Children Should Come First But Adult Selfishness Stands In The Way
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Children Should Come First But Adult Selfishness Stands In The Way
Most people feel their gender gets the short end of the stick when it comes to parental rights, but the reality is that they both have inequitable burdens to carry.
Gender roles have been in place for almost all animal species since the dawn of time. Progressive human society has taken steps to lessen those role identities, mostly to alleviate the unequal status suffered by women throughout our history.
There’s no denying many of these steps were necessary and long overdue, as men held the upper hand regarding children and relationships in almost every culture. They could spread their seed indiscriminately and choose to walk away, or stay and dictate the terms of their families’ lives. Women were treated as little more than vessels to facilitate the immediate desires of men and were often cast aside afterward at their whims.
Rectifying inadequacies of life in the past doesn’t require overcompensation in the present, but that’s what has frequently occurred. It’s no secret that today’s men experience extreme disadvantages in most Family Courts. While most people (men included) would agree that all things being equal, children need their mothers, the role of fathers has been marginalized too much. In modern culture, men are often forced to be responsible for things in which they have little or no say.
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This starts at conception, an event in which men and women are equally responsible. If a woman decides she doesn’t want the responsibilities of a child but a man does, he has no recourse to prevent her from obtaining an abortion and spare his son or daughter. The decision is legally hers, and hers alone, even if he’s willing to take on the responsibility of parenting by himself.
If a man decides he doesn’t want the responsibilities of a child but a woman does, he has no recourse to prevent her from keeping the baby and forcing financial responsibility upon him. That decision, too, is legally hers and hers alone.
This is touchy ground for a variety of quite legitimate reasons. As those who physically carry babies, women should have the autonomy to decide things that pertain to their own bodies. And children should not be forced to suffer for lack of financial support - they certainly didn’t ask to be here. These self-evident realities supersede most questions of fairness. Our system, however, leaves plenty of room for abuse.
Bob and Jane conceive a baby and plan to move ahead as parents. Excited about his impending fatherhood, Bob starts arranging his life around his future child. But then Jane has a change of heart months later and terminates the pregnancy without even telling Bob, who is crushed that his child has been simply discarded. Our system says “tough beans, Bob, get over it”.
Tom and Lynn conceive a baby and plan to move ahead as parents. Excited about his impending fatherhood, Tom starts arranging his life around his future child. But then Lynn has a change of heart months later and breaks up with Tom for another man. Tom is forced to pay child support for 18 years for a kid he sees twice a month and never has a chance to raise directly. Our system says, “that’s the breaks, Tom”.
Joe and Kathy conceive during a casual hook-up, and Joe admits from the get-go that he has no desire to be a father. Kathy has other plans and keeps the baby, turning the rest of Joe’s entire life upside down against his wishes by saddling him with the support of a child he did not want in the first place. Our system says, “be careful whom you sleep with, Joe”.
Peter and Joanna are dating casually. They agree to not have kids and use birth control, but it fails. Joanna decides the pregnancy was meant to be, and… you get the picture.
Women have their share of bullshit to deal with as well. There is still the occasional man who thinks nothing of siring children randomly and disappearing, though the laws are on the woman’s side if he is found. Many abusive men get away with their repulsive behavior because women will often tolerate it to avoid becoming single parents. And society often presumes that it’s the woman’s place to make the majority of the sacrifices required to be a parent, while negligent fathers get little more than sideways glances.
A common theme that has been lost in all this is what’s best for the children. Asking women to actually be good mothers does not seem unreasonable, since the choice to become one is entirely theirs. Children bear the burdens of adults who continue to use poor (or no) judgment when choosing partners with whom to procreate.
It has also been statistically proven that the more the involvement of fathers is reduced, the more kids become rudderless and lost. No amount of spin can change that reality, but our system is designed to incentivize that scenario for women, whose subsequent empowerment lessens their sense of partnership obligation.
Good fathers show their sons how to not be shitty fathers, and set examples for their daughters of what traits they should seek in a good father for their own kids. Good mothers do the same, by exercising tolerance in support of the life decisions they previously made. None of that can happen if fathers are cast aside and resentful that their lives were dictated to them instead of chosen by them.
It’s easy to say people should be more discerning about prospective partners, engage in symbolically permanent unions like marriage before having children, and put children first by committing to the sacrifices necessary to make their relationships work long-term. But the understanding of those sacrifices is eroding, as more and more people choose their own wants over their children’s needs. At the risk of sounding antiquated, if people are not willing to give it their all with like-minded prospective co-parents, they shouldn’t have kids. There, I said it.
You can complain that such a stance marginalizes you, or that it infringes on your rights to raise children even if you don’t want or haven’t found a suitable partner. You can claim that it’s an unfair burden to ask you to refrain from the joys of parenthood. You may be right on all of those things, but whose well-being takes precedence?
Children must come first, and adult selfishness stands in the way of that happening.
Zephareth Ledbetter is the author of “A White Man’s Perspectives on Race and Racism”, available as an ebook at smashwords.com/books/view/1184004, and can be reached on Facebook and Twitter
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Children Should Come First But Adult Selfishness Stands In The Way
I've thought a lot about these issues--consent to parenthood, abortion, father vs. mother standing in the law, women's bodily autonomy vs. potential rights of a fetus, etc. Puzzling through these issues is an occupational hazard of being an attorney I guess.
Here's a huge question that I never see addressed: Is a woman entitled to a medical procedure that takes the embryo/fetus out of her body, or is she entitled to a dead baby in addition?
There's an excellent argument, based on our current societal understandings and legal frameworks, that every person is entitled to exercise control over their own body. Let's take that as a given for the sake of this discussion. Therefore, a woman may have the right to become "unpregnant" at any point in her pregnancy. But why, oh why, is there an assumption that 1) she is therefore entitled to have the fetus killed, and 2) at no point in the process does the father have any say-so or rights, as long as the woman has invoked the magic words "I want an abortion."
If you dive deeply enough into the facts you will learn that elective abortions of healthy fetuses in later stages of pregnancy are NOT all that rare. Is it a small percentage? Sure. If it's murder, though, is it somehow not murder just because there are only X-amount of them in the US? There are thousands of these abortions every year by the way---oddly, that fact isn't widely acknowledged and the stats are hard to come by.
Once a pregnancy is advanced to a certain level, after the first trimester, the fetus must, medically, be delivered in some way. The cervix must be gradually dilated and the fetus removed. Typically, you kill the fetus first by a lethal injection before delivery, but you don't have to. It sometimes happens that the fetus spontaneously delivers alive while the woman is undergoing this process. There you have it, a fetus struggling for breath on the table. If this delivery happened as a result of premature labor in a "wanted" baby, the fetus would either be given compassionate care and held until natural death occurred, or if medical care could save the baby, treatment would immediately begin.
Tell me why a woman has a right to look at a baby who is no longer inside her body and say, I want it dead, because I came here for an abortion and so I'm entitled to a dead baby. She has zero right to say that as far as I can tell. Very importantly, once the baby is delivered, the father has equal rights to dictate what happens to his child. Let's say that he was present during the procedure. Mom wanted an abortion but once the child was delivered alive, she changed her mind and wanted the child given medical treatment. If she would have been entitled to direct that they deny medical treatment, then so is the father and he should be able to say, nope, we came here for an abortion and I'm gonna have to insist that you leave the baby to die. And, visa-versa---she wants the baby to be left to die but he steps up and says that he wants the child to be saved.
When I see abortion debated/discussed, I'd really like to have clear answers to this direct question: Is a woman entitled to have a fetus removed from her body, or is she entitled to a dead fetus? Because you can deliver a later term fetus in an abortion without killing it first by injection.
As a woman I can certainly appreciate how females were treated in the past. But I must say - that is history. It has no bearing on the current issue because two wrongs never make anything right. Punishing men for the past now only hurts the child in the present.
The problem of fathers running away to avoid their financial obligations - that is mostly history as well. Many states now have reciprocity agreements in place for garnishing wages for child support, and the Federal government will garnish tax refunds for outstanding support.
But all of these financial protections for women and children doesn't address the issue of having a father actively and voluntarily involved in the child's life.
Because the woman carries the child, she is currently responsible for deciding the future of both the father and the child. Somehow, this doesn't seem fair. The time for "my body, my choice" was back before the moment of conception.
Some women make poor choices- sleeping with men they don't actually want to partner with or failing to use contraceptives (or ensuring their partner does) when they don't desire children. Some women make evil choices - they knowingly get pregnant in exchange for 18 years of child-support payments.
Men can (usually) protect themselves from the later by using contraceptives themselves - regardless of what the woman says. But many men find it difficult to believe their sex partner would lie to them about 'being protected.' Men could certainly use an education in this area. I have personally known men in failing marriages who were entrapped by their wife secretly discontinuing her method of birth control to deliberately get pregnant against the couple's mutual agreement not to have children.
But what of men who conceive a child with a woman who wants an abortion? It must be gut-wrenching to know that your child will be killed and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
I think we need to educate men on the necessity of using male birth control to secure their own destiny and give men more of a say in the area of abortion. This could go a long way in preventing unwanted children and in securing a brighter future for those children who are desired. And if women aren't in complete control of the abortion decision, we'd see far fewer women having unprotected sex.
Obviously, there are no easy solutions to these dilemmas, but I feel it's important to start somewhere. Fathers need more rights to balance this equation. I don't have the answers, but now would be a good time to begin a sincere discussion of these issues with the goal of making some changes.