I would never vote for this legislation and it's almost unquestionably unconstitutional (I say 'almost' because I don't have any idea what this SC might decide Roe means). But your correct observation that this legislation would place women's rights in men's hands overlooks the fact that, as it now stands, men's rights are placed in women's hands. That may be OK with you, but I'm sure you can understand that many men aren't so equable on the subject.

Obviously, abortion rights place a father's rights and duties squarely in the hands of the mother. If she decides to keep the child, he must pay to support it; if she doesn't he is deprived of the opportunity to be a father. That is true irrespective of his wants of needs. As an abortion-rights supporter, I can grudgingly accept all that, but I must admit, if it happened to me I'd be extremely upset. In addition, there is no requirement in any state that a woman even inform a man about a child or give him any opportunity to be a father to it. This effectively deprives him of his parental rights. Again, his rights are entirely in her hands even outside the abortion arena.

Some fathers' rights groups have proposed an 'opt out' law. Such a law would allow single fathers (35% of all new fathers) to make a declaration within, say, 30 days of learning about a pregnancy, about whether they intended to provide support for the child or not. If they said "no," they would lose all rights to the child and all obligations toward it. If they said yes, they would be required to follow through and would preserve their parental rights. Armed with that information, the woman could then exercise a more fully informed decision about whether to abort the fetus or not. It would also give the father at least some control over his own rights which are currently entirely in the mother's hands.

So would you support such legislation?

Excellent post. If you don't already know about Sarah McLanahan's Fragile Families study at Princeton, check it out. There's some great data in there. Also Irwin Garfinkel at Columbia.

what Specter is saying is that he doesn't want the truth. If he's willing to give up the oath and the transcript, he knows very well that this crowd will lie more or less constantly. So when Specter says this, translate it to mean "I don't want to know the truth."

What you describe happens anyway. Any woman can identify any man as the father of her child. When the state files suit against him for child support, it tells the court he can't be located, so the court issues an order for "alternative service of citation," meaning that notice of the suit is published in the newspaper. When the guy fails to show up in court, the state takes a default judgment against him for back child support, costs and interest. Of course the child support continues to accrue as time passes as does interest on the judgment. If the guy is ever found he's hit with a massive judgment for a kid who's not his and when he tries to explain that fact, the court says "you're too late. You should have appeared at the original hearing. The matter is res judicata." It's a fairly common practice. You, for example, assuming you're female, could pick a guy at random and put him on the hook for 18 years with no ill consequences to you at all.

So the situation you describe, where the guy actually gets notice and an opportunity to have a DNA test, would actually be a big improvement in that regard.

and let's not forget WHY Karen DeCrow and other actual feminists support shared parenting. DeCrow has for years pointed out that "if men are to cede power at work, women must cede power at home." Long before the work/home tradeoff became such an obvious problem for women, DeCrow understood that, in order to gain equality in the workplace, they would have to give up things like the automatic preference given them in custody matters. In short, DeCrow understood early on that concepts like shared parenting were good for women, while resistence to them tended to keep women at home and out of work. That's an idea that seems to me to be too obvious not to accept, but unfortuantely for all of us, men, women and children, it's still not simple enough for feminists to get. Feminism has gone from honest efforts at sexual equality to "ever more for women," and that's bad for everyone, including women.

huh? I have no idea of how you got the idea that I would support a bill that would encourage paternity fraud. That truly is not a conclusion you can draw from what I've posted on this to date. As I said earlier, I don't support this bill and it clearly violates Roe and Casey.

Hmm. All of the top three candidates are Senators. None of them has served as much as 2 terms in the Senate. Since 1932 a total of one sitting Senator has been elected president.

But others are among the most valuable resources we have. They provide an instant corrective to the dogged consent manufacturing of the MSM. Glenn Greenwald here at Salon is an excellent example. I hear it on the radio almost every day; callers to talk shows channel Greenwald's points and force the pundits to deal with the facts and analyses he publishes. It's an extremely valuable process and one I don't see being compromied by the usual strategies. I keep thinking they'll find a way, but they so far haven't.

gush about the morale of the troops and how wonderfully everything is going in Iraq and it turns out the 6 days they spent there was a Potemkin Tour arranged by the military. It's as predictible as the sunrise.