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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Women have options men do not have for terminating pregnancy because men do not get pregnant.

In my opinion, abortion is a far more morally fraught method of surrendering parental responsibility than legal paternal surrender (LPS). There's the worse issue in abortion of "maybe we're killing something here that deserves rights" which simply isn't present in LPS. Perhaps hardline pro-choicers who don't see the unborn as being deserving of rights at any stage of development and don't see any moral greyness in any part of the issue would disagree, but IMO that's a thorny issue which is very unique to abortion. It actually appears to me that abortion is a more questionable practice than LPS. There are very few methods of surrendering parental responsibility that don't invite moral objection.

And that debate aside, the existence of abortion as a unique option for women that already exists by virtue of them getting pregnant raises the question as to why women have further additional methods of surrendering their parental responsibility that men do not after birth.

Only a handful of infants are surrendered every year under safe haven laws. I doubt many of those were produced by fathers who otherwise would have been willing participants in the child's upbringing.

By bringing up safe haven abandonment I'm not arguing that women are giving babies away that fathers want (though that is a distinct possibility and IIRC in the case of adoption there have been cases where biological fathers were alienated from their children - the rights of fathers are often not appropriately respected in these proceedings). Rather, I'm arguing that if a woman does not want a kid she's given birth to, she can abandon it, and put the burden on the state to deal with it.

If we were to be consistent with the principle that taxpayers should not be obligated to pay for children that aren't theirs, she should not be allowed to access safe haven abandonment at all. She should be made to keep the kid that she chose to carry to term, and help the state identify the biological father so the child can receive support from both parents. That this is not the current system is pretty incongruent.

But they don't actually care about this, they just want to be able to have consequence-free sex and leave the woman stuck with the responsibility of deciding what to do if she becomes pregnant. I believe exactly zero arguments based on "unfairness."

I'm a pretty strong supporter of LPS myself from a moral consistency standpoint. I'm also very certain your characterisation doesn't accurately portray my motivations for arguing in favour of it, given the fact that I don't have any desire to have "consequence-free sex" with women. Or just sex with women at all.

Very few of the policies I argue in favour of with regards to male-female relations actually end up benefiting me.

The point you carefully elide is that in those cases where a woman can sever her responsibilities, she's also terminating any responsibility the father has as well.

Correct. She is allowed to sever her responsibilities if she wants, and also terminate the father's responsibilities in the process. None of this contradicts my assertion that women have an array of options they can utilise to terminate their parental responsibilities, some of which they can utilise even after birth, and men typically cannot do so at any stage of the process without also having the woman's cooperation and consent.