In my mind, her negligence in failing to notify my friend as a potential father of this child should negate his responsibility to that child. He was certainly negated from the process until it suited her to involve him.

Before you get all crazy about this I want you to sit and think for a minute. You find out tomorrow that you are the parent of an 18 month old baby to a person you only knew for 2 weeks or so 2 years ago and now your wages will get garnished to pay child support for the next 16 years. Are you really OK with that? Let’s say your in come in 40K a year. They could easily take about $800 a month for that.

I think that using the word “some” here is very far from accurate. In my experience, a very significant portion of the male population falls into these categories. The hostile comments toward men in this thread come from the very real fact that so many men will – and do – behave like complete abusive assholes when it comes to sex, reproduction, and parenthood. While the hostility might not be entirely on the mark, it’s absolutely understandable.

That’s the crux of the argument right there. My father is better than a lot of fathers. But he still refuses to pay anything over the state-mandated amount of child support–which isn’t enough to raise a dog, let alone a child–and openly resents it and makes it plain to both my brother and myself. Being older and lacking a penis, I now know that my father is full of shit and a selfish asshole to boot. I mean, what else do you call squandering your children’s child support and college savings and watch them wear hand-me-downs whilst you buy several acres of property in Texas, buy shiny new cars, and shop in Nordstrom? I went to upper middle class to hovering above the poverty line in the years between 1st and 2nd grade. It has impacted the direction of my life vastly, and utterly prohibited me from doing a lot of the things I would have been otherwise able to do.

And my story isn’t weird or even uncommon. Time and time again I hear from friends in my income bracket (my low income bracket) how their Dads come around to play and be “Disneyland Dad” while pissing and moaning about their bitches of ex-wives having their grubby hands in their wallets and using them as a free meal ticket when they were married. They they blithely depart from their children’s lives, leaving the majority of child-rearing to their struggling ex-wives, only to come back when they want to be “Dad” without all that pesky responsibility. Or they just say “fuck it all”, start a new family with another woman, and then use the power they wielded in their first abusive marriage to financially, legally, or physically dissuade the mother of their children for filing for some piss-poor compensation for caring from the children they abandoned.

My mother was fired from three jobs trying to win sole custody (so my father would have to pay a pitiful amount instead of a deplorably pathetic amount of support) or trying to resist my father fraudulently reducing his support by lying about his income or just refusing to pay. Between the years she spend out of the work force raising his kids while he was married, and the years she spent in court getting fired (not to mention the legal fees attached to even presently serving papers for support), her income is so low as to be pathetic. Yet my father owns a house worth several million dollars, five cars, and numerous other goodies. And he still pays next-to-nothing.

So, really, I don’t give a flying fuck about “Men’s Rights”. Fuck your Men’s Rights. My father ruined my life, and the life of my mother. My father is nothing special. There’s plenty of other fuckbags that want all the esteem and priviledge of having children with none of the responsibility. A woman’s job, by default, is to raise children. Which is why so many households are headed by single mothers. Even when the dude sticks around, his contribution to child-rearing is considered “helping”, which he is now a saint for doing. If she labors night and day for her children, well, that’s normal.

Honestly, I could really care less about all this bullshit about what is philosophically and ethically great in some idyllic little world that MRAs and those stupid enough to debate and listen to them operate in. The reality is that everyone considers it the woman’s job to (a) raise children and (b) bend over backwards to not get pregnant if she doesn’t want “a”. Men get to think that being Disneyland Dads makes them good parents, and that “bareback” sex means you’re a big strong maaaan. And my story isn’t unique, it isn’t special. You shouldn’t even feel sorry for me, because the majority of single mothers have it a lot worse than I ever did.

So instead of pissing and moaning about inconsequential bullshit that is actually a vast exercise of male priviledge and never ever happens in real life, let’s focus on making sure that women and children can afford to live, and that nobody actually still thinks it’s totally cool to abandon your children, and it’s actually the fault of that bitch of an ex-wife, who stole your manhood/children/wallet. Because once feminism has actually done something to equalize this desperate situation, then we can worry about men. Until then, shut the fuck up about men. Especially shitstains of men that abandon their own children and then whine like it’s their god-given right to sow their wild oats and then keep their dreams of being rock stars.

As one man to another…STFU. A woman is not a human incubator. She is not required to carry around another living thing in her body. I can’t force you to give up your liver for another person and I can’t force a woman…not even my wife…(since you seem to think that’s gives me some rights over her body)…to let another use her organs to sustain that life.

Flexibility and fairness all sounds good, but you forgot that the woman you’re requiring to undergo 9 months of discomfort, pain, medical risk, lost income, and lot time is A HUMAN BEING also deserving of fundamental rights.

Here’s the thing: If two people have sex and the woman gets pregnant as a result, I’d point out to her that it was always a risk if she just freaked out and did nothing and refused to make any decsions about the pregnancy at all. It’s not, yes, you should carry a fetus for ten months and put your body at risk because you had sex and this is a punishment. It’s, look, you can get pregnant from having sex, so you’d better think long and hard about how you’re going to deal with it. (And if men could get pregnant, I’d say they should be able to decide whether or not to abort because it would be their bodies that are affected by pregnancy.) There are no do-overs after.

With men, you know, they don’t have to parent. (Helping to pay for necessities is not the only thing you do when you parent, FFS). But if you’re the father, you’ll have to provide some measure of support. And a poster above was right–if a single mother refused to provide financial support and care for her child, she’d be charged and the kid would be taken away (even if she was coerced into having the baby and thus didn’t freely choose motherhood).

And you can’t put a child up for adoption without the consent of both biological parents.

Finally–I was involved with a man who, several years before we met, had a child with someone else. And you know, if he had ever bitched and moaned about CS, I would have tossed his ass out like a plague infested rat.

i wa shocked to find this talking point somwhat true but a dna test doesnt always work. depends on the state but there are men out there with a dna test showing they are not the father who are stll responsible. many are husbands. “needs of the child” trumps all, its very interesting, especially when you look at the stats on how many men are rasing kids who arent biologically “theirs”. not sure if theres any fix to that but it is interesting.