Man sentenced to 13 years for tricking girlfriend into taking abortion pill

[SlickSnake]

I actually don't own a toaster

So did you divorce your toaster you married, or just kill it and bury it in the backyard and collect the insurance?

 

[SlickSnake]

Sounds to me like you oppose equality.

Sounds to me like you oppose reality.

 

[SlickSnake]

Jesus, what a misogynist. You have one lucky wife. But I am guessing you're single...

He's single now, since his toaster he married kept burning him, so he buried it in his backyard, next to his vacuum cleaner, which really sucked a lot.

 

[SlickSnake]

I am done engaging with you, obviously you have some deep rooted issue, and you are probably more comfortable in a country like Saudi Arabia.

Or the appliance department at Walmart.

 

[SlickSnake]

I can't believe you would promote unsafe toaster sex.

Well, the rubbers kept melting, so he had to use the tin foil from his hat, instead.

 

[SlickSnake]

Yeah I thought so. Expecting women to be responsible for their choices obviously isn't misogynistic.

And I don't know why you are bring up Saudi Arabia. I am arguing for exactly the opposite of Saudi Arabia. Recognizing women as fully equal to and having no need of men.

But in Saudi Arabia, men have no need of women, and can marry their favorite camels instead. Just imagine a whole harem of sexy camels to hump. And where do you think the term camel toe really came from?

 

[SlickSnake]

If a guy has unprotected sex with a woman, he's responsible for whatever results. Don't like the result or possible result? Then stay out of there.

Or go gay. Or marry your toaster.

 

[SlickSnake]

And if you are a male and raped repeatedly for 3 years you still have to pay child support.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11149730



So a teenage boy is stupid for being raped by a woman 2 decades older than him?

LOL, at stupid laws and stuff. And they say justice is blind. I guess we all conveniently forgot about the part where she is also a BLIND RAPER who needs child support.

 

[Geosurface]

Someone really needs to discover the multiquote button.

 

[DrPizza]

I was going to post this last night, but some of you were having too much fun not reading the article and simply believing the sensationalistic, and skewed, headline.

Anyway, wasn't there someone here who was posting, asking for ways to do what was done? (I'm not typing in the appropriate search terms while at work.) It almost seems to me that I may have vacationed the idiot who did that.

 

[Geosurface]

some of you were having too much fun not reading the article and simply believing the sensationalistic, and skewed, headline.

The title of this thread is "Man sentenced to 13 years for tricking girlfriend into taking abortion pill."

The headline of the article the OP links to is "Welden gets 13 years in abortion pill case."

I keep seeing this meme in the thread that people think he was convicted of murder. I'm not sure anyone has said that, it's possible that someone did, but overall the tone I've observed is people (myself included) saying that 13 years seems excessive, and using this case as a jumping off point to discuss larger societal issues relating to men and women's reproductive rights (or lack thereof) and whether our current law and society has some troubling double standards in these areas.

What is the sensationalistic headline people were swallowing without properly understanding? The headline of the article, and the title of this thread, both seem completely accurate as descriptions of what happened.

And as for "murder" - the only place that word appears in the article is when the formerly pregnant girlfriend said:

“That fairy tale morphed into my own personal inferno when he decided to murder our child,” she said

So again, I think that all of the directly case-related discussion in this thread has pretty much been operating under the correct premise of what happened. I don't see how people not reading the exact charges they used to prosecute him, or the ones he could have faced, changes anything about the basic discussion. And again, a lot of the discussion has been about larger issues, not this case specifically.

wasn't there someone here who was posting, asking for ways to do what was done?.

I think I remember seeing that. I want to say it was Dari, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

[Oldgamer]

I was going to post this last night, but some of you were having too much fun not reading the article and simply believing the sensationalistic, and skewed, headline.

Anyway, wasn't there someone here who was posting, asking for ways to do what was done? (I'm not typing in the appropriate search terms while at work.) It almost seems to me that I may have vacationed the idiot who did that.

The title of this thread is "Man sentenced to 13 years for tricking girlfriend into taking abortion pill."

The headline of the article the OP links to is "Welden gets 13 years in abortion pill case."

I keep seeing this meme in the thread that people think he was convicted of murder. I'm not sure anyone has said that, it's possible that someone did, but overall the tone I've observed is people (myself included) saying that 13 years seems excessive, and using this case as a jumping off point to discuss larger societal issues relating to men and women's reproductive rights (or lack thereof) and whether our current law and society has some troubling double standards in these areas.

What is the sensationalistic headline people were swallowing without properly understanding? The headline of the article, and the title of this thread, both seem completely accurate as descriptions of what happened.

And as for "murder" - the only place that word appears in the article is when the formerly pregnant girlfriend said:



So again, I think that all of the directly case-related discussion in this thread has pretty much been operating under the correct premise of what happened. I don't see how people not reading the exact charges they used to prosecute him, or the ones he could have faced, changes anything about the basic discussion. And again, a lot of the discussion has been about larger issues, not this case specifically.



I think I remember seeing that. I want to say it was Dari, but I'm not 100% sure.

Ok hold the phone here, the very title of the news article itself says Quote: "Welden gets 13 years in abortion pill case"

And the very first sentence of the news article states Quote: : “TAMPA — John Andrew Welden apologized, quoted the Bible and asked for mercy from the judge who sentenced him to 13 years and eight months in federal prison for tricking his girlfriend into taking an abortion pill just before she lost her 6-week-old embryo.”

That is in fact what the guy did. He led his girlfriend to believe according to the news article that the pills she was taking were anti-biotics when in fact they were not.

I am not sure how the title is so inaccurate as to what is being reported in that news article.

 

[Victorian Gray]

And if you are a male and raped repeatedly for 3 years you still have to pay child support.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11149730



So a teenage boy is stupid for being raped by a woman 2 decades older than him?

Apparently never happened:

http://www.inquisitr.com/915699/was...m-ordered-to-pay-child-support-to-his-rapist/

This might be the 'real' case and it's very different.

http://law.justia.com/cases/california/caapp4th/50/842.html

 

[nehalem256]

The unbalanced reaction can be attributed to a collection of past men and their outright belligerent/nasty attitude towards a pregnant girl walking up to them and saying it's theirs.

The truth is, men weren't exactly nice people in the days of old. Sure, we were tougher, stronger, fought in wars and boxed with bears in the dead of winter,... but, without paternity tests, men could and have walked away from their fatherly responsibilities. You found a girl, told her whatever you needed, knocked her up and walked away with no real worries about what happened next.

This does not justify how men are treated today in paternal court cases - but, it explains why men are public enemy number 1 in divorces & relationship splits that involve women with children.

The key thing you are missing is that we used to live in a world where women where helpless and needed men. Women were not considered equal to men and it was therefore necessary to protect them.

Now, women are equals, yet they still insist on being treated like they the are helpless little flowers.

 

[Oldgamer]

The key thing you are missing is that we used to live in a world where women where helpless and needed men. Women were not considered equal to men and it was therefore necessary to protect them.

Now, women are equals, yet they still insist on being treated like they the are helpless little flowers.

Wow you really have some deep seeded issues with women.

 

[Geosurface]

The truth is, men weren't exactly nice people in the days of old. Sure, we were tougher, stronger, fought in wars and boxed with bears in the dead of winter,... but, without paternity tests, men could and have walked away from their fatherly responsibilities. You found a girl, told her whatever you needed, knocked her up and walked away with no real worries about what happened next.

Well, what is the range you're using for "days of old" ? Humanity is very diverse and over the course of our history there have been bad men and bad women, and good men and good women.

In the balance, looking at the overall roles throughout history, I feel a much more accurate way of looking at how men have behaved toward women is that they have protected them, provided for them, gone to war to defend them, killed other men to defend their honor, and invented countless technologies to make their lives easier.

Of course, something so complicated and varied as how men and women have interacted with one another over the course of all of human history, or even just a recent slice of it, is impossible to just boil down to a short summary. But I do believe it's unfair to characterize it as you have, as men all being cads and evading their responsibilities. Our great-grandfathers were probably much more likely to take their role and responsibilities as a husband and father much more seriously than they tend to be taken nowadays. They were also probably the kind of guys who would instantly punch another man for insulting a lady, etc.

Let me just give one fun little example of a snapshot of male-female dynamics not that long ago:

In August 1914, at the start of the First World War, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with support from the prominent author Mrs Humphrey Ward. The organization aimed to shame men into enlisting in the British Army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform.

This was joined by prominent feminists and suffragettes of the time, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. They, in addition to handing out the feathers, also lobbied to institute an involuntary draft of men, including those who lacked votes due to being too young or not owning property.

Yep, early feminists handing out white feathers to symbolize cowardice to men who weren't in military uniform. Classy, eh? Go die in the trenches or you're a chicken shit! Meanwhile, I'll be lobbying for equality... and never making a peep about the draft being extended to women.

Meanwhile men, and almost EXCLUSIVELY men, were dying by the tens of millions in that war. Huge numbers of whom didn't have the vote themselves, because they weren't 21. The view was that men earned the vote by being eligible for the draft. When women got the vote extended to them, they didn't gain an accompanying duty like the draft, their bargain was just "here, take the vote" whereas for men it was "here, you can have the vote but in exchange we can draft you."

"As late as 1917, the US government was executing men who refused to fulfil the obligation they owed in return for the right to full legal person-hood in the eyes of the state.

Three years later, women won the vote. Without even the obligation to do “war work” like sewing uniforms, or community service like picking up litter from the sides of highways."

But I'm off on a tangent, I just find that an interesting male-female dynamic at a particular point in history. It's actually fairly characteristic of VAST swaths of history and how men and women were valued and regarded by societies.

This does not justify how men are treated today

Agreed. No one should be punished for the actions of their ancestors or other people in general. It's deeply immoral to do so. This is a big part of why I've always found Christianity to be dubious in its morality. The idea of someone suffering for someone else's sins. The idea of our entire species being born with "original sin" for the actions of two people in the distant past. It's also why I don't like gun control, among other reasons, because it's always about taking away freedoms from everyone as a reaction to the misdeeds of a few.

 

[Exophase]

I am not sure if this has been posted. I am not going through 8 pages of garbage.

The guy struck a plea deal where he would plea guilty to product tampering and mail fraud. IE: lesser charges. Not of murder. Not of inducing an abortion by fraud. Not of assault. The guys attorney and the federal prosecutors both agreed upon the thirteen year eight month sentence in return for his guilty plea.

The Feds held the 2004 Unborn Victims of Violence Act over his head to force him to plead guilty to the above lesser charges. He would have been found guilty under the 2004 Act and would have faced life in prison without the plea deal. The Act was written by the GOP and passed by party line votes by a GOP House, GOP Senate, and then signed by President Bush.

/end thread

I wonder if there was a push for a lesser plea bargain because UVVA charges haven't landed anything like a life in prison conviction yet. Florida has its own feticide law but it's roughly consistent with abortion rights in that it only applies after 23 weeks of pregnancy, so he wouldn't have been guilty of it.

This article reported shortly after the crime took place has some more details: http://www.nationalrighttolifenews....orn-child-under-nrlc-backed-law/#.UurW-_vKnQo I wouldn't be surprised to hear Walden specifically got the idea to use Misoprostol from the Boie case..

 

[Geosurface]

Oh by the way, it should be made clear again that what this man did in tricking his girlfriend into taking drugs to terminate her pregnancy is VILE and completely unacceptable, and he does deserve punishment. Probably not 13 years of punishment, but punishment without a doubt.

Those of us who are talking about some of these skewed dynamics aren't saying what this guy did was right! Let's not be simple-minded here.

And by the way, i'm 95% sure that when nehalem says something like "well if men can't get legal abortions they'll resort to illegal abortions" he is merely trying to poke at the arguments he finds inconsistent and problematic from the other camp. I don't believe he is saying he approves of what this man did.

 

[nehalem256]

This was joined by prominent feminists and suffragettes of the time, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. They, in addition to handing out the feathers, also lobbied to institute an involuntary draft of men, including those who lacked votes due to being too young or not owning property.

Sounds to me like feminists like to control men's bodies.

And by the way, i'm 95% sure that when nehalem says something like "well if men can't get legal abortions they'll resort to illegal abortions" he is merely trying to poke at the arguments he finds inconsistent and problematic from the other camp. I don't believe he is saying he approves of what this man did.

Lying to people about the medication you are giving them is clearly unacceptable behavior.

 

[Exophase]

In the balance, looking at the overall roles throughout history, I feel a much more accurate way of looking at how men have behaved toward women is that they have protected them, provided for them, gone to war to defend them, killed other men to defend their honor, and invented countless technologies to make their lives easier.

That comes off as a very skewed perspective. Just because most of those things were performed by men doesn't mean they were doing them simply for the benefit of the women. What would you think if I argued that American slave owners would protect their slaves, provide for them, not required them to go to war, killed others who tried to take them, and invented countless things that they would have never had the opportunity to with their utter lack of education?

Women weren't usually treated anything as badly as slaves but there are some parallels. They were far very often sold into marriage, and the husband had absolute authority over the wife. Women in general had fewer rights. And it's not like they were just kept like pets, they were generally expected to cook and clean at the very least, and were given more duty in caring for the children (in addition to birthing them, more at the father's discretion than the mother's).

I won't argue that there weren't some good biological motivations that pushed men and women into different roles. A lot of these reasons are becoming more and more obsolete, which is why it's been more self evident that women should be allowed to do most of what men do today. I also don't disagree that there are laws and conventions today that favor women over men. Historically, I'd easily consider those favoring men to outweigh those favoring women, which is why I think we've seen the shift address removing oppression towards women first. Hopefully those unfairly against men, like some of the paternity requirements vs abortion, or eligibility for the draft, will gradually subside.

 

[Geosurface]

Some years ago when I joined the Navy and was going through the training process to serve on a submarine, I got a chance to see a dynamic which might challenge most people's usual default way of thinking about these sorts of issues. It's very easy to be cavalier and say "well he should've wrapped it up or not had sex if he didn't want to be on the hook for child support!" when you're envisioning a pure innocent female and a horn dog, slimy male just trying to weasel out of his obligations. Allow me to paint for you a very different picture:

Imagine, if you will, a submarine base filled with a large number of young men who are very frequently 18 years old and many of whom signed up when they were 17. They've just come out of boot camp when they arrive at this base and for many of them, their boot camp experience was in an all male division and they're now at a nearly all male base. The submarine service is only just recently incorporating female officers, and I believe this is still in its very preliminary stages. This is a base which is much more for enlisted, and I'm talking some years ago also, so it's basically almost entirely a male base.

These young men have therefore been cut off from their homes and families and friends, and everything they knew, for at least 3 months. After boot camp, they're shipped straight to this base and in most cases they're states away from their home. They will likely continue to be cut off from everything they know for many more months, and they know that ahead of them is the prospect of years of being in a cycle where they alternate between being on this nearly all male base with lots of restrictions and obligations, and then going out for sometimes almost a year at sea in an all male metal tube under the ocean, and which is an extremely cramped, high stress environment. Also, when they first show up at this base they are initially on a limited liberty program where they aren't allowed to leave the base, or drink, etc - and so when these privileges are granted later, there's a tendency to over-indulge.

Because the submarine service requires a higher ASVAB score to qualify, this base skews to a more nerdy type of guy (though by no means exclusively) and so it isn't uncommon AT ALL to have some 18 year old guy who signed up when he was 17, may be a virgin, and is completely naive and inexperienced in matters of women and relationships. Now this young man, with raging hormones, is kept pent up in a very female-deprived environment and is probably exercising much more than he normally did, which boosts libido even more.

And much like sharks know to congregate where the seals are bound to come into the water off the beach, and numerous predators know to show up when the baby sea turtles are hatching... this situation on this base creates a class of women who live near it and target these young men. Seem far-fetched? Trust me, it isn't. It was so common, in fact, that the chain of command on this base would spend a great deal of time trying to warn these young men about this. Of course, we all know how good being warned by someone older about something is when you're a teenager vs. learning from direct experience.

So yes, these women exist. Not just at this base, but around any military base. Due to the nature of this base, it may have been more pronounced here. I'm not sure. I know it wasn't limited to this base. And these women pursue a whole host of strategies, and I'm obviously not implying that they sit down and think "oh I'm going to take advantage of a young, inexperienced man" - the majority don't think like that, as human behavior is always much more organic and subconsciously driven than that.

But this predation could take many forms and I saw most of them, and heard about the rest:

1. The woman who likes to sleep around and uses the base as a steady, ever-refreshing stream of easy males.
2. The woman who has STD(s), knows it, and is immoral enough to use the transient nature of this base's population and the casual hook up possibilities as a way to secure partners who don't know about her situation and who won't be around the area long in most cases.
3. The woman who already has one or more children and wants to get a Navy guy because even if they break up, if he had started providing for them in any way, the Navy very likely will force him to continue to as though they were his own children. (Saw this one play out myself.)
4. The woman who knows that these young guys are easy, and have a new source of income they aren't used to having, and they live on base so they have few expenses, and that if they get married to one of them they can get on the Navy's teat pretty firmly and for quite a long time, especially if she has his kid. Plus, whatever base he gets stationed at, he'll be gone for months at a time and if she is so inclined, she can use this same aforementioned environment to get an endless stream of adultery opportunities while her husband is at sea, who may or may not be aware she is married. (This variety is super common, and obviously I realize that a lot of them don't plan this scenario out, but human nature takes care of it playing out anyway.)
5. The strip clubs which sprout around these bases, and like the liquor stores which show up on reservations, they know their market and the employees there have no qualms about milking massive portions of these young men's paychecks for stupid lap dances, etc.
6. The woman whose biological clock is ticking and wants a kid at all costs. Takes advantage of young, inexperienced sailors who may not know much of anything yet about birth control, women's reproductive cycles, and the world at large - in order to dupe him into impregnating her, and then whether she has any interest in him sticking around or not, she knows he has a steady paycheck and an employer who uses the UCMJ to expand our society's already very anti-male laws in this area to be EVEN MORE SO. She doesn't have to hope he'll pay child support, she knows that the Navy will take it right out of his paycheck.

Now if you think pulling at your heart strings like this is low, just remember that pulling at peoples' heart strings is absolutely central to most liberal policies, including arguments for establishing and then expanding abortion rights for women, as well as lots of other social safety net programs which are either exclusively or primarily for women. So I think appealing to sympathy is legitimate here.

These are young, naive guys. Cut off from their prior life. Lonely. I think some of us older guys can sometimes forget how we were back when we hadn't learned what we know now about relationships and people and the world.

I was fortunate in that I enlisted when I was well into my 20's. I wasn't married, so I lived in the barracks on base with most of these younger guys, and got to see first hand how they'd fall into these traps. All the warnings from the chain of command weren't enough to save most of them. They'd always think the woman they were with was different. They were blinded and couldn't see what others could see about what was being done to them.

I'm not going to claim I was entirely immune. I was a single guy and I experienced a less dramatic version of a lot of these same feelings, but I was not inexperienced or unworldly, at least not by comparison, and I was able to engage in relationships with women in the area without getting burned. I knew to meet women further from the base. I had a car, many of the younger guys didn't. I had plenty of previous dating experience and knew a thing or two about red flags and places to avoid meeting someone, etc. Many of the younger guys didn't.

But if you can't sympathize with an 18 year old kid who knocks up some 28 year old woman after she lied to him about being on the pill, and is then losing a huge portion of his already small paycheck for years and years to come as he serves his country in one of the most stressful ways possible, and in the portion of the Navy which has both the highest divorce rate and highest suicide rate, then I think you're heartless.

I think you have to sympathize with someone like that. Just like you have to sympathize with an 18 year old girl who gets smooth talked by a 28 year old guy who is much more experienced, and who just doesn't like using a condom, and convinces her they don't need one for whatever reason, and she ends up pregnant and left high and dry by him. Anyone would sympathize with her. Our society sympathizes with her, and gives her a hell of a lot of support and options to ease that burden, or avoid that burden almost entirely.

And keep in mind, with regard to my Navy example, it doesn't have to be that extreme. That is a really pronounced, lopsided dynamic I used to call attention to this issue because of how dramatic it is and because it's something I saw first hand, but make no mistake: this same basic dynamic exists, though to a lesser extent, for any guy coming right out of high school, going through his 20's, and learning about the world and about relationships. We all hope that any young man or woman can go through that learning period and come out on the other end of it without any unwanted pregnancies or STDs, etc. But we all know that sometimes shit happens, and that's exactly the reason we provide women so many parachutes.

So, what next? Place police around a pregnant woman's vagina, to ensure she does not abort? Or chain both mother and father together, to make sure no one runs away? Or drug the mother by force and abort when a court decides the father can get rid of it?

There isn't anything really pragmatic and possible, to "voice" the father's wishes. Because, the baby is not within his control/grasp. It is not part of his body.

All I'm saying is I don't think it's crazy to ask that our society at least extend an option to males for them to be able to say "wait a second, hold it, I never agreed to be a father, I want no part of this, and she can either abort it or give birth to it knowing that it is 100% her responsibility." - an option to sign away his parental rights and responsibilities while she is still in the time could abort and/or drop it at a safe house. That doesn't seem unreasonable. I'm pro-choice, pro-woman, and certainly not in favor of men being able to dictate to a woman that she must abort a pregnancy. I just don't think men should be treated like disposable, expendable ATMs, and that their desires for their life and future should be respected too.

And if your knee-jerk reaction is to say to me "pro-woman!?!?!? you just listed off all these predatory women and that was soooo misogynistic of you!!!" - do me a favor and give yourself a slap. Get serious here. I'm talking about predatory women, not all women. And I also fully appreciate that there are PLENTY of times that some young, naive girl ends up with a young, naive Navy guy, and nobody was deliberately or even subconsciously trying to take advantage of the other person, but it still goes wrong anyway and he's on the hook. That's not the kind of situation I'm talking about. Some of the situations I'm talking about blur the line a bit, but by no means am I acting like every woman around these bases is some scheming villain. Not at all.

 

[brianmanahan]

dari, is that you? :whiste:

 

[Exophase]

Geosurface, I do sympathize with people who were used and manipulated by others, especially romantically, and if it came at great financial peril. I've been used and manipulated by women too. Face it, there's a whole lot of awful stuff people can do to each other that isn't actually illegal, even if it feels like it hurts worse than being assaulted or stolen from. But there's a limit as to what we can start making illegal, especially when it starts becoming very hard to prove one account vs another and when a lot of bitterness and resentment comes with the territory.

I've said before (a few times), I do agree that men should be allowed to opt out. But frankly, and maybe a little cynically, I think this is really more about the state avoiding a potential burden on their own resources than simply favoring women. Support abortion? No problem, the women or at worst insurance company pays a relatively minor expense. Support opting out of child support? Chances are higher that the single mother is going to come looking for welfare or that the kid will end up in the foster system. Hence why men are often tracked down and forced to pay child support even when the mother didn't file a motion for it or even isn't interested in it; as far as the state's concerned you're paying on their behalf, not the mother's.

I know some people (well, one person....) are going to say that the state should just make women have abortions if there's any risk that they'll end up needing government assistance, but of course that's not going to fly in a society where there's barely even a consensus on the right to abort, much less willingness to.

 

[Geosurface]

I've been used and manipulated by women too.

I should be clear, I'm mostly relating my feelings on things I've observed and which people I know have gone through. I myself have never really been treated particularly poorly by a woman. May have come close a couple times. I've had women decide to end relationships, I've also been the one to end relationships, and I've had ones where we both just sort of felt the time was right to end it. In most of those, I think both parties walked away feeling pretty friendly about it. I've never really had a truly nasty split.

So I'm definitely not some bitter dude who looks back on a record of being burned and has come to be super pessimistic about women or think that guys are going to get screwed over by women the vast majority of times they get into relationships.

Not my outlook at all (nor am I implying that it is yours btw) - I think the majority of women and men get into relationships for completely normal, healthy reasons. I think almost nobody sets out to deliberately screw someone over in a relationship, and those who do come from both genders. I also think that most times a relationship doesn't work out there's no real hero or villain, but rather just human nature playing out. It's hard to make a relationship last. No villains required to explain it.

I actually have a pretty high opinion of women in general, and although in the last couple of years I've gone from identifying as a "male feminist" to now being a pretty passionate anti-feminist, this is not out of any hatred for women whatsoever. This is out of a recognition of the negative impact it has had, and the double standards it turns a blind eye to or in some cases even promotes. I think there are loads of wonderful women out there who identify as feminists and who are very well-intentioned and good people. I just happen to think that there are a lot of notions it promotes which are damaging, and I think that some of the real movers and shakers in the movement both presently and in the past, are very divisive and harmful figures.

I'd like to think that it is my respect for women which has allowed me to get to a point where I expect the same from them that I do from men, and don't beat around the bush on it. Sometimes the best friend you have is the one who calls you on your BS and pulls no punches. You may hate to hear what he has to say, but sometimes you really needed to hear it and sometimes he's the one who actually cares the most about you. I've had a friend like that myself.

Chances are higher that the single mother is going to come looking for welfare

I think Munky was right when he said:

The solution is a lot simpler. You remove the safety net which shields women from the consequences of their actions. Remove taxpayer funding of abortions. Remove forced child support from the man if she chooses to keep the baby (or give the person with more income the primary custody). Make her liable to return child support payments if the paternity test comes back negative at any time. These safety nets only enable and encourage such behavior by removing any deterrent against them.

It sounds harsh to the ear, but I think he's pretty close to the mark. I think removing consequences from bad choices is one of the worst "kicks" our society has gotten on for the last several decades, and I think the results are disastrous and we're only seeing the beginning of the full impact it will have.

There are a lot of people here who, when they read what Munky said there, will knee-jerk react by saying "OMG woman hater!" but honestly anyone who reads what he says and thinks it indicates that he hates women, needs to snap out of it. He's treating women like adults, and the only reason it sounds harsh to people in our society now is that we've been conditioned to view women as having no agency and being childlike victims. That is one of the things feminism should really be focusing on undoing. A lot of people these days apply a standard of "you're a mysoginist if I, at any time, ever find you saying anything negative about a woman." Which, I shouldn't need to point out, is a completely absurd standard.

 

[nehalem256]

I've said before (a few times), I do agree that men should be allowed to opt out. But frankly, and maybe a little cynically, I think this is really more about the state avoiding a potential burden on their own resources than simply favoring women. Support abortion? No problem, the women or at worst insurance company pays a relatively minor expense. Support opting out of child support? Chances are higher that the single mother is going to come looking for welfare or that the kid will end up in the foster system. Hence why men are often tracked down and forced to pay child support even when the mother didn't file a motion for it or even isn't interested in it; as far as the state's concerned you're paying on their behalf, not the mother's.

Sounds like you are pretty much saying what I have been saying.

The point of child support is to bail women out for the poor choices they make.