My Story… A Woman’s Point of View Who is “Caught Up”

While I understand and agree with the validity in the argument, meant to be a platform for the consideration of a man’s rights in the birth and rearing of a child, it just doesn’t hold any weight. I am the divorced parent of 2 daughters, 14 & 9, and pregnant with my 3rd child (which came as quite a shock). I am pregnant by the father of my 14 year-old child. He and I were never married. When I became pregnant with the 14 year-old, I was a junior in high school and he was a freshmen in college. Later, at 22, I finally got married (to another man) and had a child with my ex-husband (who is the father of my 9 year-old). My story is this...

The father of our baby is not happy at all that I am pregnant. Before I got pregnant, he told me that he wanted more children, that he wanted to be married, etc. etc. I have known him for 17 years of my life. I believed him, not simply because I have faith in him (because I love him), but because we were no longer 16 & 19 any longer. After this, we slept together, and I became pregnant.

Back in 1993, I took him to court (a year after our 14 year-old was born), and he was ordered to pay child support. He is now in the arrears, because for the first 4 years of her life, he job hopped, and the system was not as advanced in catching non-support payers as it is today. So, although he has a great job now, and has been paying support regularly for 9 years (involuntarily) ($75/week + health insurance), he is still in the arrears because he is playing catch up for 4 years of not paying). Not my fault. He has other children he pays for. One, a year younger than our daughter, and another one who I am not supposed to know about since the real truth came to the surface about his “hidden life” which includes a wife in another city who he sees on the weekends.

It really doesn’t matter how he feels about me being pregnant. If he could get away with not paying child support, and if I went to him and told him that he didn’t have to do anything, he would support the “reality” of me being pregnant. Instead, when our child is born, he will begin to pay child support for this child. I will file a case against him-not to make him “pay” for his deceit, but because our child deserves the right to both parents supporting him or her-emotionally AND FINANCIALLY. When you are married and having babies, no matter who the working parent is- the money belongs to both of you.

Another reason he is so distraught is that he believed the fallacy of being nearly “home-free” in his payments, because our daughter is a teenager, and then BOOM, he has to start all over. Here in Indiana, you pay child support beyond 18 up until 22, if the child is enrolled in college full-time. I am raising intellectual, educated children, so college will be in her future, God-willing. These are the facts: if he would not have not lied to get what he wanted (sex) & been honest and said he did not want another child, I wouldn’t be pregnant. If he would have told me, from the beginning that he was married to another woman, I wouldn’t be pregnant (I would never have slept with a married man). It doesn’t matter if we got together and discussed that we didn’t want kids and then I ended up pregnant (which never happened). When you have sex with someone you are not married to, you are subject to almost “whatever” happens. What I mean is this… Don’t have sex if you are not willing to accept the consequences and responsibilities of what may arise from having sex. It is not fair for people to who pay taxes, like myself, to have to fund welfare benefits to a woman who has a non-paying "baby, daddy" or "ex-spouse". I wasn’t happy at first about another child, but thank God that I have my fertility, my children, and my college education. This was quite an untraditional, unconventional way to have a family, but here we are.

Absolving a man of his responsibilities to financially support his child would be like allowing a mother to do the same. If one day, I awoke and decided to stop caring for my children, I would probably be incarcerated and my children would be taken from me. Well, if a man decides that he will not financially support his children, he should be incarcerated as well.

The bottom line is, if you don’t want children guys, then go against your warped ideas of what it means to be a man & get a vasectomy if you want to continue having sex without protection. Find a woman out there who doesn’t want kids. Believe me, there are many women who are very career-driven who don’t want the “distraction”, nor the responsibility of children and would be more than happy to get their tubes tied as well. These guys, behind this “front” to promote the rights of men, are real morons. Boys, verily I say unto you, do not have unprotected sex with a woman whom you do not wish to share the commitment of raising a child or children with. If this statement is an issue for you….then become a homosexual, and go have sex with men. The possibility of children being born is proof as to reasons why sex was “created” to be within the confines of relationships (marriage).

The debate over Roe vs. Wade - which was faulty law, and is being tested now in order to strengthen or dismiss it - is a natural correction in the procreative realm. If feminists are going to insist that procreative rights apply only to women, while for men, responsibilities trump any kind of choice, then they will alienate those men most likely to support their fought-and-bargained-for (and not inevitable) procreative "rights." I noticed that, in the original article, the author wrote "father's rights." Would she ever have placed "a woman's right to choose" in ironic quotation marks? There will be a corrective compromise here that brings fairness and involves more freedom for men, or the right to abort will be severely curtailed when enough men decide they are being taxed without representation. And that their support for abortion rights has been exploited to their detriment.

It's like custody law - for too long, women have had unfair leverage over men. On a personal level, I left my impressive career, my friends, my apartment, my comfort level and my country (Canada) to move to New York without papers, when my ex-girlfriend decided to have our baby in the U.S. (and she was not a citizen, she was an Irish immigrant). I pay support, and more importantly, I provide a significant amount of the hands-on child-raising, especially when she leaves the country on a few days notice (for up to 10 days) for her freelance job. It was either do this, or risk never seeing my daughter. Yeah, I made a choice to do that... but what choice did I really have, as a human being - and a father? Women will either prove willing to correct the discrepancies, or lose their only allies in the political sphere. And when it's every interest group for itself, the forces of the right wing will likely reassert their dominance. Choose or lose. While Roe vs. Wade For Men may seem unlikely now, the debate has thankfully been opened, and some increase in the power to choose/decide/opt out for men is inevitable.