Should men have the right to opt out of child maintenance payments IF they wanted an abortion and the woman decided to keep the baby?

Again, I would be very wary of a woman who offered me the female equivalent of this ("a contract for me to sign that says that if she gets pregnant as a result of our sexual activity I will be legally bound to marry her and/or support her and the child for life").

That isn't a equivalent of this at all. An LPS contract is "in case of an accident you can handle it however you want, but I won't be involved". That thing you mentioned would be "in case of an accident, you become my slave". Not even remotely the same thing, and there would be no reason for any man to ever sign it.

In LPS the woman signs away the right to control someone else. That would be signing away the right to control yourself. In short, it's totally different and would never exist and has no need to exist.

Certainly, I cannot ever see myself thinking an LPS would be a good idea (speaking only for me that is).

Why not? If a man cares about never becoming a parent against his will, and only having children when he chooses to have them (which is what all women do), then LPS is how you could make that happen. He has nothing to lose if he makes use of this right.

Call me naive if you like, but I would find it hard to trust a partner who presented such a contract as this to me because I would see her as someone who was so individualistic that other people, including me, would be of only passing interest to her. I doubt I'd be interested in that.

I don't know why you'd make an assumption like that at all. How does the statement "I do not want to become a parent until I choose to become a parent" imply "I only care about myself and you don't mean very much to me"?

Couples have discussions like this and it's not uncommon or weird at all. "What would you do if we accidentally got pregnant? Would you have an abortion, or would you want to have the baby?" And usually they come to an agreement on the issue, such as "I'm not ready to have kids yet" "yeah me neither, I want to be older and be financially ready to have a child before I consider it" and so on. Discussions like this do not imply that the two people don't care about each other.

I don't think a relationship is a zero-sum game which is what this seems to be implying. That's not been my own experience to date anyway (then again, I am currently single …)

A zero sum game? It has nothing to do with that concept at all. This isn't "you sign this contract, and I'll give you something else in exchange for it". It's simply an agreement between two people that neither one of them will have the power to force the other one into becoming a parent against their will. That's all it is. There are no hidden meanings or devious plans, there's no forced slavery, there's nothing bad about it. And everyone gets to choose whether they want to be a part of this contract or not, no one is made to give up any rights if they don't want to.

/r/MensRights Thread