daoneandonly wrote:How do you say a man is inconvenienced if he wants to have a child and the woman aborts him/her? How is that an inconvenience, traffic is an inconvenience, your child being killed against your wishes is a heartless act. On the flip side, if he feels inconvenienced because he does not want to be a father but she wants to have the child, to f'n bad for him, he's the father and he's responsible.
So what's your plan for women who have children and want to keep them but wealthy men and their lawyers push them to have abortions? These kinds of things happen all the time. And yes, biologically the woman might have more control in some situations. So? Why do we need to make allowances for the one case where the power imbalance might be occasionally shifted towards the woman? If the woman is choosing to have an abortion, there are LOTs of factors, and the man in question is always central among them. Sometimes there will be things the man could do to change the woman's desire for an abortion but he's unwilling to do them as he doesn't think it fair or whatever. Other times, there is nothing the man can do because the point where he could have made that decision is in the past. But make no mistake, while the woman will have the final say and may go against the man's wishes in the end, the man is never a purely innocent victim in all of this. The man made significant actions that put him in a position where the woman who might have his child no longer wishes to have his child and he's now suffering the consequences of those actions. Hopefully in the future he changes his ways because I don't think anyone wants to see those kinds of consequences if they can be avoided, and men absolutely can avoid them.
I mean, sure, if you disagree with the term inconvenienced, fair enough. As for jumping to conclusions, sure, but again, your first reaction to suggesting you agree with the idea that we need to hold everyone accountable was to bring up how men might suffer. What that means is something I can't specifically clarify, and I get the impression you can't, either, but it absolutely means something even if you want to dismiss it.
If society as a whole wants to discuss these things, we need to start looking at these things from the woman's point of view a bit. Women who are having abortions don't actually want to have them. They're making a decision they don't want to make in a sea of decisions they don't want to make. Let's figure out how to make things better for women. As soon as we start the discussion by redirecting back to "what if" scenarios where some purely innocent victim is hardest done by, we're ARE (knowingly or not) making the argument that the results don't actually matter and it's the moralizing that does. If we want to prevent abortions, let's ignore all that moralizing part of it and look at real life scenarios. Start with figuring out how to improve the situation and then start looking at some of the extremely rare troublesome cases later, or even deal with them on a case by case basis as they actually come up.
Improve access to health care, improve supports for parents (Canada can get about 1.5 years off for maternity/parental leave, for example), start improving mental health supports and start taking measures to create a scenario where women aren't giving up ~20% of their future earnings potential by having a child (not to mention all the additional costs associated with a child) - a decline which doesn't actually exist for men.
If someone is talking about banning abortion, I find it's pretty likely that they aren't actually interested in preventing abortion - just banning it and essentially branding anyone involved in abortions as evil. If someone is actually interested in preventing abortions, they aren't talking about banning it - they're talking about other issues that might not at first seem directly related to abortion but absolutely are. If someone wants to ban abortion but isn't getting involved in the discussion of women's wages or family supports, regardless of what they believe they aren't actually against abortion at all. It's not unlike being against gun control (fair enough) and arguing that mental health is a problem (fair enough) and then turning around and eroding access to mental health and doing nothing to try to improve current supports and coverages. People's actions largely bely their true beliefs, so if someone is spending time worrying about banning rather than preventing, to me that's very telling.
I'm also a little curious about all your responsibility for their actions talk. I'm a firm believer in responsibility myself, but I'm a believer that pointing fingers is essentially a way to attempt to take away one's responsibility and place it on others. We have a responsibility as a society to make things better for everyone, and in doing so, it is highly likely we will see fewer abortions. as soon as we get into the kind of discussion where we start talking about how a person should have to raise an unwanted, unloved child in a situation where their mental health supports aren't there and they are obviously struggling as a necessary consequence of an action, depending on what case that may be, and we're talking about banning everything and making people prove they aren't the exception for which we're banning, we are truly awful. We need to be a society that takes a lot more responsibility overall and doesn't point fingers to the extent we have been. Mercy and forgiveness are principal tenets of my faith. I'm not a big fan of discussions that demonize people unnecessarily, and it's even worse when it's clearly not effective and really only serves the benefit of moralizing and pushing responsibilities onto others.
And for the record, I'd love it if you actually say what you believe. Saying you can go along with what I believe but disagree with parts of it, not being particularly specific, and relying more on picking exceptional circumstances that will be extraordinarily rare as a means to essentially turn the discussion aren't particularly helpful to discussion. You may not agree with me (it's pretty clear to me that you don't at this point), but I think you'd agree I've been pretty open about all of this. Why not expand a little?
