I posted this on X (the site formerly known as Twitter). Men who cause pregnancies can be required to quit their jobs, raise the kid(s) for 18 years, pay for their job training or college, and then try to get back into the work force. That will cause an epidemic of vasectomies.
Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 11, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
In some places vasectomies are considered “mutilation” & as such are outlawed! Also, doctors often tell patients they won’t be able to have an erection after the procedure which scares many men away. (Anecdotally I’ve heard that some communities tell men that wearing a condom caused cancer…)
France also considers vasectomies to be “genital mutilation”. It’s more prevalent than you think. Male doctors are afraid they’ll be sued if the client cannot have an etection after a vasectomy!!
I think that after a man has all the children they want, there needs to be a required vasectomy! Just like some states have required ultra-sounds. I'm not sure how this can be enforced. Any one have any ideas?
My Trump loving neighbor splained me how he opposed abortion and was proud to support the "right to life". Not 5 minutes later he splained me why he didn't support refugees and was proud to tell me he didn't want even $1 of his taxes going to help refugee children. The hypocrisy of the far right has never been greater.
Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 11, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
It's akin to watching a large sea-going vessel piloted by crocodiles, erratic, wild swings of the tiller punctuated by stalking and eating whatever can be preyed upon.
The tells of Rs/cons are conflict in thought and contradiction in words and deeds while absolutely positive they can square the circle of their own making simply by pounding a square peg in a round hole.
Said another way:
"The lunatics are on the grass
The lunatics are on the grass
Remembering games
And daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path" ~Brain Damage Pink Floyd w/a teak or two,
How about if the law against abortion came with the provision that the unborn child's father was legally required to pay for that child's every need until they become an adult then both parties to the pregnancy are sharing the reality of having a baby come to term. And in the instance of the baby being unable to be born alive, thus putting the mother through hell waiting to deliver a dead baby, there would be a multi-million dollar payout from the government who refused to allow the abortion to that woman. You get the idea, there are many ways to include men in these laws.
Liked / upvoted for the thinking along the lines that "justice is fairness," reservations about crafting any laws that (2) Don't word the child support requirements to include having the state enforcing the laws having to show both parties agreed either that no contraception need be used, and/or that the parties did not mislead one another (the male with promises that any child WOULD be supported, the female with false promises she was "on the pill" or some similar evasion) and (2) Stop short of mandating prison for either party, as either omission in the statutory language empowers the state to violate traditional privacy rights even more than now, and would overcrowd our already overcrowded prisons, besides giving the state too much scope the micro-manage private sex acts.
The "multi-million dollars payouts" are already going to guarantee this kind of law goes nowhere, of course, but at least you are suggesting laws that insist the male bears some legally culpable responsibility, I am just averse to the quasi-authoritarian state that would be enforcing them.
The anti-abortion position is that the woman made the choice to potentially procreate when she had sex, no matter what she intended. No one is asking women whether the man made some representation of having had a vasectomy, or whether she was on birth control that failed, or any other intent or promise made by either of them. If women don't get credit for a good faith effort to not procreate, men shouldn't either.
If women consent to potential pregnancy just for having sex, then the men having sex with them need to also be told that sex is consent to procreate. There's no need to make the state any more quasi-authoritarian than it is already. If we're going to tell women that sex is consent to childbirth, then fairness dictates that we tell men that sex is consent to child support.
Yeah Nancy, I am not sure why you are informing me of this obvious parallel, it's my entire point in what I posted, or maybe I need to make it even more obvious?
That is, it seems obvious to me that millions of women are rightly outraged and will evade the vicious violations of their reproductive freedoms inherent in the anti-abortion laws.
Which is a damn good reason in itself to have no such laws, correct, or do you disagree?
If you agree, then I am only pointing out that the empowerment of a quasi-authoritarian state will also be justifiably resisted by men, not all men, just as there are women who will not resist unjust anti-abortion laws. I also pointed out that in order to prove out individual cases consequent to this already absurdly unjust law limiting reproductive freedom, the state will have to "micro-manage" private sex acts, since it never occurred to me than anyone would make the sweeping claim that one or the other partner should be lied to (again, by a man lying and claiming he would support any children - which could encompass cases where the contraceptive measures simply fail, mind you - or by the woman, claiming she is using an IUD or taking the pill) and yet still be victimized by the state, thus, in the woman's case, be unable to use the judicial process to collect child support, or in the man's case, be able to avoid paying it.
The hypotheticals were meant to show the laws cannot possibly be fair, irrespective of whether they are made even more draconian by applying them to more people.
I confess I have no idea who exactly is supposed to be empowered to do the following, quoting from your comment:
"[T]he men having sex with them need to also be told that sex is consent to procreate."
Who is going to "tell them" this, the state, that is through the court system? I am confused insofar as it seems you thought I meant to include that as part of "holding men accountable," no, I mean by shifting the terms of the understanding of consensual sex acts, so that men willingly cooperate with their partners - do you have a different theory of what the state should be able to do? If so, you're just part of the problem, it's the background theory of the anti-choice, anti-abortion rights bunch that the state should be empowered to make a pregnant woman's body both de facto and de jure state property, which I think is a paradigm case of fascist ideology in practice. Whether extended to the partners or not. But maybe you are trying to make a different argument?
That is, are you trying to argue that because Law A is unjust to one group of people, it is somehow therefore fair for Law A to be applied to still other people? That somehow or other, that is not also unjust?
Child support is enforced against legally married spouses (almost, but not always, the male partner in a traditional marriage) when one spouse does not support the child, or children.
Are you claiming the child support laws should be enforced against unmarried people?
I do not understand your argument, please explain, thanks!
You may think you are being obvious, but you are far from clear. You asserted: "reservations about crafting any laws that (2) Don't word the child support requirements to include having the state enforcing the laws having to show both parties agreed either that no contraception need be used, and/or that the parties did not mislead one another (the male with promises that any child WOULD be supported, the female with false promises she was "on the pill" or some similar evasion)."
So, can you explain in as few words as possible whether you are for or against men having to pay child support, no matter if they intended for a pregnancy to result or not?
Your original assertion was very wordy and confusing. It appeared to assert that you felt there should be guardrails around whether a man intended to procreate when he had sex, and that his child support obligation should be contingent on that intention. If you are in favor of men paying child support for any pregnancy that is the result of a sex act they voluntarily engaged in, regardless of procreational intent or representations by the parties about birth control or lack thereof, then we are in fact in agreement.
Married men who shirk their legally provable responsibility already have to pay. That's already an enforcement problem, but so what, there are myriads of enforcement problems all over our legal system, so there's no issue there.
When I worked in the Family Justice Center, there were a few complaints about the amount of funding for enforcement of Minnesota's child support laws, but that was a just a survey project for clients to answer, to find out what they wanted changed about the process, so it had no bearing on survey results.
You have asked me a kind of classic "loaded question," as I don't want to misinterpret the hypothetical you pose in a way that is unfair to you, so let me first have you clarify this issue: are you actually willing to use the force of the criminal law to ensure that someone who is completely, honestly, sincerely and intentionally misled about crucial material facts, when they have a moral right to know those facts, pay a fine of any amount at all to the very person who lied to them?
In other words, to cut to the chase, of course the answer is "hell no," if you're lumping the outlier cases where women lie about using birth control - again, to someone legally contracted to support the children, their spouse - but in general, the answer is "hell yes," since we can eliminate those cases as aberrations, far off the norm. That's already the law.
I mean, that would otherwise be an astounding legal theory, it sounds like something Trump would come up with - "Sure, I misled them as to how much the hotels were worth by twenty or thirty million dollars, but who the hell knows what they're worth, in fact, they should pay me for offering my expert opinion!" blah blah blah.
So if I read the last statement as meaning it shouldn't matter if the male participant is defrauded and lied to, I think that's absurd, shouldn't be the law anywhere, but it does sound like the kind of law the most fanatical right wingers would propose if they could get away with it, since they also hate the idea of sex acts done consensually for pure love and pleasure and not bringing unwanted children into the world - so again, I am confused, you cannot be supporting that result, right? Where the male could theoretically switch out a woman's prescription birth control pills for fakes, have sex with her while she is convinced she is on the (legit) pill, and put her through the entire psychodrama of having to bear an unwanted child, or abort it?
We need to avoid blunderbuss approaches to laws that really affect human beings at their most vulnerable, including at the hands of conniving, dishonest agents, as the honest and sincere people are generally not the problem - if a woman wants to have a child with a partner who is able to support the child or children, or as the main support if she has a higher income, there is much less danger of unfortunate results or even criminal misconduct, as in my pill-switching fraud example.
So they don't pay their child support half the time and now and then have penalties for that. You can' force people unfortunately to do the right thing. There is nothing good about this issue. All the responsibility is put on women even though so far they're not able to get pregnant without some man involved one way or another.
What if a woman had sex with more than one man during the month the egg was fertilized? The woman or the court would have to notify all the men that they would have to come in for a DNA test.
Well, we all know that the Dobbs decision has nothing whatsoever to do with the right to life; nothing at all about care for the fetus. It’s smacking down women pure and simple. None of them really give a damn that women’s health suffers or that they’re emotionally beat up. Forcing an 11-year-old who is pregnant from incest to bear the child is beyond medieval (that is happening). The only silver lining in this cloud is that so many women will be going to go vote in 2024. In the midterms in the recent election they’ve already shown how angry they are. Even women in red states. Even conservative women. Even women who previously believed in the right to life, but are beginning to see that with restrictive abortion laws, women are dying. The GOP has really cooked its goose with this one and I’m really enjoying watching it blow up in their faces.
Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 12, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
I take issue with your "Even […] women" construction. Women are women before anything else, never mind political inclinations. (If a young woman's healthy and not pregnant, a reminder arrives every month.) Yes you see MAGAt women out there chanting and waving posters, but again and again the same women admit to aborting unwanted pregnancies. Election results today seem to surprise some people as much as Kansas did. I don't know why. As I pointed out then, surveys ever since Roe v Wade had consistently shown about two-thirds support for legal abortion. I don't remember the distribution among women, but i'd wager it was more than two-thirds. Women then and now considered the issue of motherhood first. Anything else was and is an irrelevant abstract.
Amazingly, the GOP just doesn’t get what a toxic issue this is. In Ohio, they are screaming, like usual, that they will fight tooth and nail to negate this. And as long as we have a GOP run Congress, and a very slim margin in the Senate, this will be a mess for a long time to come. But yes, it’s become apparent that young women, all women, get what a disgraceful and all too often deadly situation this has caused in the last year.
Exceptional! Time to stop “poking fun” with no responsibility for the father of record. There were ultra religious doctors even in the 70s, who thought that even if the fetus had died, it was unnatural to remove it. It took 2+ weeks for me to “naturally” abort. The medical professional was convinced that this was the best way medically for me. A d&c 2 weeks earlier could have spared me from the anguish of that experience. Maybe it was better for the body. However, The emotional heartbreak that MALE doctor made me endure was unspeakable.
Exactly. Because they, at that time, presumed it a health issue: D&C was considered “invasive and unnatural” which is/was BS! The health of the mother didn’t address mental health 50 years ago OR now! We had a baby who was a year and a half at the time (husband left for Vietnam when baby was 3 days old! Upon his return, I was pregnant in an hour!) I was able to have another baby after this horrible incident. Since then, I have sought out women medical practitioners everywhere that we’ve lived.
This should have been your choice. It is wrong that someone took that choice away from you. I am sorry that you lost your baby, heartbreaking, yes it is, even more reason to respect your choice.
Since I also have prostate cancer, your analogy made at least some sense. But what truly resonates is that the law only applies to women, and in most states it is old white men making the decision on abortion. And if the actual voting is the bellwether, then our people in large majorities are for women having control of their own bodies, not the liars now on SCOTUS, not the MAGA legislatures who now suddenly want a national ban after professing it was a state issue. Maybe one way to handle the voting is for only women to vote on the issue? Then it would truly make sense what decision was reached!
Many women (sadly) have been pushing these anti-abortion laws (usually because their religion harps on it so much.) In their minds an abortion is murdering a baby, even when said baby could not yet survive outside a womb, or won’t survive afterwards anyway. (And they have absolutely NO concern for the health of the mother)
Funny how these same people have no trouble removing cancer cells …
It's illogical to posit a gender-free law when there are obvious needs that women have that men do not. Abortion legislation is designed to disadvantage women, and essentially for religious reasons that almost uniformly favor men over women in matters of liturgy, practices, and status.
Right. I agree, Lucian. As the old George Carlin bit goes, "They're all in favor of the unborn, They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months." "After that, they don't want to know about you!"
"They're not pro-life. You know what they are, they're anti-woman. Simple as it gets."
These same lawmakers don't pass appropriate laws and programs to keep children safe once they're born. Gun control anyone?
One would think that some smart constitutional lawyer had already come up with this: if abortion restrictions only apply to one gender, why do they not then violate the equal protection clause?
Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 11, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
What you say is absolutely compelling, but you need to know that the Supreme Court has already explained, cogently we might say if we wanted to say such a thing, that the fact that only women get pregnant does not mean that any regulation of pregnancy is law that affects women qua women. Indeed one of the cases says California worker"s health insurance provided as a benefit to workers did not need to cover pregnancy, even though it covered all male conditions. Why? Because there are actually 3 relevant legal classifications, i.e. males, females, and pregnant people. (I am on phone, so not pulling up an exact quote). Alito cited that case in Dobbs to reject an Equal Protection claim for women. The underlying facts are sufficiently different, in my view, to have made that a frivolous citation. In a rather contradictory way, Alito also argued that if this is a problem, women can go out and vote. He said women, he didn't say men. He said women can go vote in the same case in which he basically said this is not legally relevant to women per se because it's like that insurance case. One of the arguments that surrounded the insurance case made by the law and economics crowd was that many women are married to men, and if it is a better funding decision not to use the available funds for pregnancy, women married to male workers benefit because those men do better and thus such male-dependent women do better. I am not sure if that that reasoning was spelled out in the case but that was the surrounding logic presented by many legal worthies. When I taught the case I felt obliged to tell the class that argument. A result of some of this is that Congress passed a pregnancy discrimination act that addresses that and other instances where the court said that pregnancy is not a particularly female situation. It is the fetus, stupid! said the Court.You will also want to know about Bray v. Alexandria Women's something or other.https://www.oyez.org/cases/1991/90-985 The plaintiffs in that case argued that the demonstrations aimed at abortion clinics were forms of discrimination against women that violated applicable federal law that forbade the instant discrimination against women. There, Scalia explained that the demonstrations were not aimed at women but aimed at pregnancy and the fetus the demonstrators wanted to save, I suppose. Paraphrasing again. You can read it but but basically what he was saying was the women were kind of irrelevant because the thing at issue for the demonstrators was contained inside the woman and the woman was fundamentally of no interest or significance. Now he didn't put it that way. That's my expansion on what he was saying but I gave you the link and you can read it. This could be crisper if I were not working on my phone and could open up my casebooks, which are in another location, or do internet searches on the laptop. But you get the gist. I love your insight, but the Supreme Court has disposed of it several times. It's not about women, they tell us. Forget the women.
I suspected as much about the court, but I wanted to make my point. It's a simple one, no matter how many ways the court has sought to get around or cancel it. Thanks for your informative comment. I am so lucky to have such wonderfully informed and smart readers.
Right and thanks. I agree with you but the current majority would never move off that ridiculous claim. I thought it important to note that while Alito used the cases that say pregnancy really is not about women, he proceeded to say women can vote if they don't like it. Again, I'm paraphrasing. I see Alito as a sort of juvenile debater with gotcha points that show he has yet to grow up.
By the way I think the pregnancy discrimination act, which I've never studied closely, probably does not address the demonstration scenario. But don't take my word for it. Enroll in law school or be a lawyer or maybe you are a lawyer.
But yes, legal studies helps, I wrote my required final thesis paper about Griswold v. Connecticut and the right to privacy.
Let them get away with the current assaults on reproductive freedom and repealing Griswold's effects as far as possible will see contraception made illegal.
Appellants, the Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and its medical director, a licensed physician, were convicted as accessories for giving married persons information and medical advice on how to prevent conception and, following examination, prescribing a contraceptive device or material for the wife's use. A Connecticut statute makes it a crime for any person to use any drug or article to prevent conception. Appellants claimed that the accessory statute, as applied, violated the Fourteenth Amendment. An intermediate appellate court and the State's highest court affirmed the judgment.
Held:
1. Appellants have standing to assert the constitutional rights of the married people. Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U. S. 44, distinguished. P. 381 U. S. 481.
2. The Connecticut statute forbidding use of contraceptives violates the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Pp. 381 U. S. 481-486.
151 Conn. 544, 200 A.2d 479, reversed.
Page 381 U. S. 480
MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS delivered the opinion of the Court.
Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 11, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
"Fair is fair" Lucian, I say that as a father of two daughters who each have two children. Most of my life I hated the idea of abortions, because I saw many of them as moral events, now I see them with a completely different lens. I as a male have no voice in whether someone choses to have one, that is between a woman and her Dr., that space has no room for anyone else, especially a politician. When I learned how many abortions are a medical necessity, and how it is just one of the many tools, used to keep women healthy, it solidified my 180 turn. In addition to all of the women I know being pissed off, the men who love them are as well. I like you come from the coat hanger era, we are too smart to ever go back to that time. I think all Americans had a good night Tuesday, some might not know it yet but their heirs certainly will.
Nov 11, 2023·edited Nov 15, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
There is no law that tramples men’s right to full and complete bodily autonomy. There is no law that requires a medical procedure on men against their will, nor is there any law denying men a medical procedure and forcing them to bear the consequences. The closest analogy in modern American history were the Tuskegee Institute studies of the progression of syphilis, where hundreds of Black men were left untreated for decades without being informed that they had syphilis nor that treatment existed but they were being denied that treatment. The Tuskegee experiments are now universally viewed as a horrifying , barbaric human rights violation. And yet Republicans still think it’s just fine interfere with and override women’s decisions about their own bodies. Women are responding in droves by interfering with those Republicans’ ability to get elected.
All part of a wider set of far right wing extremist goals. Here's an interview with an expert on the trends manifested in these viciously misogynistic laws, placing them in the large context represented by Trump:
Excerpt from the opening paragraphs, includes a lengthy interview with the author of a book published in 2019, that focuses in part on the rhetoric and policies Trump tries to use to bring about that massive shift to the right:
Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler's Early Rhetoric and Policies
The author, Burt Neuborne, is one of America’s top civil liberties lawyers, and questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs.
Steven Rosenfeld
Aug 09, 2019
Common Dreams
A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Neuborne doesn't make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU's national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
"Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?" he writes. "Partly it's just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it's hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln's house. But that's not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton's mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play." ******
In the rest of the piece, Neuborne illustrates each of his twenty strong points of comparison between Trump and Hitler - no longer sounds so hyperbolic, does it?
Until Trump came along, I was completely unable to understand the level of fear that the tinpot politician from Louisiana instilled in politically aware people. I only knew that as history until Trump and Trumpism appeared.
Might be slightly more complicated, and with much more appealing messages about egalitarian sharing the wealth than Trump has ever proposed - but in the end, Huey Long was a demagogue despite his instinct for hammering on massive wealth inequality in "revival meeting" style orations like this:
I do not think that the fact that forced-birth laws apply only to women or that the hypothetical prostate cancer law would apply only to men constitutes a legal problem. The problem with both laws is that the government is or would be controlling people's bodies, and that's not why governments exist; they exist to regulate matters that affect the public. If men as well as women could get pregnant and if women as well as men had prostates, then, if the government applied a forced-birth law only to women or a prostate cancer law only to men, the government would be violating the Constitution. As it stands now, the government is violating the constitutional right found to exist in Roe v. Wade, but it is not engaging in sex discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Similarly, it would not constitute sex discrimination if a law conferred a benefit on women that could not apply to men. An example might be to require that all high schools provide free menstrual products in women's bathrooms. Men would not be entitled to the same in their bathrooms.
I posted this on X (the site formerly known as Twitter). Men who cause pregnancies can be required to quit their jobs, raise the kid(s) for 18 years, pay for their job training or college, and then try to get back into the work force. That will cause an epidemic of vasectomies.
In some places vasectomies are considered “mutilation” & as such are outlawed! Also, doctors often tell patients they won’t be able to have an erection after the procedure which scares many men away. (Anecdotally I’ve heard that some communities tell men that wearing a condom caused cancer…)
That's probably where women are genitally mutilated so they won't ever enjoy sex and therefore will never be tempted to stray.
France also considers vasectomies to be “genital mutilation”. It’s more prevalent than you think. Male doctors are afraid they’ll be sued if the client cannot have an etection after a vasectomy!!
Wow. Oh yes, we must preserve a perpetual and eternal erection.
Well men do think it’s important.
I think that after a man has all the children they want, there needs to be a required vasectomy! Just like some states have required ultra-sounds. I'm not sure how this can be enforced. Any one have any ideas?
My Trump loving neighbor splained me how he opposed abortion and was proud to support the "right to life". Not 5 minutes later he splained me why he didn't support refugees and was proud to tell me he didn't want even $1 of his taxes going to help refugee children. The hypocrisy of the far right has never been greater.
It's akin to watching a large sea-going vessel piloted by crocodiles, erratic, wild swings of the tiller punctuated by stalking and eating whatever can be preyed upon.
I will watch with great amusement when they eat their own
The tells of Rs/cons are conflict in thought and contradiction in words and deeds while absolutely positive they can square the circle of their own making simply by pounding a square peg in a round hole.
Said another way:
"The lunatics are on the grass
The lunatics are on the grass
Remembering games
And daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path" ~Brain Damage Pink Floyd w/a teak or two,
Am grateful, Dave.
Nah. It’s about the same as it has been all my long life. Memories are short.
How about if the law against abortion came with the provision that the unborn child's father was legally required to pay for that child's every need until they become an adult then both parties to the pregnancy are sharing the reality of having a baby come to term. And in the instance of the baby being unable to be born alive, thus putting the mother through hell waiting to deliver a dead baby, there would be a multi-million dollar payout from the government who refused to allow the abortion to that woman. You get the idea, there are many ways to include men in these laws.
Men just run off if they are held accountable so your idea, while sensible, would not work.
Liked / upvoted for the thinking along the lines that "justice is fairness," reservations about crafting any laws that (2) Don't word the child support requirements to include having the state enforcing the laws having to show both parties agreed either that no contraception need be used, and/or that the parties did not mislead one another (the male with promises that any child WOULD be supported, the female with false promises she was "on the pill" or some similar evasion) and (2) Stop short of mandating prison for either party, as either omission in the statutory language empowers the state to violate traditional privacy rights even more than now, and would overcrowd our already overcrowded prisons, besides giving the state too much scope the micro-manage private sex acts.
The "multi-million dollars payouts" are already going to guarantee this kind of law goes nowhere, of course, but at least you are suggesting laws that insist the male bears some legally culpable responsibility, I am just averse to the quasi-authoritarian state that would be enforcing them.
The anti-abortion position is that the woman made the choice to potentially procreate when she had sex, no matter what she intended. No one is asking women whether the man made some representation of having had a vasectomy, or whether she was on birth control that failed, or any other intent or promise made by either of them. If women don't get credit for a good faith effort to not procreate, men shouldn't either.
If women consent to potential pregnancy just for having sex, then the men having sex with them need to also be told that sex is consent to procreate. There's no need to make the state any more quasi-authoritarian than it is already. If we're going to tell women that sex is consent to childbirth, then fairness dictates that we tell men that sex is consent to child support.
Yeah Nancy, I am not sure why you are informing me of this obvious parallel, it's my entire point in what I posted, or maybe I need to make it even more obvious?
That is, it seems obvious to me that millions of women are rightly outraged and will evade the vicious violations of their reproductive freedoms inherent in the anti-abortion laws.
Which is a damn good reason in itself to have no such laws, correct, or do you disagree?
If you agree, then I am only pointing out that the empowerment of a quasi-authoritarian state will also be justifiably resisted by men, not all men, just as there are women who will not resist unjust anti-abortion laws. I also pointed out that in order to prove out individual cases consequent to this already absurdly unjust law limiting reproductive freedom, the state will have to "micro-manage" private sex acts, since it never occurred to me than anyone would make the sweeping claim that one or the other partner should be lied to (again, by a man lying and claiming he would support any children - which could encompass cases where the contraceptive measures simply fail, mind you - or by the woman, claiming she is using an IUD or taking the pill) and yet still be victimized by the state, thus, in the woman's case, be unable to use the judicial process to collect child support, or in the man's case, be able to avoid paying it.
The hypotheticals were meant to show the laws cannot possibly be fair, irrespective of whether they are made even more draconian by applying them to more people.
I confess I have no idea who exactly is supposed to be empowered to do the following, quoting from your comment:
"[T]he men having sex with them need to also be told that sex is consent to procreate."
Who is going to "tell them" this, the state, that is through the court system? I am confused insofar as it seems you thought I meant to include that as part of "holding men accountable," no, I mean by shifting the terms of the understanding of consensual sex acts, so that men willingly cooperate with their partners - do you have a different theory of what the state should be able to do? If so, you're just part of the problem, it's the background theory of the anti-choice, anti-abortion rights bunch that the state should be empowered to make a pregnant woman's body both de facto and de jure state property, which I think is a paradigm case of fascist ideology in practice. Whether extended to the partners or not. But maybe you are trying to make a different argument?
That is, are you trying to argue that because Law A is unjust to one group of people, it is somehow therefore fair for Law A to be applied to still other people? That somehow or other, that is not also unjust?
Child support is enforced against legally married spouses (almost, but not always, the male partner in a traditional marriage) when one spouse does not support the child, or children.
Are you claiming the child support laws should be enforced against unmarried people?
I do not understand your argument, please explain, thanks!
You may think you are being obvious, but you are far from clear. You asserted: "reservations about crafting any laws that (2) Don't word the child support requirements to include having the state enforcing the laws having to show both parties agreed either that no contraception need be used, and/or that the parties did not mislead one another (the male with promises that any child WOULD be supported, the female with false promises she was "on the pill" or some similar evasion)."
So, can you explain in as few words as possible whether you are for or against men having to pay child support, no matter if they intended for a pregnancy to result or not?
Your original assertion was very wordy and confusing. It appeared to assert that you felt there should be guardrails around whether a man intended to procreate when he had sex, and that his child support obligation should be contingent on that intention. If you are in favor of men paying child support for any pregnancy that is the result of a sex act they voluntarily engaged in, regardless of procreational intent or representations by the parties about birth control or lack thereof, then we are in fact in agreement.
Married men who shirk their legally provable responsibility already have to pay. That's already an enforcement problem, but so what, there are myriads of enforcement problems all over our legal system, so there's no issue there.
When I worked in the Family Justice Center, there were a few complaints about the amount of funding for enforcement of Minnesota's child support laws, but that was a just a survey project for clients to answer, to find out what they wanted changed about the process, so it had no bearing on survey results.
You have asked me a kind of classic "loaded question," as I don't want to misinterpret the hypothetical you pose in a way that is unfair to you, so let me first have you clarify this issue: are you actually willing to use the force of the criminal law to ensure that someone who is completely, honestly, sincerely and intentionally misled about crucial material facts, when they have a moral right to know those facts, pay a fine of any amount at all to the very person who lied to them?
In other words, to cut to the chase, of course the answer is "hell no," if you're lumping the outlier cases where women lie about using birth control - again, to someone legally contracted to support the children, their spouse - but in general, the answer is "hell yes," since we can eliminate those cases as aberrations, far off the norm. That's already the law.
I mean, that would otherwise be an astounding legal theory, it sounds like something Trump would come up with - "Sure, I misled them as to how much the hotels were worth by twenty or thirty million dollars, but who the hell knows what they're worth, in fact, they should pay me for offering my expert opinion!" blah blah blah.
So if I read the last statement as meaning it shouldn't matter if the male participant is defrauded and lied to, I think that's absurd, shouldn't be the law anywhere, but it does sound like the kind of law the most fanatical right wingers would propose if they could get away with it, since they also hate the idea of sex acts done consensually for pure love and pleasure and not bringing unwanted children into the world - so again, I am confused, you cannot be supporting that result, right? Where the male could theoretically switch out a woman's prescription birth control pills for fakes, have sex with her while she is convinced she is on the (legit) pill, and put her through the entire psychodrama of having to bear an unwanted child, or abort it?
We need to avoid blunderbuss approaches to laws that really affect human beings at their most vulnerable, including at the hands of conniving, dishonest agents, as the honest and sincere people are generally not the problem - if a woman wants to have a child with a partner who is able to support the child or children, or as the main support if she has a higher income, there is much less danger of unfortunate results or even criminal misconduct, as in my pill-switching fraud example.
So they don't pay their child support half the time and now and then have penalties for that. You can' force people unfortunately to do the right thing. There is nothing good about this issue. All the responsibility is put on women even though so far they're not able to get pregnant without some man involved one way or another.
What if a woman had sex with more than one man during the month the egg was fertilized? The woman or the court would have to notify all the men that they would have to come in for a DNA test.
Three cheers.
Well, we all know that the Dobbs decision has nothing whatsoever to do with the right to life; nothing at all about care for the fetus. It’s smacking down women pure and simple. None of them really give a damn that women’s health suffers or that they’re emotionally beat up. Forcing an 11-year-old who is pregnant from incest to bear the child is beyond medieval (that is happening). The only silver lining in this cloud is that so many women will be going to go vote in 2024. In the midterms in the recent election they’ve already shown how angry they are. Even women in red states. Even conservative women. Even women who previously believed in the right to life, but are beginning to see that with restrictive abortion laws, women are dying. The GOP has really cooked its goose with this one and I’m really enjoying watching it blow up in their faces.
They just want women barefoot and pregnant so the white old men can keep their power! More progressive women in the House and the Senate!
I take issue with your "Even […] women" construction. Women are women before anything else, never mind political inclinations. (If a young woman's healthy and not pregnant, a reminder arrives every month.) Yes you see MAGAt women out there chanting and waving posters, but again and again the same women admit to aborting unwanted pregnancies. Election results today seem to surprise some people as much as Kansas did. I don't know why. As I pointed out then, surveys ever since Roe v Wade had consistently shown about two-thirds support for legal abortion. I don't remember the distribution among women, but i'd wager it was more than two-thirds. Women then and now considered the issue of motherhood first. Anything else was and is an irrelevant abstract.
"It’s smacking down women pure and simple." Yup.
Perhaps the ballot box will solve this absurd turn of events.
Recent world events point out the value of "putting Mom in charge" wherever possible not a bad idea.
Amazingly, the GOP just doesn’t get what a toxic issue this is. In Ohio, they are screaming, like usual, that they will fight tooth and nail to negate this. And as long as we have a GOP run Congress, and a very slim margin in the Senate, this will be a mess for a long time to come. But yes, it’s become apparent that young women, all women, get what a disgraceful and all too often deadly situation this has caused in the last year.
Exceptional! Time to stop “poking fun” with no responsibility for the father of record. There were ultra religious doctors even in the 70s, who thought that even if the fetus had died, it was unnatural to remove it. It took 2+ weeks for me to “naturally” abort. The medical professional was convinced that this was the best way medically for me. A d&c 2 weeks earlier could have spared me from the anguish of that experience. Maybe it was better for the body. However, The emotional heartbreak that MALE doctor made me endure was unspeakable.
I had a friend in the 70s who had to go through this torture. It’s inadequate for me to tell you how sorry I am that you went through that.
That is simply horrible, I couldn't touch the like button, I heard you loud and clear. Bless you.
So these male doctors were punishing you because you miscarried?
Exactly. Because they, at that time, presumed it a health issue: D&C was considered “invasive and unnatural” which is/was BS! The health of the mother didn’t address mental health 50 years ago OR now! We had a baby who was a year and a half at the time (husband left for Vietnam when baby was 3 days old! Upon his return, I was pregnant in an hour!) I was able to have another baby after this horrible incident. Since then, I have sought out women medical practitioners everywhere that we’ve lived.
This should have been your choice. It is wrong that someone took that choice away from you. I am sorry that you lost your baby, heartbreaking, yes it is, even more reason to respect your choice.
Since I also have prostate cancer, your analogy made at least some sense. But what truly resonates is that the law only applies to women, and in most states it is old white men making the decision on abortion. And if the actual voting is the bellwether, then our people in large majorities are for women having control of their own bodies, not the liars now on SCOTUS, not the MAGA legislatures who now suddenly want a national ban after professing it was a state issue. Maybe one way to handle the voting is for only women to vote on the issue? Then it would truly make sense what decision was reached!
Interesting. How about women get to decide because, like a jury, they should be judged by their peers.
Many women (sadly) have been pushing these anti-abortion laws (usually because their religion harps on it so much.) In their minds an abortion is murdering a baby, even when said baby could not yet survive outside a womb, or won’t survive afterwards anyway. (And they have absolutely NO concern for the health of the mother)
Funny how these same people have no trouble removing cancer cells …
It's illogical to posit a gender-free law when there are obvious needs that women have that men do not. Abortion legislation is designed to disadvantage women, and essentially for religious reasons that almost uniformly favor men over women in matters of liturgy, practices, and status.
Right. I agree, Lucian. As the old George Carlin bit goes, "They're all in favor of the unborn, They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months." "After that, they don't want to know about you!"
"They're not pro-life. You know what they are, they're anti-woman. Simple as it gets."
These same lawmakers don't pass appropriate laws and programs to keep children safe once they're born. Gun control anyone?
https://news.yahoo.com/heres-why-george-carlins-1996-202727453.html
One would think that some smart constitutional lawyer had already come up with this: if abortion restrictions only apply to one gender, why do they not then violate the equal protection clause?
It does.
They have diaper changing tables in both men’s and women’s bathrooms.
With transgender bathrooms we may require unisex amenities as well.
When my husband went to law school fifty years ago there were no women’s bathrooms.
When they realized they had admitted female law students, women’s labels were taped over the men’s bathroom signs.
I audited his classes and discovered urinals in the “ladies” room!
It hasn’t been that long has it? Not going back are we? As much as they’re trying.
See my post. It has been tried.
What you say is absolutely compelling, but you need to know that the Supreme Court has already explained, cogently we might say if we wanted to say such a thing, that the fact that only women get pregnant does not mean that any regulation of pregnancy is law that affects women qua women. Indeed one of the cases says California worker"s health insurance provided as a benefit to workers did not need to cover pregnancy, even though it covered all male conditions. Why? Because there are actually 3 relevant legal classifications, i.e. males, females, and pregnant people. (I am on phone, so not pulling up an exact quote). Alito cited that case in Dobbs to reject an Equal Protection claim for women. The underlying facts are sufficiently different, in my view, to have made that a frivolous citation. In a rather contradictory way, Alito also argued that if this is a problem, women can go out and vote. He said women, he didn't say men. He said women can go vote in the same case in which he basically said this is not legally relevant to women per se because it's like that insurance case. One of the arguments that surrounded the insurance case made by the law and economics crowd was that many women are married to men, and if it is a better funding decision not to use the available funds for pregnancy, women married to male workers benefit because those men do better and thus such male-dependent women do better. I am not sure if that that reasoning was spelled out in the case but that was the surrounding logic presented by many legal worthies. When I taught the case I felt obliged to tell the class that argument. A result of some of this is that Congress passed a pregnancy discrimination act that addresses that and other instances where the court said that pregnancy is not a particularly female situation. It is the fetus, stupid! said the Court.You will also want to know about Bray v. Alexandria Women's something or other.https://www.oyez.org/cases/1991/90-985 The plaintiffs in that case argued that the demonstrations aimed at abortion clinics were forms of discrimination against women that violated applicable federal law that forbade the instant discrimination against women. There, Scalia explained that the demonstrations were not aimed at women but aimed at pregnancy and the fetus the demonstrators wanted to save, I suppose. Paraphrasing again. You can read it but but basically what he was saying was the women were kind of irrelevant because the thing at issue for the demonstrators was contained inside the woman and the woman was fundamentally of no interest or significance. Now he didn't put it that way. That's my expansion on what he was saying but I gave you the link and you can read it. This could be crisper if I were not working on my phone and could open up my casebooks, which are in another location, or do internet searches on the laptop. But you get the gist. I love your insight, but the Supreme Court has disposed of it several times. It's not about women, they tell us. Forget the women.
I suspected as much about the court, but I wanted to make my point. It's a simple one, no matter how many ways the court has sought to get around or cancel it. Thanks for your informative comment. I am so lucky to have such wonderfully informed and smart readers.
Right and thanks. I agree with you but the current majority would never move off that ridiculous claim. I thought it important to note that while Alito used the cases that say pregnancy really is not about women, he proceeded to say women can vote if they don't like it. Again, I'm paraphrasing. I see Alito as a sort of juvenile debater with gotcha points that show he has yet to grow up.
By the way I think the pregnancy discrimination act, which I've never studied closely, probably does not address the demonstration scenario. But don't take my word for it. Enroll in law school or be a lawyer or maybe you are a lawyer.
Or study medieval arguments about theology!
But yes, legal studies helps, I wrote my required final thesis paper about Griswold v. Connecticut and the right to privacy.
Let them get away with the current assaults on reproductive freedom and repealing Griswold's effects as far as possible will see contraception made illegal.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/
******* Excerpt:
Appellants, the Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and its medical director, a licensed physician, were convicted as accessories for giving married persons information and medical advice on how to prevent conception and, following examination, prescribing a contraceptive device or material for the wife's use. A Connecticut statute makes it a crime for any person to use any drug or article to prevent conception. Appellants claimed that the accessory statute, as applied, violated the Fourteenth Amendment. An intermediate appellate court and the State's highest court affirmed the judgment.
Held:
1. Appellants have standing to assert the constitutional rights of the married people. Tileston v. Ullman, 318 U. S. 44, distinguished. P. 381 U. S. 481.
2. The Connecticut statute forbidding use of contraceptives violates the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Pp. 381 U. S. 481-486.
151 Conn. 544, 200 A.2d 479, reversed.
Page 381 U. S. 480
MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS delivered the opinion of the Court.
🤯😤
Basically, we women are simply “luggage!”
I am tickled that Youngkin was spanked by the voters. trump will not win the election. Trust me...
Me too!
"Fair is fair" Lucian, I say that as a father of two daughters who each have two children. Most of my life I hated the idea of abortions, because I saw many of them as moral events, now I see them with a completely different lens. I as a male have no voice in whether someone choses to have one, that is between a woman and her Dr., that space has no room for anyone else, especially a politician. When I learned how many abortions are a medical necessity, and how it is just one of the many tools, used to keep women healthy, it solidified my 180 turn. In addition to all of the women I know being pissed off, the men who love them are as well. I like you come from the coat hanger era, we are too smart to ever go back to that time. I think all Americans had a good night Tuesday, some might not know it yet but their heirs certainly will.
Thank you, Dick. Your daughters are lucky to have a forward thinking dad.
The Republican Party espouses that they protect the rights of individuals. Just men, not women apparently.
There is no law that tramples men’s right to full and complete bodily autonomy. There is no law that requires a medical procedure on men against their will, nor is there any law denying men a medical procedure and forcing them to bear the consequences. The closest analogy in modern American history were the Tuskegee Institute studies of the progression of syphilis, where hundreds of Black men were left untreated for decades without being informed that they had syphilis nor that treatment existed but they were being denied that treatment. The Tuskegee experiments are now universally viewed as a horrifying , barbaric human rights violation. And yet Republicans still think it’s just fine interfere with and override women’s decisions about their own bodies. Women are responding in droves by interfering with those Republicans’ ability to get elected.
Fair’s fair.
All part of a wider set of far right wing extremist goals. Here's an interview with an expert on the trends manifested in these viciously misogynistic laws, placing them in the large context represented by Trump:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and
Excerpt from the opening paragraphs, includes a lengthy interview with the author of a book published in 2019, that focuses in part on the rhetoric and policies Trump tries to use to bring about that massive shift to the right:
Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler's Early Rhetoric and Policies
The author, Burt Neuborne, is one of America’s top civil liberties lawyers, and questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs.
Steven Rosenfeld
Aug 09, 2019
Common Dreams
A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Neuborne doesn't make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU's national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
"Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?" he writes. "Partly it's just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it's hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln's house. But that's not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton's mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play." ******
In the rest of the piece, Neuborne illustrates each of his twenty strong points of comparison between Trump and Hitler - no longer sounds so hyperbolic, does it?
Until Trump came along, I was completely unable to understand the level of fear that the tinpot politician from Louisiana instilled in politically aware people. I only knew that as history until Trump and Trumpism appeared.
Might be slightly more complicated, and with much more appealing messages about egalitarian sharing the wealth than Trump has ever proposed - but in the end, Huey Long was a demagogue despite his instinct for hammering on massive wealth inequality in "revival meeting" style orations like this:
0:00 / 3:48
Huey Long: Share the Wealth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hphgHi6FD8k
I do not think that the fact that forced-birth laws apply only to women or that the hypothetical prostate cancer law would apply only to men constitutes a legal problem. The problem with both laws is that the government is or would be controlling people's bodies, and that's not why governments exist; they exist to regulate matters that affect the public. If men as well as women could get pregnant and if women as well as men had prostates, then, if the government applied a forced-birth law only to women or a prostate cancer law only to men, the government would be violating the Constitution. As it stands now, the government is violating the constitutional right found to exist in Roe v. Wade, but it is not engaging in sex discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Similarly, it would not constitute sex discrimination if a law conferred a benefit on women that could not apply to men. An example might be to require that all high schools provide free menstrual products in women's bathrooms. Men would not be entitled to the same in their bathrooms.