Coincidentally, this article about “financial abortion” came to my attention just the day before yesterday’s reader question did, but they both touch on the same subject: the oppressive “family court” and mandated-child support system. The article points out that while a pregnant woman has the right to “opt out” of the burden of unwanted motherhood by choosing abortion, the man who got her pregnant has no similar right; if she chooses to have the baby he’s on the hook financially for over two decades, even if she told him she was using contraception and he strenuously objects to fatherhood. Some MRAs, anti-abortion nuts and politicians have proposed that a man should have veto power over a woman he has impregnated, but this is obviously an abomination; every person owns their own body, and absolutely nobody else (and certainly not the state) has the right to control what that person does with their body. At the same time, it seems reasonable for a man to have some recourse against consent violation, so some have proposed that a man could legally sever all ties during the pregnancy, dodging his financial responsibilities by voluntarily surrendering his parental rights.
I’m not going to waste my time or energy in a fruitless Mars/Venus emotional discussion about men’s inability to keep their dicks in their pants, the responsibility for contraception, the “unfairness” of Nature, “But the children!” or any other insoluble malarkey. Nor do I believe for one second that a government which claims every citizen as property of the state and uses violent threats in an insane attempt to micromanage every aspect of its citizens’ lives, to the point where it is willing to lock people in cages to keep them from experiencing pleasure in a way it doesn’t approve of, or literally force unwilling women to endure the dangers and burdens of pregnancy and childbirth against their wills, would ever agree to let men out of a convenient noose and women out of a trap where they’re forced to rely on Big Brother and be tied to a useless man for two decades. Puritanical US “authorities” want sex to be as dangerous and consequence-laden as they can make it, which is why prostitution is criminalized, abortions & birth control are the subjects of so many ban attempts, and “family court” is a nightmare for everyone but the lawyers and bean-counters. The only thing I want to do here is to propose (not debate, sorry) a framework which a hypothetical free society (in which the rights to contraception and abortion were unquestioned) might use to resolve this dilemma.
The principle of self-ownership demands that the government stay completely out of the lives of individuals who have not committed violence against others, and that includes their reproductive lives. Therefore, the only just and ethical way of dealing with the situation is to simply recognize reality: the child is the chattel, sole responsibility and sole right of the mother. Up until the advent of DNA testing just a few years ago, there was no sure way to determine the male parent of a child anyway, so the whole concept of “legitimate fatherhood” hasn’t any more tangible connection to reality than angels dancing on pinheads (as any loving adoptive father or stepfather will tell you). Fatherhood in the social sense has absolutely nothing to do with DNA and everything to do with emotional and economic investment in the child, and the idea that someone can be compelled to love by court order is as vile as it is absurd. If the biological parents of a child want DNA tests, in other words if biological parentage matters to them, well and fine and may Hera bless them. But the outcome of such a test should have absolutely no legal weight; it should confer neither paternal rights nor paternal obligations. If a man wants the former, he can offer the mother the latter; if a mother wants the latter, she can offer any man (not necessarily the biological father) the former. If they both agree on the terms, a lawyer makes a contract and they’re done; disputes are settled in ordinary civil courts under ordinary contract law, with no special “family” mumbo-jumbo involved. No more custody battles; no more bureaucrats making intimate decisions for mothers. Just the recognition of biological reality and the removal of one of government’s most effective means of controlling the individual.
Back when women were the legal property of first their fathers & then their husbands, who in turn were the property of direct male relatives elder to them in Hindu patrilineal law, no different from a plot of land or a cow, regardless of biological paternity all children that a woman bore were legally & socially the children of her husband & not the impregnator. That little rule of wives being chattel allowed men to outsource their tasks in the boudoir to other men; no different from hiring a farm-hand to plough your fields or someone to milk your cows for you. It was still a crime for someone to steal milk from your cow or the cow itself, to illegally occupy or till someone else’s land or to steal crop from their fields, and so was committing adultery with someone’s wife.
That’s why in the Hindu origin story of the planet Mercury (Budha in Sanskrit), when Tara has an affair with the Moon god and becomes pregnant, her sage husband becomes angry when the foetus responds that the Moon is its father & curses it that it shall be neither man nor woman. This was also the root of the recently removed adultery law in the Indian constitution which punished men for adultery with another’s wife but not the adulterous women: chattel are incompetent to consent.
It is also the root of the names of the wedding rituals of Kanyā-dāna (lit. Donation or Giving of a Girl) & Garbha-dāna (Donation of an Embryo or Womb). When child marriage was practised, this second rite of Giving Away the Womb was not conducted during the initial wedding when the girl was anywhere between 3-9 years but only after the girl’s first menstruation.
This also left unwed mothers with no choice other than to either fend for themselves, rely on their fathers & brothers who were their legal guardians, or find a man who would marry them & take responsibility for the child. Jabalā, the mother of the sage Shvetaketu took the harder lonely route & told him to cite her name alone when questioned about his parentage as she herself wasn’t sure who his father was. When the lovestruck princess of Kashī (Benares) wished to marry Arjuna, her father struck a deal with him that he would have to marry his only daughter but any children they had would belong to the royal family of Kashi alone, meaning that Arjuna had neither parental right nor responsibility & the King of Kashi ensured a male heir for himself.
There are also noted instances of women giving birth to children, giving the child to the biological father & going away. Satyavati, the mother of the sage Vyāsa agreed to give the sage Parashāra a son & left them both after delivery, with no animosity whatsoever. Later, in a cross-cultural parallel to ancient Semitic law, she even calls upon Vyāsa as her son to give children to his widowed sisters-in-law when her younger son King Vichitravīrya dies without issue.
It’s strange how ownership works really. Consent & permission are inherently interwoven into its very framework.
Sounds reasonable to me. Especially as it becomes (again) more and more obvious that the most dangerous enemy of freedom and well-being of individuals is the state.
Ah, but this ignores the condition where the father, biological or simply by being a part of early rearing, wants to continue to be a father and the mother does not.
Your hypothetical situation requires not only a free and just society, but one filled only with rational people. Unfortunately love is not rational, generally, and its intrinsic connection with family, parenthood and mating is never going away.
Biological paternity does matter in a case where the man has expressed an interest in child rearing but the mother wishes to deny it.
Now, I do see the argument that the woman does own the child by right of both posession and creation. It’s a very rational argument. Unfortunately, it is also a fact that one of the major reasons a patriarchy exists as opposed to something more egalitarian is because a man’s desire to have access to his progeny is quite strong.
Either way, though, I do beleive a crime is committed when a mother denies a father the right to participate in child rearing without any legitimate complaint of active harm to the child. The crime is the denial of something owned by the child (parentage) rather than against the father. There are very concrete reason why a child would want to know their parents. Unless the mother can prove harm will come to the child at the hands of the father, a that mother has no right to deny the child access to their other parent.
Actually, this applies to anyone who has ever filled the roll of parent, say for more than two years. The relationship to the mother is irrelevant, as is the genetic connection to the child or mother: if a child has been raised by someone for a sufficient amount of time, no one parent has the right to deny access to the child unless they can prove harm.
Amd just to clarify, I would categorize access to education as equally a right of the child- no parent has the right to mentally abuse someone by denying them access to knowledge. It’s an assault on their mind.
I would categorize access to a parent as access to a kind of knowledge, since parents are the primary conduit that education happens through, and there is no excuse for less conduits without cause.
It’s an age-old problem based on an age-old dilemma: paternal uncertainity vs maternal certainity. A man has not had any way to be absolutely sure that a child is his until fairly recently. The mother, being the one who gets pregnant and lactates, is the one who the child needs more. Post conception, fathers merely provide physical, emotional, social & economic support which can be found from somewhere else as well. Men are disposable, women are not.
That’s why all cultures & societies across the globe have considered mothers the natural guardians. Patriarchy sought to wrest legal & social control over offspring from women & enacted control over women themselves as biology was impossible to change, but there have always been women who take the kids and leave & they will always exist.
There are modern scientific research studies that show that the biological father is the safest person for a child to live with, followed by the biological mother, on the grounds that men are able to give more all-round security of all kinds. But that same study also shows that a non-biological female authority figure is the most dangerous for a child’s well-being, followed by a non-biological male authority. This includes unmarried romantic partners of the custodian parent, step-parents, relatives who take in orphans, state-appointed legal guardians, everyone. Very rarely do you find a man who has full custody of his own children & does not remarry or have a girlfriend but working single moms without boyfriends or husbands are frequent sights in today’s date. The risk of leaving a child with the father is greater than the risk of leaving it with the mother.
If both parents are single & the child is with the mother, then obviously the father has to keep the mother sweet. You can’t cross the drawbridge by antagonising the guard. If the mother actively chooses to deny access, it can be for a myriad of reasons, not all of which are invalid but still plenty unprovable as amounting to harm in court. It can be something as simple as being a bad influence to parental incompetence to domestic violence. The softer, less directly harmful reasons cannot be disproved until the child is old enough for its own tendencies & capacities to be apparent.
Once the children are old enough to articulate for themselves which parent they wish to live with, usually after age 9 or 10, courts can & do take into account the child’s wishes, at least in our judicial system. But before that, there is no way anyone can rescind full parental rights from a capable mother in good conscience & force her to allow the father access if she deems it unwise. And women usually don’t do that, unless the separation was very bitter, in which case fathers can & do contest denial of parental rights.
There is no easy answer to this question but the contractual method Maggie suggests is the closest we can get to a system that is best for everyone. The other option is to bring back the traditional model of marriage indissoluble until death & we all know how many people will be happy with that.
A very good idea. The important thing is it keeps authority and responsibility in the same hands.
The problem here is that there are people who will not negotiate a contract for childcare (and other possible outcomes) prior to sex. Thus there should be a “default” contract regarding the results of sex – that is, children, STDs, possible injuries, who is responsible for birth control, and who gets to make the decisions if birth control fails – and that contract should be written into our basic laws (mainly so that everyone knows what they’re getting into.) However, there should be an option for adults to rewrite the contract to suit themselves.