Quote:
Originally posted by Phasad1913
If the government's position is that forcing a man to pay for an unwanted child is protecting the interests of the child, I don't buy it because the child can be even more damaged if its father reluctantly pays money and does nothing else for him or resents its mother and beats her AND THE CHILD up. I'd rather take the chance of the woman finding another father for the child (stepfather, for example) and bringing the kid up in love and peacefulness than forcing a bad father to stay in the picture.
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Agree, Agree, Agree. And I don't think this example is that extreme. It is quite a common situation that I've seen many times. Unfortunately, there are women out there who put their own financial wants above the needs of their children.
Regarding avoiding sex altogether if you can't take care of a kid. That's a great theory, but unfortunately it is just not reality. Abstinence programs are under fire in some school systems. Most people who engage in responsible sexual activity or abstinence do so because they were properly educated at school AND at home. When I was in high school and college, the people who were having unprotected sex were either products of lazy parenting or waaaay overprotective parenting where anything related to sex (including MTV) was absolutely off-limits. Most of these people ended up pregnant or with diseases.
So abstinence can be a goal, but it can't be the only option to discuss in this day and age. We can sit here as adults and say "No, sex doesn't make the world go 'round." But will horny teenagers stop and think about it? No. Will drunken college students stop and think about it? No. We just have to hope that we've educated them enough before these situations that some of what they learned will kick in and they'll find a condom.
Please don't think I'm advocating teaching 5-year-olds how to put a condom on the banana in their lunchbox. But children are getting more and more sexually active at younger ages. And if we stop to think about human history, we really aren't that far removed from when girls were married at 14 and started churning out kids at 15. So now all of the sudden we expect people to just forget what their natural instincts are and to forget what quite possibly their own grandparents and great-grandparents did. It's still pretty common in my family to be married VEEERY young. I'm 31, and I have a cousin who is 2 years older than me whose son is graduating high school next year. I haven't even had a kid yet. 14-year-olds don't need to be getting married, but we have to come to terms with the fact that biologically they are sexually mature mammals and may engage in sex.
Wow. Way off on a tangent there. Sorry.
