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Wellness Wednesday for July 30, 2025

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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.

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