Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
It's a woman's body and a woman's choice; The man has no rights here. Once you strip away his rights in the decision process, you also remove all of his obligation.
If "Bob" and "Cindy" date for six weeks and Cindy discovers she's knocked up, it's her decision to have a baby. Bob agreed to have sex with her, not father a child with her, and not enter into some kind of relationship that requires an eighteen year commitment. The man has no rights and is not legally part of the decision making process to have the baby.
Before I met wife, I dated a woman named Karen. Karen had dated a man named Vince prior to me meeting her, got knocked up, but decided it wasn't in her best interests to Vince as a father. She broke it off with him and had the baby without his knowledge. Somewhere along the line the father's name got mentioned in some paperwork, and Vince woke up one day and discovered that he owed five years of back support for a child he never knew he had. Not only did he have no rights and no part of the decision making process, he had no knowledge of the child. So he got socked with a $20k bill, had to make child support payments, and was only allowed to see his child once a month - a child who wanted nothing to do with him. How's that for fair?
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If a woman ignores her duty to tell a man about a child that he helped concieve over a given period of time, then I think he should be off the hook for back payments, and maybe even off the hook completely. You can't have a man coming in and out of a child's life like. It's not fair to the child or to the father. Moreoever, if he rarely gets to see the kid like you said, he should not have to pay at all.
In the more usual situation where the man agrees to sex and spawns a baby, he is partially responsible if he knows that the woman became pregnant. When you have sex you accept the risk of having a kid whether you want one or not (just like you accept the potential of contracting an STD even though most people don't want one of those), and you know beforehand that the ultimate choice will be the woman's, not yours, since the child is going to grow inside her body.
I never take a woman's word that she doesn't want kids or that she's on the pill. I bag it and use spermacide.