The Abolishment of Modern Indentured Servitude

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I pretty much agree with you except in those situations where a couple has made an agreement in which one parent is agreed to be a homemaker. In a situation where someone has given up a career and has been out of the job market for 18+ years, it's really hard to go out and start over. Hell, lately it's hard to find a sustainable income with a good education, positive work history, and a phone book of exemplary references. I think in a situation like that, then yeah, even after divorce the other party has a responsibility, as it should have been a decision that was made together.

I think child support should be opt-in when pregnancy and childbirth are opt-in-
I don't believe a man should be required to support a child he didn't want born in the first place,
but that scenario is contingent on women having the choice to opt-out of the pregnancy in the first place.

Is the current availability of abortion sufficient opportunity for a woman to opt-out? I'm just curious, because I agree with your general sentiment, but I'm not sure I see a fine line there. A lot of women are pressured by family, religion, conditioning, etc. to the point that they're nearly coerced into bringing a child to term.

Each party has to opt in order to make the child... decisions have consequences. There is always a chance sex will lead to pregnancy... its kind of what it is supposed to do.

The government sets the terms of the contract, and unlike other contracts, the whole thing isn't set out in writing, people aren't encouraged to seek the advice of an attorney, and they can't modify the terms to suit themselves. I'd prefer a marriage contact that met all those standards. Prenuptial agreements get overruled by the courts all the time, though, so even if people do have a real contract, the government doesn't enforce it like other contracts. In Texas, if you represent yourself as married, and live like a married couple, the courts will treat you as though you are married. I see no reason not to apply the same standard to parentage.

How about sterilizing people who keep making babies they don't support? Coldly logical, but who wants to give the government that power? Irresponsible, unethical people will always have some advantages over concerned, responsible people. Life's not fair, the law's not fair, Q.E.D.

@BurntOutMom I support the movement to place a value on homemaking, although it raises some issues of contributions to Social Security or Gov't pensions.

My statement was conveying an ideal scenario, I understand that reforming marriage like that would have great negative affects if not handled correctly. I shouldn't have assumed you would be able to tell.







Not all marriages end because of abuse. And really in my opinion abuse(passive or active) and/or mental instability should be the only thing that absolves a marriage when children are involved.




My preference does not suggest life time mating.



What moral code? I just think that marriage should be the construct people use to guarantee(within reason) that a child can be raised with the resources of two people.(I might have at one point said that it should be a man and woman but I've realized that gender role models can be supplied by single sex couples from outside the marriage it wasn't much of an issue for me to begin with though I don't see gender role models as particularly useful at an individual level) I just don't think it is right to tie someone to another without their consent.



Pregnancy and child birth are opt in for mothers,(at least in America) there are abortions and if that goes against an individuals beliefs there is adoption.

First,
if sex were "supposed to" equal pregnancy, humans wouldn't be one of the few species which engages in it year-round and regardless of whether the female is ovulating-
sex provides health benefits, stress relief, and is important in group and pair-bonding and therefore societal cohesion and stability.
It is quote obviously an evolutionary imperative present for reasons other than solely reproduction-
arguably, reproduction would be very unwelcome if not unsustainable in any one, randomly-chosen incidence of sex, hence the millenia-old and universal desire to develop means to control it (many female-utilized means of which being violently-opposed by religious and other patriarchal institutions until common-sensical secular forces prevail, not with frivolous notions of female autonomy [radicalism, that] but with the observation that in regions and nations wherein women possess greater reproductive freedom, both they and their offspring are healthier and more advantaged economically).

Now,
if the decision to have sex equalled de-facto consent to pregnancy and childbirth, abortion would not exist.

Abortion IS a consequence of sex, just as much as pregnancy and childbirth- it's just not a consequence you like.

Semantically-disguising the archaic sentiment despising the notion of
women engaging in consensual sex with no mandated-reproduction involved
doesn't change that it is precisely that same long-standing, attempted-shaming rhetoric being used with phrases invoking "consequences" and "responsibility".

What "current availability of abortion"?

The vast majority of counties have no providers, meaning women are forced to travel, sometimes hundreds and hundreds of miles to procure one.

Women who seek abortions are disproportionately-poor for obvious reasons,
and abortion is not covered under insurance.

Mandatory waiting periods,

women being forced to view anti-choice literature and films before being deemed adequately-educated enough to elect the procedure,

laws requiring abortions be performed only in hospitals,

parental notification, and parental consent laws requiring under-aged women to procure one if not both parent's consent or else seek a JUDICIAL BYPASS-

all made possible by the mind-boggling vagary of Planned Parenthood v. Casey's ruling that the state possesses Constitutional justification to legislate obstacles to abortion access, but not insofar as they might cause "undue burden" to women seeking it.

You know nothing about the current availability of abortion-
ironic, because the women most-likely to be awarded alimony and child support
are those for whom abortion access is largely non-existent due to economic circumstance.

Nor is the "option" of surrendering a child to the most abusive state care system in the modern world versus attempting to raise him or her at or below the poverty line yourself a fair choice to ask of anyone.

Last edited by ValentineWiggin on 24 May 2011, 5:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

That answers that question.

I was familiar with some of the obstacles that had been erected. Most of which seem cruel and unusual. They seem punitive and torturous in a lot of cases.

I wasn't aware just how hard it was, though... Sounds like there is still a lot to be done to guarantee women's reproductive rights.

Any other idiotic statements?

China and numerous other countries are far worse at taking care of orphaned children than the United States is. Our problem is all the red tape when it comes to adoptions, but to imply we are the worst country in the world at taking care of orphans is a flat out lie.

Good points from each side there, imo.

As I see things, both alimony and child support laws delve into matters of cultural and/or societal morality -- aka "religion" -- where either/both/any parent is point-of-gun coerced into doing something believed/held as "morally right" (as opposed to "lawfully correct") within said culture or society. Hence, this:


*The legal complication (if that is the correct word) there, however, is the fact of a state-sanctioned marriage actually being a three-party contract giving the state the dominant position for (en)forcing financial provision for children, and with said children actually belonging more to the state (as a byproduct of said marriage) than to either parent.

It seems to me that every comment, so far, has failed to take into consideration a fundamental principle:

Child support is the right of the child, enforcable by that child against both of the child's parents.

To many parents engaged in divorce perceive child support as a game of winners and losers as between the two of them. While property settlements and spousal maintainance (alimony) are most certainly proper disputes between the spouses, the custody of, access to and support for the children of the marriage most certainly is not.

The only relevant criterion for evaluation of these issues is: what is in the best interest of the child. To suggest that a legal infant's right to enforce a support obligation is comparable to indentured servitude is to make a mockery of those circumstances in which people continue to suffer in genuine conditions of indentured servitude or slavery.

Consider this example: http://www.theprovince.com/news/West+Va ... story.html

I find it repellent that parents obliged to pay child support would consider their circumstances in any way comparable to what this young woman from Ghana had to endure.

However, and rhetorically: How many people actually bring such awareness and/or conscious commitment to the marriage table?

Hence, their later discovery of the actual expense of being parents often seems to them to be some kind of unfair burden or even some kind of "punishment" after having only just so greatly enjoyed copulation.

Sounds like the feminism 101 textbook. I do not buy it, while humans certainly do engage in sex year-round I do not think this absolves them in any real way from the consequence of the action.



Important in group bonding? I will just have to take your word on that one. Most of what you are listing are side-effects, the primary effect of sex is pregnancy. It is like arguing that running is designed to make you lose weight. No, running makes you move faster than if you were walking, losing weight is a side-effect.



I would agree that sex without responsibility is liberating. However shocking this might sound to the 'me-now-I-mean-right-now' culture, not all liberation is desirable. It is liberating to run from the police when they catch you but it does not make it right. The line that pregnancy is some chain forced upon women by men and that men have used it to keep them in the kitchen for thousands of years is pretty much where feminism goes off the deep end for me. If you want to infer some sort of moral lesson from this I suggest you first google 'naturalistic fallacy'.



Post-hoc ergo propter hoc. Soviet women had HUGE reproductive freedom (far more than the average US woman).



Abortion is not a consequence of sex. Pregnancy, childbirth, baby showers and those little woolen boots are the consequences of sex. Abortion is a result of people attempting to avoid those consequences.

Statistically, pregnancy is not the primary result of sex - even without birth control. It is just the result with the most consequences.