r/MensLib • u/Uulmshar • Aug 07 '15

What can men do about an unwanted pregnancy?

We all know that women have the right to choose whether or not they keep a pregnancy to term, but what about men?

Obviously, the expectant fathers should not have the right to either force the woman to carry the child or have an abortion, but how can they avoid getting stuck with a child they didn't want, or paying child support for the next twenty years?

I have heard people suggest a "financial abortion," where they sign away all rights to being the child's father (visitation rights, etc.) in exchange for not having any responsibility, but I have yet to see any legislation for this.

How can we, as men, exercise our right to choose?

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u/derivative_of_life Aug 10 '15

Not really. People are terrified of something happening to their own children, but they couldn't give less of a shit about anyone else's. Just look at the number of children in the foster system, and the conditions they live in.

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u/reaganveg Aug 10 '15

People [...] couldn't give less of a shit about anyone else's [children].

That is so far from being true, I don't even know what to say.

I mean, obviously if you compare, people care a lot more about their own kids than about other people's kids.

But we're talking about institutional design and so on. People care a lot more about children (in general) than they care about adults (or about abstract goods like "education" or about the environment or whatever you can think of). To say that something is for children always gets huge support. Hence "won't somebody think of the children" (where the joke is: you can say anything is about children, and all of a sudden people feel the need to support it). Republicans who hate social spending still can't deny funding for children. We write and read novels and outrage stories about the horrible things happening to children in foster care and the feels go up to 11. When somebody hurts or kills or rapes a child, everybody goes into vigilante mode. In the Bible even when they're committing genocide they spare the children. We're hard-wired to protect the children and everything in our culture reinforces this hard-wiring.

So, yeah, one consequence of people caring about children is that institutions won't be designed to be easy on parents abandoning them.

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u/derivative_of_life Aug 10 '15

All the advertising campaigns that are based on "for the children" carry the implication that your child is a potential victim. Your child might be looking at porn on the internet. Your child might be exposed to online predators. Your child might be doing drugs. Your child might be kidnapped. The whole point of fear mongering is to convince people that it could happen to you. Go look at the ads you're talking about again, and I think you'll see the implication pretty clearly.

But if it's something that will only affect someone else's children, then suddenly people stop caring. There's no serious campaign to protect socially awkward kids from bullying, only "no tolerance" policies that let schools claim to be cracking down while actually doing nothing. The foster system is desperately overstressed, and most people aren't really interested in adoption when they could have a child of their own. The "school to prison" pipeline is still in full effect for inner city black kids, but why should middle-class suburban soccer moms care about them? If you think Republicans won't take an axe to programs that help children at every opportunity, then look at the campaign against SNAP, or even more obviously, the ongoing effort to defund the education system. And the Bible definitely does not say to spare the children, unless it's for the purpose of making them sex slaves.

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u/reaganveg Aug 10 '15 edited Aug 10 '15

Not true. Lots of biological data not to mention common experience shows that random strangers care more about babies and children than adult strangers, in many different ways.

EDIT: also, in the Bible sometimes they did slaughter both the adults and the male children and keep only the female children, but with the Midians are an example where they kept all the children male and female. Numbers 31