And I should say that I’m not sure that it’s a good idea for the law to look into those more complicated aspects, because the law tends to be a blunt instrument. That’s another question.

Ampersand also made the same criticism you did, but I’m really not grasping it very well.

“Both parents have equal parental rights at that point.”

I’m not sure of the law on this issue, but I feel that morally a father who (in the extreme case) only saw the mother one time, on the night of conception, shouldn’t have any parental rights at all. This follows from the same sort of reasoning I use in my post, I think.

Because it’s no longer in her body and part of a pregnancy. I would think that would be obvious. Both parents have equal parental rights at that point. A man can sue to try to get full custody.

Besides, she doesn’t have autonomous control of the fetus -she has to do what the doctor says. She can be tried for negligence for taking drugs or alcohol while pregnant. She’s already subject to state regulation of the embryo/fetus.

Once the baby is born - it’s a baby. A separate person with his or her own rights. Child support isn’t a payment in return for the labor of the pregnancy. Child support is a right of the child.

I think you’re mixing up the rights of the woman and the man over reproductive questions with the rights of a born child.

Now, I do think “girl” refers to a younger age range than does “woman”, but not so much as you say. I think there are two separate senses of girl, one for a female child, and one for a young female adult. (Webster’s backs me up there.) There are two senses of “woman”, too, one that means any human female, and one that means a fully adult, socially mature female. The latter sense can be heard in phrases like “to make a woman out of one”. It tends to refer to females of 30+ years, in my experience, especially those who are either sexually unattractive, or when their sexuality is irrelevant to the context where they’re being spoken of. In doing so it probably trivializes the maturity of younger females, and further encourages the view that women are sexual objects, and it might be good to try to employ it more liberally for young women. But for me, it’s still awkward when used that way.

Ack. So confusing.

I agree about the juxtaposition, and can only say that it was unintentional.

The whole point of the feminist POV is not “women first” or “crush the men” but “women equal to men”. This means that burdens, choices, and responsibilities should be accepted on equal footing and equally between men and women, and where the burden, responsibility, ability to make the choice, or footing is not equal, adjustments must be made to bring the situation into equality.

That said, in the pre-coitus part of a one-night stand, both the man and the woman should theoretically have the equal choice in whether or not to have sex and whether or not to use birth control. You posit consensual sex, so in your scenario, the choice about having sex is equal. But in your scenario, the man is not responsible for controlling his fertility, even if he doesn’t want a child to result from having sex that night - your scenario puts the whole burden of whether or not a pregnancy occurs on the woman. That is not equal, is it? Why should the man get off scot-free if he isn’t taking care of his end of things?

Post-coitus, I see several different outcomes, assuming that the man doesn’t want to have a child:
1) No pregnancy - nobody has to think about this further (I’m deliberately excluding STDs from this).
2) Pregnancy despite both the man and the woman using birth control - if the fetus is aborted, the man should help pay for the abortion - preferably half the cost. If the woman decides not to abort, I think in this case I agree with you that the man should not be responsible for child support unless he chooses to be.
3) Pregnancy despite the man only using birth control - the man should be at least partly responsible for the cost of an abortion if the woman wants one, but I would have to agree with you that in this case the man should only be as responsible as he chooses to be. To be really really fair to the child, who after all didn’t ask to be here, I think the man should assume some child support burden, say 1/280 of the total cost of raising the child (a typical pregnancy lasting 280 days)- which is about $2K if that total cost is $500,000 to age 18.
4) Pregnancy despite the woman only using birth control - sorry, dude, but you didn’t take care of your end at all, so by not using birth control you just signed yourself up for paying at least some child support (maybe $4K?) and definitely for paying half of the abortion. If you think the woman might have been lying about birth control, then a condom is good insurance against child support payments, eh?
5) Pregnancy results because neither the man nor the woman used birth control - same as #4.

The whole issue of partial child support is one I think ought to be examined more closely, because I think that might be the way to be more fair to everyone involved, but maybe this is something that has been argued before and I was unaware of it.

I don’t see abortion as “absolving” responsibilty from the father. The reason it changes things is that without a safe abortion, the child is much less a product of the free choice of the mother (to continue the pregnancy), and much more a product of the joint choice of the parents to have intercourse.

“that is the only thing he can do to avoid the risk he isn’t willing to take”

This is a particularly bad instance of begging the question, because it has a good rhetorical effect without actually making an argument. You’re basically saying here, “oh, he fucked up–he should take responsibility”. But I don’t think there is any responsibility, so let’s establish that first.

OK, let me make an analogy. Say I suggest to my friend Bob that he go out street racing. He decides to take my advice, and he gets into a pretty bad accident and receives some considerable injuries. Am I partly responsible? Not really. Maybe a tiny bit, but not really. Basically, I think that the fertilization and implantation of a zygote is really nothing more than a suggestion to the mother that she might want to have a child. It’s still up to her to make the positive choice to continue the pregnancy.

Now, I’m sure most people will view this choice as a negative, not a positive. (In the sense that negative is abstaining from action and a positive is taking action, not in any moral sense.) The positive choice is to get an abortion. And when abortion isn’t readily available, or when it’s a morally difficult decision for the mother, it makes it really hard to see it as a negative choice, as I would have it. (And, as I’ve said, abortion *is* difficult, so my argument is pretty hypothetical.) But I think in a world not so terribly far from the one we live in, and in fact a world that is desirable by feminist ideals as I understand them, that abortion would be seen as the default option, and the mother would be making a positive choice to continue the pregnancy. People wouldn’t even see the pregnancy as having begun until that point.

Jake, if I were older I would probably use “man” and “woman”, but as it is I usually use “guy” and “girl”, as the people I know are “guys” and “girls”. I’m not always consistent, but it’s absolutely silly to think that I’m referring to a minor when I say girl. So fuck you.