[annabellish]

Making that about women vs men is missing the point entirely, which is part of why i was explicit about alternate childbearing groups. If you have two woman in a childbearing group, then the one who is pregnant has the option to terminate or continue the pregnancy, while the one who is not pregnant does not have these options. It is entirely about bodily autonomy - you cannot force anybody to either undergo an abortion or not undergo an abortion. It is a medical process with side effects, effects on one's mood and mind, deeply personal implications depending on how "human" exactly you feel a fetus is, et cetera.

Drawing that as "men have no rights" is deeply reductive, because it isn't about men vs women, it's about the childbearing person vs the non childbearing person(s), and fundamentally does come down to that the same rights have very different implications depending on a person's position.

You have the old joke, "this law isn't discriminatory, both rich and poor are banned from sleeping on the streets!", and in this case it essentially holds true. What you're seeing isn't discrimination, both the childbearing person and the non-childbearing person(s) have the same right to not be compelled into or out of an abortion, it just isn't a right which helps very much if you aren't pregnant.

It does work out that the average man in a childbearing couple doesn't have an "out", but there's no way to implement that "out" without imposing on the rights of somebody else, whether it be by compelling action, or by suddenly threatening to revoke a promise of support that a new childbearing parent desperately needs for them and their child.

[belorn]

> you cannot force anybody to either undergo an abortion or not undergo an abortion

No one is arguing for forcing someone to do anything. Forced abortion or non-abortion would be the opposite of having reproductive rights and bodily autonomy as human rights. Every human rights advocate are against this and rightly so.

> but there's no way to implement that "out" without imposing on the rights of somebody else

There is. It is called paper abortion, or simply the concept that naming yourself as a parent to a child should be a voluntary act by an adult. Conception is no more a promise of support than conception is the promise to give birth to a child. We don't say that women have made a promise to give birth to a child just because they had sex, so it seem strange to say men in contrast does make such promise. The only promise of support should come from society at large to give every child the same possibility in life regardless of how much money their parent or parents has.

Human rights. Human liberty. Choice and freedom. Not about forcing someone to do something against their will. The benefit of adults that want to bring a child into the world compared to adults that are forced by culture or law is very striking and as the article points out essential progress in society.

> If you have two woman in a childbearing group, then the one who is pregnant has the option to terminate or continue the pregnancy, while the one who is not pregnant does not have these options

Just a side note, but I don't think there is a legal system that I know which would force the other woman to pay child-support against her will. The child-bearing mother can't write on the paper that the other woman is the child's second parent, and instead the law forces the non-bearing woman to voluntary request to be the second parent. It is indistinguishable from the process that reproductive rights for men would be, and operates as a clear example of how it would work in practice.

[annabellish]

It's a... difficult area, for sure. The scenario where some guy and some girl have a one night stand and then nine months later he's on the hook for a whole tonne of money is a Very Bad scenario, because obviously there's no promise of support inherent in that, and I'm not gonna pretend that scenario has never happened, and in cases where it has it's difficult to suggest that more nuance shouldn't have been taken.

I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that "paper abortion" is a workable concept in the general case, though. If a couple is a couple and they break up eight months into the pregnancy, then suddenly you have one person who is about to lose their financial support _and_ their ability to financially provide for themselves, but "Child Support" as a concept isn't there for the parent, but the child.

The main difference between actual abortion in this case and paper abortion is that paper abortion still involves a child, and you can't get away from that. That child needs supporting, and permitting the "provider" member of a traditional "provider/childbearer" childbearing couple to vanish late in the process totally screws over the child, and that's what child support laws are there to avoid. There's definitely cases where this goes wrong, but I don't think I've seen much evidence that those are anything but a tiny minority.

>Just a side note, but I don't think there is a legal system that I know which would force the other woman to pay child-support against her will.

I think that's probably true, unfortunately, and I think that's very silly and needs fixing. A two-woman pair is effectively identical to a man-woman pair (save obviously for usually requiring artificial insemination).

>The only promise of support should come from society at large to give every child the same possibility in life regardless of how much money their parent or parents has.

This, though, I can agree with wholeheartedly. I would be 100% behind abolishing child support as the current concept in order to replace it with a general child support system not dependant on the financial situation of either parent - kind of like UBI but for the child. We don't have that yet, though, so we're just kind of working with what we have, and what we have is a very imperfect system that prioritises the child above the parents, because the child has no choices in anything and is in need of far more protection.