, your link is an op-ed from 2002, so I don’t know… Read more »
@mythago: There are cases of women successfully suing sperm donors for child support. Likewise, there are cases of boys being forced to pay their rapists child support. While some states do have laws regarding parentage via rape, it does not not appear that those laws to apply male rape victims. The “opt-in” concept is illogical because most people want their children and impractical because it creates a much worse situation than what already exists. You keep all the existing problems and compound it with paperwork and probably some test period to ensure men petitioning to be fathers are fit and… Read more »
A distinction you failed to make. Until Toysoldier’s comment it didn’t occur to me that anyone would assume such permission was needed, anymore than the father’s permission for a ‘paper abortion’ would be needed – since we are talking about parental rights. To clarify rather than assume, an “opt-in” system would simply be the mirror image of “opt out”; all legal rights and responsibilities fall on the mother unless and until the father affirmatively “opts in”, at which point he is permanently on the hook (as it were) just as he is under the system we have now. Of course… Read more »
@Brian: Either parent can be forced to pay child support. Both mothers and fathers have legal responsibilities, including financial ones, towards their children. I know what you’re about to say, which is that the family-court system has an unfair tendency to give primary custody to mothers and require non-custodial fathers to directly pay child support to the mother – and we could get into how that is exacerbated and to what degree by marital role division and sexist assumptions and so on – but even acknowledging that, it’s not true that only fathers must financially support their children, and it’s… Read more »
(Probably should note here that I’m not talking about that last post of dmb’s)
Regarding “paper abortions”: While the current system where a man can be forced to pay child support is unfair, at this point it’s the least unfair option. If we could get somebody else (*coughthegovernmentcough*) to pay for the kid somehow I’d be all for it, but since that’s not the least bit politically feasible in the US it’s less fair to the child to not have the father’s support than it is to the father to have to support the child. Regarding the dmb/mythago spat: I have to say, dmb, that you seem excessively hostile to mythago. She did make… Read more »
Wow, major conjunction fail in that first sentence. This is what happens when you spend too much time writing in brief-ese rather that English. To be clear, I believe an ‘opt-in’ system is the one that errs on the side of protecting the father, avoiding bickering about whether or not the father opted out in time, and protects men whose welcomed fatherhood was delayed because of the mother’s fraud. An ‘opt-out’ system is fraught with problems. I don’t see the objection to an ‘opt-in’ system, particularly if it presumes a father’s right to ‘opt-in’ rather than requiring the mother’s permission… Read more »
That is impractical and illogical. How so? It seems to me much more practical and logical than a system that, in real life rather than a rhetorical ideal world that doesn’t exist, hinges on whether or when a woman can get an abortion, whether the potential father has filled out the paperwork in the right period of time (“You missed the deadline!” “She didn’t tell me she was pregnant!” “I told you as soon as I found out!”, etcetera) and which errs on the side of protecting men who don’t want to be fathers, while also protecting the parental rights… Read more »
@doctormindbeam: Is your statement really in line with this blog’s comments policy? If you’ve felt that I’ve said something that is improper I’d like to know what it is; your comment was not very enlightening in that regard. @Toysoldier: Not quite; sperm and egg donors, by law, are presumed never to have been parents in the first place. Assuming their state has a law recognizing such, and assuming they fulfill whatever requirements the law sets to define somebody as a ‘donor’, then the law in effect says “These people are an exception to the rule that you are presumed to… Read more »
If you really approve of making parental obligations and rights fully disposable, then the fair solution is not “opt-out”, but “opt-in”. That is impractical and illogical. Why would women not also begin with the default “do you accept this child, with the rights and responsibilities included” opt-in option? More so, most people who have children want their children. Few women and men abandon their children. The proper solution would be to allow men the same options of legal abandonment available to women. You also seem to forget that the timing of a “paper abortion” can be done in such a… Read more »
But what you can’t do is ask the mother to sign away the child’s rights to parental support. Because those rights don’t even exist until the child is born, and once the child is born the rights belong to the child, not to the mother. Sperm and egg donors sign away their parental rights before the child is born. Surrogates do as well, although they can refuse to comply with the contract and keep the child. Likewise, some women have sued sperm donors to force those men to pay child support, although those men legally have no parental rights to… Read more »
I frankly fail to see how providing men an additional option takes away women’s existing options. That’s because you appear to be presuming that an abortion is something a woman can have anytime she wants because, in certain circumstances, the government cannot ban her from having one. You also seem to forget that the timing of a “paper abortion” can be done in such a way that the woman doesn’t, in fact, have the opportunity or even legal right to an abortion. Forcing me to pay child support for a child that we initially agreed we would not support or… Read more »
That still wouldn’t address the ability of a woman to get pregnant and then force a man to support her child. “Her” child? I thought it was “their” child, but of course I have this thing about fathers as well as mothers having rights. Women do not “get pregnant” all on their own, as you imply. And the mother has to support their child too. And as has been pointed out before, women as well as men are responsible – legally and financially – for their children, whether or not they deliberately had sex, whether or not wanted to be… Read more »
@jnakabb (July 7, 2011 at 3:57 am): Yup, looks like the key to making lists work in WordPress is closing those list and list-item tags.
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