Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has read with great enjoyment the comments to his Men’s Club post below. He’s enjoyed the commentary so much that he’s decided he needed to write a second post to address some of the additional topics that have been raised on this hot-button issue.

The first one to tackle is a succinct comment from Kathy of Cake Eater Land. Kathy writes:

But what about the woman’s right to control her own body? You kinda
skipped over that bit.

A ha! If your Maximum Leader may channel the Joker for a moment. “Hello Benny. It’s your Uncle Bingo. Time to pay the check.”

Here is some check paying. First off, your Maximum Leader approached the question set before the Men’s Club from a purely theoretical point of view. Perhaps he should have been explicit about this. Kathy correctly points out that if you frame the argument from the point of view of “it’s a woman’s body a she has a right to control it” then you must take a completely different tack with your argument. Indeed, Kathy’s point is reflective of how this issue is actually adjudicated in our nation at this time.

If you start with the assumption that a woman has full control of her body, and further assume (as we do in this country) that at least to a certain point a fetus is nothing more than a tissue mass growing inside the woman then it only makes sense that the woman should have the only say in whether to abort or not. This is pretty much the “settled” jurisprudence of our day. It is a perfectly logical and cogent argument to advance. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t agree with it, but he certainly understands it.

Your Maximum Leader determined to construct an argument based on how he thought about the subject. If one starts by assuming that a fertilized egg is a human life, then you have three people (mother, father, & child) and their respective rights to deal with. Your Maximum Leader, rather than deal with all the possible permutations of situations, made another unstated assumption in his previous post. He assumed that the people involved in this ethical/moral/legal dilemma were not married. Indeed, all the possible variations on this theme can boggle the mind, so for the purposes of his discussion he will continue to assume that insofar as this topic is concerned, the man and the woman are not married.

So, where are we? If you accept that there are three people in the equation then the matter can be made as complicated as one wants to make it. For the purposes of brevity and clairity, your Maximum Leader just put down the basic points to his theoretical position. All things being equal, if a woman wanted to terminate her pregnancy, and the father of the child did not the ethical calculator in your Maximum Leader’s tips towards life for the baby. This is certainly a considerable pain for the woman. There is emotional distress, physical distress, pychological distress involved in pregnancy. Even a desired pregnancy. To have external forces prolong n unwanted pregnancy would surely cause complications and problems.

But now one starts to hit the underlying issue of responsibility. Here we can bring in some of Ally’s comments. Ally wrote:

Okay, first, you cannot possibly claim that the responsibility of a child born would fall solely on the father with no aid of child support for the woman. It doesn’t work that way on the flip side - women sue for child support from men who do not want the children the woman insisted upon having.

If your Maximum Leader may indulge for just a moment in some glibness… He can claim whatever he would like on his blog. You may choose to disagree. (At least until the Mike World Order comes… Then disagreement can be quite costly to you.)

Your Maximum Leader made his argument in a quick “cutting the Gordian Knot” type of way. All things being equal, if a woman gets pregnant and determined she doesn’t want to have a baby; but the father of the baby wants to take responsibility for the baby; then he should be allowed to do so. The father should be required to assist the woman financially during the course of her pregnancy - for the good of the child that he wants. And the woman should take care of herself and the baby if for no other reason than to avoid harming or killing the child intentionally. (Which in this hypothetical case would seem to be an action that should come at some criminal cost.) But when the pregancy is concluded the two parent should go their separate ways FOREVER.

Your Maximum Leader feels this way because of his overdeveloped sense of responsibility. If a man feels strongly enough to want to keep a woman from aborting his child, he should be prepared to go it alone. The woman has already determined that she does not want to be responsible and thus is aborting the child. In your Maximum Leader’s mind this is a serious decision to take. And once entered into there should be some finality to it.

Conversely, your Maximum Leader believes (theoretically) that if a woman becomes pregnant she should notify the father. If he does not want to take responsibility for the child, but the woman does, she should be prepared to go it alone.

As your Maximum Leader has said before, this is a hypothetical argument. We all know that current family law looks nothing like what your Maximum Leader is describing. But current family jurisprudence also doesn’t promote responsibility or societal stability - in your Maximum Leader’s mind.

Ally makes a second fine point when she wrote:

Second - if you want the right to have a say on something that is occurring outside your body, marry her. Then you stand some chance of actually having a being that is allowed to reach the oxygen-breathing stage. Otherwise, we will have to make it normal practice to remove a fertilized egg and bring it to term in an artificial womb. Having a child brings life-long change to a woman’s body….if she doesn’t want that, you are going to have a hard time trying to equalize fathers’/mothers’ rights.

Whoa! Lots of good stuff here. Your Maximum Leader heartily agrees that two ought not to procreate except in the context of marriage. To do so otherwise, he believes, is irresponsible. Hence his fixation with radical responsibilty in his argument. You either are or are not going to be responsible for a child. If you are and the other parent isn’t then you ought to be prepared to do it alone. The system we have now makes people pay for irresponsibility (sort of) after the fact. Well… It actually makes men pay for their irresponsibility after the fact. If that societal crutch were removed, perhaps it would promote more thoughtful decision taking at an early stage.

Next your Maximum Leader will just say that insofar as he can see in our day there is no equality of fathers’ and mothers’ rights. Family law is quite slanted in favour (rigthly or wrongly) towards women. Only by taking a step towards radical responsibiity could some sort of equality start to emerge.

And then there is the science fiction aspect of artificial wombs. Well, it is sci fi now, but as he said before, it is going to happen… Probably sooner rather than later. Once you get an artificial womb you will start to see fewer and fewer pregnancies among (at least) married people with some money (or health insurance). This is not to say that there will be fewer children. Just if the technology is out there your Maximum Leader thinks a significant number of women (and their husbands) will choose to use it. Why wouldn’t you? Less strain on the woman. Potentially it is safer for all involved. There are lots of upsides to artificial wombs.

So… There are some comments and (hopefully) clairifications on your Maximum Leader’s earlier post.

Further discussion is welcome.

Carry on.