Dealing with Dead-Beat Dead-Beat Dads

 Steve sounds like you have been drinking pee or sniffing crack.  

Whether or not a woman gives birth is up to her.   I said that if a guy has sex and a child results he must pay for this.   The same as if you crashed your can into mine and had no insurance, you would be paying for the accident.   It is called taking responsibility for your actions.

Seek help for that drug addiction!

 Well, that video has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.   You are trying to sway the thread away from guys taking responsibility for their actions in creating a child to something about abortion. I am not going to bite.

That video has everything to do with what you said. Either you are not bright enough to grasp the concepts involved or you are simply burying your head in the sand.

Pukakidon – That’s all well and good, however we are not talking about a situation where one party is clearly at fault and the other is not, as might be the case in a car crash.

When it comes to sex, it, as they say, takes two to tango. Women reserve the right to have an abortion regardless of what the man wants – “My body, my choice”. Arguably that’s fair enough, however “my choice” also means “my responsibility” – and that’s the part that seems to get forgotten.

Women have reproductive rights – the right to choose whether or not to become a parent; men don’t – wearing a condom is merely a precaution (and condoms do fail); not a right – it does not confer any reproductive rights upon men. Men only have reproductive responsibilities – the responsibility to pay should the woman choose to become a parent.

So when do men get reproductive rights? Well, that’s easy – when men get married. I’ve commented previously on posts about gay marriage that the fundamental reason for marriage is to create paternity  - that’s when men accept full paternal responsibility, along with full paternal rights, for any children from the marriage.That’s why historically it was considered really bad if a married woman slept around; because her husband was legally responsible for her children (indeed, that’s still the law today). However, the deal was for life – “till death do us part”, but if for whatever reason the marriage broke up then the children were *his* – because he paid for them. Compare with an unmarried woman having children – the children were hers alone, and no-one else’s responsibility, not even the putative father’s. 

So in the absence of DNA testing to establish paternity, fatherhood and paternity were two different things: fatherhood in the biological sense – no legal or financial consequence for the man (like a sperm donor today), and paternity – a legal concept voluntarily entered into by the man and with legal and financial consequences for him. This was all because because biological fatherhood could not be determined with any accuracy.

So what do we have today? If a man’s wife has a child he is *defined* as the father – legal paternity; as has always been the case. As far as I know, this is still so even if he can prove he is not the biological father. 

If the marriage breaks down, the children are usually considered hers – she gets custody – but the man still generally has financial responsibility, even if he doesn’t have full paternal rights.. although this is changing somewhat. Because divorce is now “no fault” this will still apply even if it is the woman who walks out – and indeed, most divorces are initiated by the woman (and it has been suggested that in the majority of the remaining cases the man has been bullied or otherwise forced into seeking divorce).
Paternal responsibility therefore extends beyond the terms of the original contract – marriage.

And if the couple are not married, so the man is a father only in the biological sense and without having voluntarily agreed to parenthood, then the man *still* has paternal responsibility – financially, that is, and of course he doesn’t get any paternal rights. The woman can of course opt out of any such responsibility; she can abort or adopt out.

Ok so if that all seems like whinge whinge for men let’s look at a slightly bigger picture. 

Since the late ’60s births to unmarried mothers have gone up from around 13% to around 45% of all births. That is not necessarily bad in and of itself; personally I have no moral objections to single mothers.
However, study after study shows that children raised in single mother homes without their biological father are much more likely to be socially dysfunctional: to be alcoholics, drug users, criminals, promiscuous, violent, suicidal and so on. This is very likely the reason why having “bastard children” historically was considered immoral. It is now known that there are biological consequences to raising children without the father in the household, so it seems likely to me that we are not dealing fairly fundamental biological forces – forces that helped separate man from the other apes.

What many today call “progress”: freeing women from the “patriarchal oppression of marriage”, seems to me to be regress; undoing the last few thousand years of social development.

So let’s cut all the white-knighting and shaming language and talk openly and honestly about the consequences to society as a whole. Or is that too much too ask?