Metablog

Oh, wow. Looks like this issue is getting more attention. Amanda Marcotte, Lindsay Beyerstein, and Shakespeare’s Sister have all weighed in, based on a court case actually being argued (I’m supposing) along the lines of my previous post. Now, the former two are writers I read regularly, and who I tend to agree with 90% of the time. So I feel kind of awkward taking a position so very opposed to theirs. But I feel I must.

None really say anything that I feel a need to dissect. They don’t present a strong, well-reasoned case for their side, as I do, and I don’t feel like divining what their exact arguments against my position might be before they state them. But I do want to draw a bit of attention to them for my hypothetical readers, and to make a disclaimer for myself. I don’t necessarily support any of the arguments being made by these MRA laywers or their client, and in fact I probably don’t support many of them. They’re almost certainly not approaching the issue from a feminist viewpoint, and I’d like to think that I am. And while the details of the exact case aren’t clear, this is definitely not the most clear-cut case to support my own view. The existence of a long-term prior relationship (How long term? I’m not sure.) means that the girlfriend could have had reasonable expectations. The boyfriend’s case seems to hinge on the fact that he had made clear, as he said, that he didn’t want any children. Establishing that in court might be hard, and I think it would be a terrible idea for the burden of proof to be on the mother in this situation, as women already have to overcome so much to deal with the courts at all. (See, there? I’m not really an MRA sympathizer.) Is there a precedent for this? Probably not.

But it could turn out that he’s being an asshole about the whole thing.

I’m not sure I can support this case even if it turns out the guy doesn’t really owe her child support by my view. Because this sort of situation is still relatively rare, and in general to have that sort of precedent is going in exactly the wrong direction for women’s rights in this country. I do think it’s unjust for men in that situation, but compared to the injustice that women suffer, it’s really almost excusable. I’m much more afraid that, in the current climate, changing this would be an overcorrection and lead to more injustice to women in child support cases than it prevents against men in these cases.

Another disclaimer. These same kinds of people seem to be against child support in general, which I am definitely not. My position is only that child support should be based on prior expectation as well as parental status, but where there is prior expectation, I don’t think the man should be able to go back on his word after the viability of the child. And I think it’d be shameful for him to go back on his word even after conception.

There is one interesting issue that Amanda brings up, and that Lee brought up in the comments to my other post. How much should the method and faithfulness of the birth control used affect the responsibilities of the man? In this case, Shake’s Sis speculates that no birth control was used because the woman understood that she was infertile (though that’s pretty baseless speculation, imho). But was it because the man didn’t want to use birth control and managed to persuade the woman against her better interests, or was she gung ho with the idea? And would that change how responsible he is for child support? I tend to think that if the guy applied pressure on the question, it does make him a little more responsible for the pregnancy, (as in, more than half), but not any more responsible for the child. But if it was a purely mutual decision, I don’t think it changes anything. After all, the whole idea is that continuing the pregnancy is completely the choice of the mother, and so she has all the responsibility for that choice.

On the other hand, I do think there should be a financial obligation for the father to assist the mother in obtaining an abortion, and there’s definitely a moral obligation. In this I can agree with at least some of the words of so many commenters on this issue: you got her pregnant—take responsibility. I just don’t think that responsibility extends quite as far.

And I think in another post I might go meta and try to find a few of the fallacies in the feminist posts I linked to, which might help to explain why I got so mad at the three posts I linked, two of which were written by authors I agree with 90% of the time. Why do I feel they’re being as unfair to my position as they feel so many conservatives are to theirs?

UPDATE 2006-8-2: I participate in a couple of discussions about this.

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