As SallyStrange has pointed out in the comments here, quite a few MRAs seem to have a bad case of “womb envy” – or, more specifically, “abortion envy.” That is, they envy the ability of women to abort fetuses that they – the guys, as sperm providers — have had a part in creating. And since they don’t get final say in whether or not the woman in the equation gets an abortion, many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born.
But for every MRA demanding their own right to an abortion, there’s another MRA who thinks abortion is an unmitigated evil, which in essence means that they think pregnant women should be forced to give birth to babies they don’t want. The guy behind The Life Zone evidently thinks this way. And so does one New Mexican pro-lifer named Greg Fultz, who has launched a bizarre campaign designed to shame the woman who aborted what he thinks of as “his” baby – the highlight of which is a giant billboard depicting him holding what looks like the blackened carcass of a baby under the headline “This Would Have Been a Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To NOT KILL Our Child!”
I’ve been meaning to write about the Fultz thing for some time, but haven’t, because frankly the whole thing makes me depressed. Over the past day or so three separate Man Boobz readers have brought the subject up, so I figure it’s time to deal with the subject. My solution? I’m going to punt, and rather than post about it specifically I’m just going to point you to an excellent, and nicely sarcastic, post on the subject from Jill on Feministe.
Since Jill wrote that post, Fultz has been ordered by a judge to take the billboard down or face jail; he says he won’t. Details here.
NOTE: I originally ended this post with a 1200 word dissertation spelling out my take on abortion. But reading it back over again I realized that many of the points I made in it had already been made, in many cases more deftly, by various commenters in yesterday’s 800-plus comment thread (which actually stayed on the topic for the first several hundred comments, until more or less everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said). The tl;dr summary: her body, her choice. “Paper abortions” only work if the government is willing to step in to make up for the loss of child support, and that isn’t going to happen in the US any time soon. (And I don’t see many MRAs calling for increased support for single moms.)
So instead of abortion, let’s talk about Fultz. What a dick.
“Presently if a husband decides to exit he will be accountable if the mother decides to have the child. The law determines that. Presently there is no law in place the other way.”
If a woman has a child and then leaves it with the father for him to raise on his own, he can legally ask her for child support. Just as if a woman has a child and the man leaves her to raise it on her own. Both are legally financially accountable for the child.
Bee – no kidding. I know men in that situation. One of my cousins is raising his daughter from his first wife. She’s completely screwed up and would never be able to raise a kid. He managed to pull his life together, get a good paying job, and find a new wife who’s not screwed up and together they’re raising both his kid from the first marriage and one they had together. A friend of mine is a single dad whose girlfriend helps out with his kid when he travels for work (but isn’t full time raising the kid because they don’t live together). I don’t know if the mother has any custody at all – he barely talks about her, I think things ended very badly there. Another friend if mine had one child each by her first two husbands and in each of those cases the father has primary custody (she gets visitation on weekends). No court ordered this – it was by mutual agreement based on what was best for the kids (they get better school districts where their fathers live I think I don’t know all the details).
I don’t actually know what the mothers are providing in terms of child support in any of these cases because people don’t talk about that kind of thing. But I do seem to know a fair numbers of fathers with primary custody! I also know a couple of moms.
I didn’t say that the questions shouldn’t be asked, but was asking what you thought or think might be a viable solution (to that one particular question, or scenario), because the question doesn’t really make sense. If a husband decides to exit and the mother decides to have the child, he is accountable by law (i.e., has legal, financial responsibility to the child). Your question is, if the potential mother of the child decides to bow out (i.e., terminate the pregnancy), even though the husband’s wishes would be for her to have the child, then why does the law not hold her accountable (i.e., having legal, financial responsibility to….???)
As for fathers not having a say in the matter, when the potential mother decides to terminate the pregnancy when that is not what the father desires, that does not necessarily equate to the father not having had any say in the matter, it simply means that he did not make the final decision in the matter.
*I’d love to get Slave into the Machine Shop with me and work just one day with no air conditioning, in 120 degree temps, breathing metal dusts, literally wiping the blood off your machine from your cuts that nobody is enough of a pussy to put a band-aid on, and then see how hard-ass his “work attitude” is.*
Anyway…..fuck him.
And abortion is actually a much milder version of taking a person off of life support when they can no longer function/think/breathe/eat on their own and/or without the aid of machines and intervention. The main difference is that a person on life support is an actual human that’s already born and very much alive. Yet the family or spouse still has the right to end their life for them as they are not a fully functioning human at that point.
A mother’s womb is the same as a life support machine. Or a host to a parasite, if you prefer. The fetus cannot live, think, breathe, eat, or survive on it’s own. Therefore the family (the mother) has the right to “pull the plug”.
As long as removing a person from life support is legal and not considered “murder”, abortion of an unborn, possible human most certainly cannot be.
@Lady Raine, I don’t think a life support machine is a good analogy, as we would not remove a person from life support without their consent (or the consent of their family if they are incapacitated). Also, a life support machine has no interests of its own-it isn’t a person, unlike a woman, whose body would be being used.
“many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born”
I would have no problem with this providing:
1) Permanent, irrevocable waiver and removal of all parental rights.
2) The deadbeat sperm donor is slapped with a permanent, life-long restraining order preventing him from contacting the kid for spare parts when his worthless decrepit ass needs a kidney or something. No contact, at all, for the rest of the worthless shitbag’s life with either the kid or the mother.
3) A social safety net that will support the children that deadbeat sperm donors abandon if the mother is unable/just barely making it as a single parent.
And, in a perfect world,
4) A registry of deadbeat sperm donors, so women can avoid them in the future. Or required castration. Whatever’s more cost effective.
Walkertall, I like your idea.
Rather, I think it should be accompanied with mandatory vasectomy.
this is interesting… in a sick and twisted sort of way… it appears that ten years ago Fultz may have been harassing/stalking a 13 year old.
NWO Can any of you contest the fact that your life began at the moment of conception? Ah… the “prove a negative” problem.
No, I can’t. But you can’t prove it did either.
But the issue isn’t life. Carrots are alive. Cabbage is alive. Chickens are alive. We eat fertile eggs (they even cost more than than non-fertile eggs) which is equivalent to forcing a bird to abort, and eating the result.
The question is at what point does the mass of cells become a person. Because killing, qua killing is required if a living animal is to survive.
Which is why I am perfectly willing to agree that abortion ends a living thing’s life, and so kills it. What I won’t do is say a blastocyst, embryo, or fetus, is a person. Murder is a legal term, it has specific requirements, where I live these are they: California Penal Code § 187
(a)Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.
(b)This section shall not apply to any person who commits an act that results in the death of a fetus if any of the following apply:
(1)The act complied with the Therapeutic Abortion Act, Article 2 (commencing with Section 123400) of Chapter 2 of Part 2 of Division 106 of the Health and Safety Code.
(2)The act was committed by a holder of a physician’s and surgeon’s certificate, as defined in the Business and Professions Code, in a case where, to a medical certainty, the result of childbirth would be death of the mother of the fetus or where her death from childbirth, although not medically certain, would be substantially certain or more likely than not.
(3)The act was solicited, aided, abetted, or consented to by the mother of the fetus.
(c)Subdivision (b) shall not be construed to prohibit the prosecution of any person under any other provision of law.
So… killer, sure (but that applies to me anyway, your tax dollars; for 16 years, paid me to be a professional killer. That’s what it means to be a soldier). What I’m not, and no attempt on your part to twist English to suit, or play with words to try and force us to accept your (false) terms, will change it, is a murderer.
Skyal: Whatever moral support I can give, is yours for the asking. Choice is hard. If you and your husband need to talk it out some more, then talk. I’ve been involved in some pregnancy scares, and if we’d been in the spot you’re in… her call all the way, but we talked about it a lot, which helped us both.
It sounds like you are doing it well.
Also… just to clarify. The Fultz who has the child support order (in default) is not this Fultz. It’s some other Greg Fultz, The middle name, and the faces don’t match.
Sort of sad, really.
Sort of sad, in that the jerk who abandoned his kids also gets saddled with being confused with this jerk, and that the bigger jerk in New Mexico has the moral advantage of being able to say, “you are accusing me of things I didn’t do” and then using it to pretend that makes his asshole behavior somehow acceptable.
I really don’t see anything wrong with a “paper abortion” or anyone who gets one and I’m puzzled by those who do. Take this hypothetical:
A couple has protected sex, the birth control fails. The woman, finding out she’s pregnant, is overjoyed — she realizes she would love to have and raise a child. The man is not. He is not ready to be a father. They’re not that serious. He doesn’t have the resources (financial and temporal) to devote to child-rearing. He had a future, plans, was saving up for a move or a return to school or a year off to do some interesting volunteer work. He understood (because of the birth control usage) that this relationship was one for pleasure and companionship only, and doesn’t want to be tied down to providing support for the child.
This is a position that most advocates of abortion can sympathize with. This is why we *have* abortion, why we support abortion, because a woman can be in that position and it *sucks* and it’s *wrong* to force her to sacrifice in some way her dreams just because of a statistical accident or a bad decision.
So, in the period of time in which the woman can still abort (important — no deciding you want out after she’s committed), the man signs a legally binding document declaring that he is the sperm donor for the child, but that his interaction goes no further. He will not pay child support, he will not expect custody or even the time of day from the child and its mother. The child is not his and he foregoes any rights and responsibilities he might have to it.
And then he’s done and free of undeserved responsibility. I don’t think he deserves any amount of scorn, any more than a woman does who does not want a pregnancy resulting from bad decision or accident.
Separately, of course, if he knowingly and coercively impregnated her and she is unable to get an abortion for some reason, she should be able to either press charges or sue his ass for the costs and distress of bearing a child to term. A person who does that is a predator, but I suspect the population of those is much lower than the population of at-risk innocent dudes.
So, just to make sure I hear you clearly, you think that a man who abandons a child – an actual, living, breathing child – is no different than a woman who has an abortion.
So, is it safe to assume from this that are of the “life begins at conception” crowd? Because, that’s the only conceivable way this makes any sense.
Nope! I do not support men abandoning actual living breathing children. Note that I tied the length of time in which a man should be able to do this to the length of time a woman has to abort — if the woman’s decision to have the child is contingent on the father’s support, she can then reverse that decision when the father withdraws support, *before* there is an actual child. Once she can no longer abort (and I think abortions should be legal until the child can survive outside the womb, which is as good a metric as any for when it’s alive), he will be on the hook for child support, because there’s no legal way to terminate the pregnancy anymore.
What do you think a dude should do to avoid getting in this situation? If you say use birth control, well, birth control fails. If you say avoid hookups — why should hookups be female-only? If you say force her to get an abortion, that’s bad for the same reason forcing her *not* to get an abortion is. If you say keep his legs closed — *REALLY*?
I just got banned from this site for speaking my mind http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/activism/some-words-on-abortion-and-the-mrm-2/
Jerks.