Is consent to sex consent to parenthood?

I think this argument will become obsolete in short order. It isn't social change that will free men; it is the steady march of technology and increasing prosperity that will free men. When women have access to well-supplied means of artificial conception, as well as access to all of the government programs they could ever need to raise a child comfortably without the participation of a man, men will know freedom. When women no longer need men in any capacity to rear and support children, men will have freedom.

It would have been nice if it could have happened a few decades sooner or if I were born an equal measure later so that it could have coincided with my entrance into sexual maturity. But we can't have it all.

Don't get me wrong, I think there's already egalitarian justification for male reproductive freedoms right now in many jurisdictions, I just think it's a pipe dream to think it will happen under that motive for a number of reasons:

  1. Supported maternity is a birth-right of women that simply won't be infringed. Inability to support its mothers is one of the deepest shames a society can endure.

  2. We genuinely don't believe women are capable of shouldering a proportionate level of responsibility for the birthing of children. We are not confident that women will behave as rational actors and respond to a shift of incentive away from the cultural value that they are to be supported under any context.

  3. We will cast any negative repercussions that face children as a result of a mother's choices of the parameters and context under which a child is born as a failing of the father to make those conditions favorable. The idea that a woman should either build those conditions herself or postpone motherhood until those conditions are present is revolting to us when there is a perfectly good man close to her we could compel to provide them.

  4. Penal pressure (on women) is absolutely not an option. The vision of a mother criminalized for her inability to support her children is a nightmare the human heart simply will not abide-- even if she never possessed the reasonable expectation to do so and irrespective of the quantity and quality of her alternative choices.

  5. The well-being of women and children is far more valuable to us than a man's control over his reproductive destiny. This is mostly because we do not view such autonomy as legitimate, not in the face of his duty to women and society.

You can either fight to destroy the obstacles I've listed, or let the unstoppable juggernaut of human progress roll over them for you.

I know which one I've chosen.

/r/FeMRADebates Thread