The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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I don't actually view the father as being hugely responsible for the creation of the child in this circumstance. The child was created primarily via the mother's deception, and the father was operating under a situation of false information. In addition, in similar fashion to another user in the thread, I don't have a high opinion of the inherent role of DNA in creating a link between child and father.
Finally, as I noted, this assignation of responsibility to the father creates a pretty horrendous incentive structure where baby-trapping is incentivised, since that system allows such women to benefit from it. The net result might in fact be more children born in such a dysfunctional situation and raised by fucked-up women, and that seems like a rather anti-utilitarian outcome one would want to discourage.
I think most people would find the idea that a woman who's had a child due to holes being poked in a condom should not be able to avail herself of safe haven abandonment or put the child up for adoption (for the ostensible benefit of the kid) pretty displeasing. Granted, she could've taken a morning after pill or birth control to mitigate her risk, but she relied on the biological father's representations. Though I will say that the argument for that prohibition is actually stronger given that the woman in question had options like abortion once she realised she was pregnant, and thus actually had to decline to take steps to terminate the pregnancy before a child was produced.
Of course, safe haven abandonment, adoption etc is allowed for women due to their default custody of out-of-wedlock children, even in situations where the woman in question was being exceptionally irresponsible, whereas legal paternal surrender is not often considered legally or socially permissible even under circumstances of coercion or misrepresentation.
I don't care what the mother did, I care about the child who was created by your actions, no matter how evil the mother. Yes, it sucks to have been trapped like that. It also sucks to be a child abandoned due to the caprice of not one but two parents.
You are right that we've discussed this before and won't agree. I will not change my position that there are few people more deserving of being spat on than those who'd justify abandoning a child of theirs for whatever bad actions of the other parent.
Yeah this definitely reflects a deep-seated and probably intractable difference in morality. As I said, one of these terminal moral values.
But, that being said, I would at the very least like if those who advocated such positions made attempts at ensuring moral consistency. I can't say and won't make judgements on whether you have or not, but in my experience people generally don't.
The law certainly doesn't meet these standards, anyway. It should go one way or the other. I know what I would morally prefer, but any consistency is better than no consistency.
Well, I condemn mothers who abandon their children also, and obviously manipulating someone with pregnancy is bad. I don't think there is an ideal solution that adequately "punishes" such a mother or restitutes the father while not also being cruel to the child.
If you ask me I think letting the child remain with their biological parents is actually more cruel to the kid than anything else. Especially with the biological mother. Such a woman should be presumed unfit to parent.
Letting a child grow up under these conditions, where the father is an unwilling parent and the mother is using them as a bargaining chip to entrap the father, is horrific to me. If designing policy I would not be aiming for a perfect, happy-family situation, since the possibility of that is long gone; rather I genuinely believe the ideal solution in most cases would be to place the child with an adoptive family when young. It also has the advantage of not rewarding terrible behaviour from the mother. The state should intervene not to enforce a system that's bad for 2/3 of the parties involved, but to make sure the child gets placed somewhere better.
Then we can start talking about prosecution of the biomother, for causing injury to the father and child alike.
As it is, it's not uncommon for the state to punish the father for being victimised, ensure the child remains in a dysfunctional family situation, and reward the mother for committing an atrocity. You might at least understand why I view the way we've collectively chosen to deal with this as messed up.
EDIT: added a paragraph
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