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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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Would you have had unprotected sex with her had she stated she was not on birth control? If no, then clearly you did in fact give a shit to some extent if she might get pregnant.
If you would still have done so, then yes - I'm not sure it's appropriate for you to be typical-minding.
So I'm under no impression that Amadan will ever agree with me (or that many of the people advocating this will ever agree with me, really), which is why I declined to pursue the point too much, but okay let's examine the core of this moral evaluation for a bit. If it is really the case that a child not only has the right to provision, but has the right to provision from both biological parents - if depriving the child of this is so unacceptable that freedoms should be curtailed to pursue that objective - then the following should also be a logical corollary of this belief:
1: A woman should not avail herself of the services of a sperm bank, as it results in the production of a child without the father involved. Single women should be barred from using a sperm bank under any circumstances, and if they do they should be aggressively socially shamed for intentionally producing a child who will grow up in that deprived state. After all, the statistics on children raised by single mothers speak for themselves. Same thing for men and surrogacy.
2: It should be against the law for a woman to leave the biological father off the birth certificate, or to fail to inform him of the existence of a child. She should be required to identify the father and get him involved in supporting the child either by choice or by force. A woman who does not do so is being horribly negligent and selfish and should be castigated.
3: Women should have no access to safe haven abandonment (or adoption, for that matter) under any circumstances, possibly even extremely coercive ones. Under this moral framework that is even worse than paternal surrender as it results in the unilateral abandonment of a child and alienation from both biological parents, and is a complete and total infringement of the child's right, excluding it support from even just one parent and possibly consigning it to become a ward of the state.
Of course, none of these things are currently the case. Are you willing to assent to all the above, and state that anybody who makes the above choices in contravention of these dictums is being capricious and immoral? If so, I would say you're perfectly consistent. Understandable, have a nice day. If not, it stands to reason that children do not in fact have the inherent right to the support of both biological parents, and that it's permissible for a child to end up without this supposed right for many reasons, including "she just wanted to be a single mother", and "she just didn't want her child". In practice I don't actually think most people believe that a child has an inherent and inalienable right to support from both biological parents, they certainly don't prioritise it above all else. They are perfectly willing to infringe on this principle especially if they can be convinced that it gives women more choice.
If it is perfectly moral for a single woman to use a sperm bank and produce a child out of wedlock which will not be entitled to any support from the father, by extension it should be perfectly moral for a man to surrender responsibility for a child before birth; after all it produces the very same outcome if the woman decides to keep it. This especially applies if he was duped into becoming a father through false representations, regardless of whether or not he was "thinking with his dick". But I don't think most people who advocate this position have really thought through its moral ramifications.
In theory I agree that would be good (I would not want a child of mine in the custody of a woman who would do something like that), in practice that's not going to be easy.
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