Letters to the Editor
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Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right
As far as I know, every state in the Union allows for mothers to legally abandon their child and walk away from all parental responsibility...
In every state of the union, a man who wants to keep a child can do so and hit up the woman for child support in the case where the woman wants to give the child up for adoption.
Women do have several levels of choice (at least for now) that are not available to men.
This is, indeed, an accident of biology. The unfairness is biological, not legal. Adding in a legal unfairness to the child would merely create more suffering for the most helpless. Two wrongs don't make a right.
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and your contribution to grown people talking would be?
Dude, shut the fuck up. No Name Given, you're not making any kind of useful points and are acting like a dumbass 14-year-old (which you probably are). SHUT THE FUCK UP and let the grown people talk. -- Anonymous
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the overdiagnosis and overhyping of infertility is a factor in this problem
I feel bad for all three key players in this lawsuit (dad, mom, baby--Mel Feit is doing OK).
I'm a women's health nurse practitioner, and although I don't have enough details about "Lauren's" individual case to comment specifically, it is very easy for me to see how the original misunderstanding took place. Ditto for the letter writer Darryl and his ex.
Infertility is one of the big moneymakers in modern medicine. Infertility specialists have huge incentives to scare you, get you in the door, and diagnose you as infertile before you've really given conceiving the normal way the old college try. I mean, if you are under 35, they give you a year, and if you are 35+, they give you six lousy months! Meanwhile, most couples will eventually conceive on their own; the majority of couples who don't conceive in one year conceive the second year of trying. Even couples who have been trying for five years unsuccessfully still have a 20% chance of conceiving the sixth year.
Now, if you want to be a parent and have been waiting for five years, 20% doesn't seem that high, and I have full sympathy for those folks. When you want a baby, six months seems like too long to wait. So for them, I say, get IVF ASAP. But as for the Matt and Laurens--if your birth control method had only an 80% effectiveness rate (the inverse of the 20% who conceive), you wouldn't want to count on it, now would you?
Again, I don't know what her medical problem is/was, but while many things can *reduce* your fertility, (or make pregnancy risky for mom and baby, very few things can make you absolutely, certainly infertile (including, of course, the not-quite-100%-effective tubal ligation). We can only guess how this may have been explained to her when she was diagnosed.
Add in the hype factors: 1) the marketing of most news sources to the well-heeled 30- and 40-something professionals who delay childbearing and fear/suffer from reduced fertility; 2) our culture of instant gratification; and my personal favorite, 3) the religious right telling women that abortion and also many forms of contraception (pill, IUD) will make you infertile later.
There's also some garden-variety sexism at work: since infertility as seen as a female problem in our culture, often women who didn't conceive in one relationship assume that they are infertile, and conceive, readily and to their surprise, in a subsequent relationship.
I can't tell you how many women (and teenage girls, too) I've had in my office saying they can't get pregnant because they are over 40, or had an abortion, or just because *they haven't yet* after x months of unprotected sex. Or that they don't want to take the pill because they want to have children eventually.
So, I think we should go easy on the woman in this case. She probably felt like this baby was a miracle, and her only chance to be a mother. And I think that unless we develop a more realistic understanding of fertility, there could be many more regrettable situations like this in the future.
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Feminist in favor of Masculinism
Forget timing, marketing ploys and all that. This is a fundamental issue that people think about in depth from the time they become sexually active until the time they genuinely want to conceive a child.
I am a woman who is resoundingly in favor of legal abortion AND access AND sex ed (for example, it's much more dangerous to carry a full-term pregnancy for a healthy mother than to have a safe first trimester abortion).
Men should be able to waive paternity -- make it disappear. This isn't the same as abortion; however I do think that men should only be able to do this if they use the one type of birth control that is available to them, not BECAUSE there is only one type of birth control available to them.
If men want more forms of birth control, then they should develop them in the male-executive-led pharmaceutical companies that develop birth control. Men are more than welcome to go into the doctor's office every three months for a shot of something-or-another to mess up their hormones; or go let them get implants. I'm more than happy to envision a man arguing with a pharmacist about whether his prescription for birth control should be filled.
This legislation would be wonderful: if men have to use birth control in order to retain the right to reject paying financial support to unwanted babies, there would be far fewer accidental pregnancies and better control of disease.
Unplanned pregnancies impact both the woman and the man, and though they impact them differently, it's still only fair that they both have some sort of control. I'd rather give a man the control to opt out of financially supporting his child (the ability to say "no") than give him even the tiniest hint of control over what the woman decides to do with her own body (the ability to force her to say "yes" OR "no"). If he refuses to pay support and she can't support an unplanned child but is opposed to abortion, he still hasn't forced her to do anything: she can put the baby up for adoption.