The Left-Handed Dictionary defines children as “innocent by-products.” Dour conservatives oppose birth control and abortion primarily because they believe children are the “wages of sin” (especially for single women, though seemingly not for single men.)

Now Dan Savage, making a fairly reasonable argument in favor of requiring medication-support payments from people who infect others with HIV, makes the same mistake:

A straight man knows that if he knocks a woman up, he’s on the hook for child-support payments for 18 years. He’s free to have as much sex as he likes and as many children as he cares to, but he knows in the back of his mind that his quality of life will suffer if he’s irresponsible.

link: Savage Love

I think his heart’s in the right place though he could have chosen his words more carefully. More to the point he likely would have chosen his words more carefully if he hadn’t been focused entirely on his main point.

That said, Amanda at Mouse Words summarizes the fallacy rather nicely:

Children are not a punishment for sex. Dan Savage, who has an adopted child, needs to think about this more thoroughly. Treating child support payments as the equivalent “punishment” for male sex to women’s “punishment” of having to bear raise children is the sort of thinking that has given birth to the men’s rights assholes and anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion thinking. HIV is a public health problem, but children are the responsibility, not the problem, of their family.

I had a vasectomy at age 21 because I was damn-sure not going to father an unwanted child, and in 1975 that was about the only reliable way to be sure one wouldn’t. Years later, after a reversal and two zilly-wonderful children later, I got another one because I’m just not that comfortable with unintended fertility.

Nevertheless, children are sort of a fact of life. Every one of us has a father and a mother. And bloody-near all of us are here because (whether we want to think about it or not) our mother and father had sex. Chances are very high that around 80% of any potential readers will have a child sooner or later, and that child too will have a mother and father.

The main question is whether they’ll grow up knowing exactly who.

I bring all this up because of a very peculiar series of court cases involving a pair of doctors, one who had been very meticulous about avoiding pregnancy by only having oral sex, and one of who insemnated herself with the other’s sperm she’d collected after oral sex and later sued the first doctor for child support. Link

It’s in the news this week because the father, who evidently really was clear in both word and deed that he didn’t want to be a father, recently won the right to counter-sue in an appeal.

The oddball thing for me is this ongoing notion that it’s “her baby.” Well, yes in the traditional sense he or she (it’s hard to say “it” since we’re talking about a walking and, by now, talking person) is, and even in a semi-pseudo-second-generation feminist sense it is too. But really, whether he agrees or not, whether in a different universe she never mentioned it or not, the child is his too.

It’s hard to imagine being so incurious about one’s own offspring. I’m not saying it’s not possible, or even easy! Just hard for me to imagine.

Anyway, if it were me and somebody’d pulled a trick like that — you gotta admit insemnating yourself with semen obtained from a scrupulously fertility-avoiding donor is immoral, dishonest, and wrong if not (evidently) illegal — I’d tend to sue for custody on the not-inconsiderable basis that the mother wasn’t entirely fit.

Yeah, sure, it might cramp the guy’s style having a child (or another child if he’s already married to someone else) but as I’ve discovered having children changes one in unexpected ways. More to the point it also doesn’t change you in ways you might have suspected: a parent can be as sexually active as a non-parent (most of the time, anyway.)

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Hmm. My next post had better be lascivious or I’m gonna start losing people. I know — I’ll call this a “Sanctity Sunday” post and try to do Pussy Blogging on Fridays. Stay tuned. :-)