Ideally, the possibilities would be discussed before two people have sex, although realistically I doubt it happens very often. If the father doesn't want a child then he doesn't have to have one. If the father does want a child but the mother doesn't, her decision is final because she is the person giving birth.

Quite a lot of reasons, actually. Religions beliefs, personally not wanting to have an abortion, changing her mind etc.

Because that ''something'' happens to be made up of half of the man's genes. The woman is just the person who carries the baby, but it doesn't make it totally her responsibility. The man has allowed his 'foreign substance' () to enter her body and he knew the consequences as well. Both parents have equal responsibility and morally he has an obligation. Let's face it, it's hardly a nice thing to just have sex and then dump his girlfriend, leaving her to raise a child on her own. Unless of course, there was some sort of prior agreement.

But we're not being individualistic. That's why I'm a leftist, not a Thatcherite.

Should the woman get a chance to claim she doesn't want the child and so the man can have it instead? Perhaps a man should be able to claim he doesn't want to pay child support or have contact with the child, but he shouldn't have a say over whether or not that child is born or aborted.

And if the sexual partners agreed that their main method of protection would be a hormonal birth control - perhaps because the man is allergic to latex and all other condom designs are fairly ineffective - but the female irregularly consumes her prescription (in some cases purposely so), resulting in a pregnancy - do you share that same outrage? Why is it the conservative argument against "sex implies acceptance" doesn't hold true for the woman, but it's demonstrably true for the man?

I don't think anyone here is seriously advocating that the mother and child not be cared for if their financial situation demands it (health care and abortive costs), but the individualization of child support is both punishing towards men and presumes that a man must be held responsible for a child he does not want. Perhaps it gets stickier when the couple were in a long-term relationship and the father was there rearing his children before the separation, but in a lot of scenarios the child support is extracted from relationships where there was no consent on keeping the child.

Most components of the male rights movement are a legitimate response to the very real issues neglected by contemporary sociologists. The sentiments expressed in this thread - that any attention paid to men will by necessity take away from females - is a great illustration as to why more education needs to go into why men have their own institutionalized problems and consequences that need to be addressed.

Child care is just a drop in the bucket. Much, much higher suicide rates; unfair treatment by the incarceration and justice system; warfare being predominantly a "male's duty"; lower educational achievements.

One can see issues faced by both men and women.

Cause the man doesn't have to lug the bastard around for nine months and then push the 6-10 pound baby out his penis.

Of course not. The penis does not stretch to accommodate even kidney stones.

Hey, if you're going to be facetious and condescending just to defend a backwater conservative argument like "sex implies consent," expect reciprocation.

Assuming you were actually being serious, I'm left wondering what you think should occur relating to deadbeat moms, since women typically pay half of what their male counterparts pay when the father takes custody, despite make about 80 cents to every dollar (and even then we have to account for the fact men typically work longer in more strenuous fields like mining and fishing). Is the role of female reproductive organs really the determinant factor in all of this?

The women can choose not to do that.

I'm still rather confused. A man chooses whether or not to have sex with a women "knowing what he is getting into." That doesn't mean the situation shouldn't be made as fair as possible.

Why does a man get put into a situation where he has no power simply because he had sex with a women? It's her body. Why is he responsible for a choice she made with it?

If I have sex with a women and she breaks my penal bone, should I be holding her 50% accountable for the medical expenses? I made a choice with my body. I took a risk. Something bad happened. That's a risk "I took."

Here is another scenario. There is an incredibly fun video game in the lab of a mad scientist. He gives me the only key. Here is the catch. If I active the game (which is incredibly fun), a random women will be given access to the machine. What can she do with this access? She can choose to play it, but she knows the choice will electrocute me, leaving me requiring regular and costly surgery to repair it.

She wouldn't be right to play the game. Let's tie pregnancy back into this situation. A man gets a women pregnant. He didn't choose to have a child. He choose to get a women pregnant. Why does that entail that he should be necessarily committed to support the women in whatever choice she makes?

We know the following:

1. The women would've planned for a child if she wanted one.
2. Pregnancy is more painful than abortion.
3. Objections to abortion are religious.

So men can be held at ransom for money because of what are essentially the religious motivations? Why can't they get one week to declare they do not wish to have the child, renounce all possible rights, and get out of the situation.

The women still has the same choice. Have the child or not. What exactly is the problem? She is actively choosing to have a child of her own free will. It is a choice "she" makes. Why is the man held accountable to her choice?

I really don't see how this is supposed to work. I think the state should support all single parents rather than individual people so I wouldn't advocate hanging them out to try. I just fail to see why, especially in specific cases, men are held accountable for child support.

Can we hold a sperm donor accountable? No, simply because we socially decide "that's different." It's really just like that for all cases. The only issue is that introducing this concept would leave women in bad circumstances. Well, maybe it's time to overhaul how we deal with single parents anyway?

Look at child support. Some random girl hooks up with a millionaire and her and a child live the life of luxury. Surely it's in the interests of everyone to just income-level tax and redistribute the wealth to single parents? This is within the context of our current society, of course.

EDIT: I'm not advocating that a man has any right to force a women to get an abortion or force her to continue a pregnancy.

I really hope you know that there is no such thing as a "penal bone".

Also, you are getting seriously annoying with your "playing devil's advocate" and "hypothetical scenarios". This is not an ethics class. At a certain point you will not be indulged anymore, you will be seen as sexist and we'll have to take the appropriate steps.

Yeah, I'm just going crazy with hypothetical scenarios.

What grounds is there for claiming I am sexist? Where have I said women should be forced to have an abortion or continue a pregnancy? Where have I said women are unequal to men? Where have I said women who become pregnant and choice to keep the child don't deserve society's support in every way, including financially? Where have I said a women is a bad person for wanting financial support for her child? I simply suggested maybe it should work in a different way.

What kind of completely arbitrary definition of sexism are you using where I would legitimately fall under it?

D:

The only sexists in this thread are the ones entertaining the notion men implicitly accept children every time they indulge in intercourse...

^GeneCosta, no one here is going to indulge your confused, utterly backward conception of white males being the victims of discrimination.

Only because this forum is rampant with sexist ideologues like yourself who fall back on moralistic arguments when males defend themselves.

"Use a condom before you complain about having a child" is something I should be reading at Stormfront or FreeRepublic, not RevLeft.

As for the arguments that having sex means should equal risking having a child I thought that was what the main inhibitor on female promiscuity (?) before the prevention pill was invented? Let's not fall back to that again. Having children and having sex should be seperated as we have the technical means to do that now. (Please make a male prevention pill scientists)

I don't see why the scenario where someone is burdened with fatherhood in a period of their life where they absolutely don't want/can't support children is so alien. Surely most people know someone in that situation.

Though maybe most male rights groups campaigns against the financial support that is a reactionairy position and what should be on the table is for society to take up the financial support to single mothers. Why should the financial burden of raising children fall on single persons? Let's fight for collective support of single parents instead of fighting against single support of parents.

Equal paid maternity and paternal leave is better for women (maybe somewhat longer for women as pregnancy takes quite a hit on your body) as it equals the field in the work market and careers as it's not just women who are expected to take a long break from their work, besides dispelling the ridiculous notion that women are better parents.

That is absurd.

Your entire line of reasoning is filled with logical fallacies and your post is based on guilt by association.
Completely out of the blue you end your post with get fucked? That is completely immature, very irrational, and very, very stupid. Yet people thanked you for your post. Go figure.

mining and fishing? let me catch you up to the 21st century here...

for the united states: in 2004, there were about 207,000 wage and salary jobs in the mining industry. in 2006 there were about 25,000 jobs in fishing, hunting and trapping combined, with a total of two million if we add jobs like agriculture and forestry. you probably should've gone with something like "manufacturing and construction," assuming we can keep applying traditional stereotypes. notice that both fall quite a bit short of health care and social assistance and the service industry as a whole.

Not that I disagree that men should have to pay child support payments if they get a woman preganant, accidentaly or otherwise; but interesting, this is the exact same argument raised by the anti-choice lobby. There is an obvious disparity in the application of your reasoning; but there absolutely should be. If men have to pay child support for an infant they didn't want; tough. While it is not a perfect or fair system, it would be far less fair on the children in question if they and their mother suffer from economic hardship because the father doesn't want to live upto his resoncibilities.

Yes, well at least I've actually put forward an opinion. As I said in your negative rep comment, if you disagree, make an argument to the contrary.

The whole premise of this case in favor of "father's rights" is essentially, as far as I'm concerned, not really any different than revolutionary leftists debating whether they ought to champion the cause of white rights or male rights or straight rights. Women (which, obviously, includes mothers) are systematically oppressed based on the fact that they are women; men are not oppressed due to being men. Therefore, men don't need advocacy groups organized on the basis that they are men advocating men's rights. To the extent that such groups exist, revolutionary leftists have no business supporting them. We support struggles of the oppressed; men (which obviously includes fathers) are not oppressed on the basis that they are men.

I was bringing up these industries because they are considerably more dangerous than all other professions and because men predominantly occupy these jobs even today. Your insistence on bringing up raw numbers was entirely useless and contributed nothing to the thread other than trying to provoke unneeded controversy.

Besides, it's not as if we're talking about chariot makers here. There are roughly the same number of licensed extensive care surgeons in the continental US.

Anyway... distraction aside...

Indeed, your entire argument is that we should just ignore the plights of fathers and men, deluding ourselves into believing they don't exist and that gender roles - which force both genders into tidy, quantitative lifestyles - have no negative impact on males. Or if they do, it doesn't really matter. The fact male suicide rates are four times as much as what you find in females is not something to blow off. It should not just be "ignored" because it doesn't deal with restrictive ownership of the means of production. There are definite issues men are facing. Some of us want resolution.

It is quite clear since the Sexual Revolution that lifting the oppressed out of their state of dire need does not resolve the 'chain' issue Frederick Douglas talked about in his autobiography. Just because women are continuously making strides does not mean that all those problems which face males are going away in a mirroring effect. The issue at hand is how to resolve these problems while balancing a concern for historically oppressed groups. The Left, like the Right, has proven itself ignorant of the subject. It's a new phenomena with little literature and thought devoted to it, so people are reacting harshly to the notion that just perhaps we need to devote time towards figuring out what direction men need to take. It's quite clear where women need to go in terms of economic and social empowerment - and how to deal with the consequences of female gender roles - but men are now lost in a confusing mess of indicators. There is no definite direction for them to take, and "just support women" is not enough when they have their own issues needing to be addressed as well. I'm sure we can all pretty much agree on what constitutes a self-thinking, independent woman, but there's absolutely no consensus - even in the feminist communities - on what makes an independent man. Why are men leaving their children behind? Why are they dying at a younger age? Why are they killing themselves? Why are they being laughed at when raped? Why are they forced into aggressive environments like gangs, prisons, and war? These are issues interconnected with the struggle for female liberation, but at the same time, men need to feel like they have people caring for them. It needs to be a mutual struggle.

And frankly just ignoring the issue will have the adverse effect of making men reactionary. It's a question of either incorporating these issues into the movement for gender equality or stagnating indefinitely.

What category does this fall into. If a man is caught staying at home to care for children, he is looked at as less of a man? If a man is seen as emotional, he is seen as less of a man.

I realize that all of these negatives exist because they are attributes placed on women and labeled as negative. However, men still lose because of the existing social organization.

If a man supports equal rights, it doesn't have to be altruistic. Men have good reasons to challenge gender inequality because it relates to them. Here are what I would suggest are some more legitimate men's rights issues. These are issues our social norms/legal system force upon men that make them disadvantaged in certain ways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights

Surely some of those cases are legitimate examples of society working in ways that oppose the interests of men?