Roe, Choice, Child Support

Background: Lindsay’s commentary on the National Coalition for Men’s publicity stunt “Roe vs. Wade for men” lawsuit.

Lindsay makes the following important comment:

Dubay argues that Roe gave women the right to consequence-free sex and that society should offer no less to men. At best, he’s deeply confused about the principle at stake here. One of the benefits of reproductive rights is that those of us who are pro-choice can enjoy sex without the fear of forced birth. However, Roe was never about the right to consequence-free sex, per se. I take it as a given that consequence-free sex is a good thing. However that doesn’t mean that the state has a compelling interest in working to absolve people from the consequences of their behavior, including their sexual behavior when those choices affect non-consenting third parties. On the contrary, we have a compelling social interest in forcing people to accept responsibilities they would otherwise shirk.

This gets it exactly right. A number of commenters who’ve apparently been pushing soem version of the “men’s rights” line in previous threads on the subject, have backed away from defending this particular case because one of the agreed-upon facts of the case is that the woman did not intentionally decieve the man about the pregnancy (she incorrectly thought she was infertile). This seems far less consequential to me than it does to them. I’ve always thought that the primary justification of child support ought to be the interests of the child–the innocent party in all this. Society has a strong interest and a strong obligation to keep children out of destitution when possible, and child support payments are a reasonable way to do this.

Like Lindsay, I think access to consequence-free sex is ceretis paribus a good thing. Providing this value for men would be fine, but not the risk of impovershing children. The state determines what contracts are enforcable. Some classes of contracts contrary to the interests of justice shouldn’t be enforced. A contract–verbal or written–for one party to provide no material support for any child borne of consentual sex seems to fit in that category.

I’d certainly be open to proposals to radically socialize the costs associated with child-raising. In theory, at least, I find a great deal to like in some of these ideas (that’s the subject of another post). I’d be far more inclined to take seriously these objections to child support if they were coupled with some proposal to this effect. Unfortunately, a perusal of the National Center for Men’s list of “Creative solutions for Forced Fatherhood” reveals nothing along those lines. These “solutions” actually give a pretty good indication of how seriously these people deserve to be taken. (my personal favorite: patent your genetic material and sue for patent infringement. If you think that’s good, check out the “cons” for this strategy: It might be argued that the man gave his genes away.