Some idiot wrote:

"It's absurd that a small business should pay for women to have unprotected sex. That is not a medical problem. If women want to have unprotected sex they or their partner can purchase the birth control."

Um, isn't using birth control the EXACT OPPOSITE OF HAVING UNPROTECTED SEX?????

Actually including birth control coverage in an insurance plan is a cost saving at less than $2 per month, instead of covering multiple pregnancies and maternity/paternity leave for their employees. Condoms are typically covered under health flexible spending accounts, but not under the regular health care/prescription plans...but that might be because they aren't a prescription medicine. Comprehensive health care for women includes reproductive health. Many women need rely on hormonal birth control for many reasons other than contraception. Multiple, unplanned pregnancies can cause many health problems for both mother and child. Providing contraceptive coverage is really a no-brainer for those with brains. And I'm sure someone will mention that they don't want to pay for someone else's "lifestyle" choices, but in every group insurance plan you pay for coverage that you might never use. Should plans stop covering diabetes treatment since it can be brought on by poor diet? How about skin cancer treatment? Let's not cover that since it was their "lifestyle" choice not to use sunscreen!

I never really had much opinion about Forbes mag and Forbes.com before now. I thought it was a pretty reputable magazine and site, however now after the reading the career women article and hearing about the Wives vs Hookers article, I have no interest purchasing the magazine, getting a subscription or using it's web site. My household will stick with Business Week and Money. Here's the thing with insulting career women, we read financial magazines, we have purchasing power, and we can vote with our pocketbooks.

I read the article and some of the debate, but found that most of it de-volved into the usual name calling crap and ridiculous statements (ie "if a man doesn't want children then he should never have sex").

The articles were okay, but really didn't offer any solutions or anything new, especially compared to Salon's coverage of the same issue fairly recently. Practically speaking, what can be done? Should women be forced to the abortion clinic and tied down on the exam table because a man doesn't want to pay child support? Isn't that just as disgusting as forcing a women to go through pregnancy and birth when she doesn't want to? Are either of those options really the same as making a man send a check to his child each month? Then again, if a man is tricked into becoming a father, shouldn't he have some recourse? How can that be implemented without negatively impacting the child, which does deserve the full support of its parents? How about looking at the way custody and divorce laws and courts are set up and how they should be reformed to create a less adversarial environment? Nope, none of that discussed, even though it really needs to be.

Some of the usual misconceptions came up in the debate and weren't dealt with. The first being that only men pay child support and that child support is the same as alimony (a payment to the parent) as opposed to payment owed to the child. The other thing that a lot of the debaters focused on was a non-married couple having a child out of wedlock where the father did not want a child as opposed to the many instances where the couple is married and willingly had children together, but then split up and then the non-custodial parent (yes, usually the father) must pay child support. I've tried finding statistics on the percentage of parents owing child support are from children of their prior marriages vs children from non-marital relationship, but couldn't find anything outside of numbers of custodial parents having ever been married vs never married.

In the ensuing debate, there was a lot of support for increased types of male birth control outside of condoms. But then it was pointed out that there is a male pill in testing, but that several surveys showed that most men wouldn't use it. There was a lot of back and forth about women scheming to take men for a ride by sabotaging their birth control and that any man who believed a woman that she was infertile or on the pill was an idiot and deserved what he got. I found very little sympathy in the discussion for the poor children that get caught up in the situation like Matthew Dubay's daughter, she and the others like her are the true casualties of this war.