From:    Kevin Darcy
To:      All                                    Msg #54, Aug-03-93 07:49PM
Subject: Re: right to abortion != right to child support

Organization: Who, me???
From: kevin@rotag.mi.org (Kevin Darcy)
Message-ID: <1993Aug4.034937.5774@rotag.mi.org>
Newsgroups: soc.men,soc.women,alt.dads-
rights,sci.psychology,misc.legal,alt.child-support

In article <1993Aug2.113704.2717@midway.uchicago.edu> thf2@midway.uchicago.edu
writes:
>In article <239q3g$67h@serve.tech.mis.cfc.com> kevin@serve.tech.mis.cfc.com
>(Kevin Darcy) writes:
>>In article  alpinist@eskimo.com (David Butler) writes:
>>>All I'm arguing is that YOU are responsible for the consequences of
>>>YOUR OWN actions.
>>
>>The consequences of a man's OWN action of having coitus sex is the need for
>>an abortion. He is certainly at least 50% responsible for the costs of same,
>>IMO. But any liability beyond that aren't consequences of *HIS* action --
>>they're consequences of *HER* (in)action.
>
>Legally, one intends the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his
>own action.  If I negligently hit someone with a car, my liability is
>not absolved should the victim's treating doctor also act negligently--
>such negligence is reasonably foreseeable.

A victim of a tort, however, _does_ have a duty to mitigate damages. Unlike
the unconscious victim of an automobile accident, whose only choice is to lay
there and get treated by whatever quack might happen along, a woman exercises
a free choice over whether the damages are small (cost of an abortion) or
whether they are huge (18+ years of child support). Her failure to mitigate
the damages cannot be assigned to HIS "tortious" behavior, only the damages
which would USUALLY flow from an unexpected conception by unmarried adults --
the cost of an abortion.

>And this structure even concedes what no court ever has or ever will concede--
>that the decision to carry a child to term is somehow legally unreasonable.

My, you sound awfully sure there, Ted...

At some point, as abortion becomes accepted more and more as a part of life
in this country, and maybe 70%, 80%, 90% of pregnancies to unmarried women end
in abortion, the reactionary judges who uphold the current paternity child
support regime will have to engage in some serious sophistry in order to brand
the choice to carry to term as "reasonable" which is only chosen in a scant
30% or 20% or 10% of cases, which poses serious medical risks to the woman,
and which imposes involuntary fatherhood on a man (which has many NON-PECUNIARY
effects as well as pecuniary ones). I'm also confident that more incisive
sociological studies on the effects of illegitimate birth and the effects of
our money-over-love & cure-over-prevention child support strategy, will prove
that the social experiment of the judiciary is a miserable failure, and so
even the "social policy" rationalization will be swept unceremoniously away. A
fault-based system is, IMO, inevitable. Americans, I think, have an innate
sense of fairness, and a belief that they can, one way or another, shape their
system of laws to approximate it to the degree possible within a formalistic
system. As more and more people become aware of this festering boil in the
law, either by being victimized by it, or knowing of someone who has or is, or
even indirectly and abstractly through forums such as Usenet, I have found
that they generally become angry and moved to action. This is good. This is
healthy. The only question remains then, not WHETHER this cancer must go, but
only WHEN...  - Kevin
===================================================================

From:    Ted Frank
To:      All                                    Msg #55, Aug-03-93 10:32PM
Subject: Re: right to abortion != right to child support

Organization: University of Chicago
From: thf2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank)
Message-ID: <1993Aug4.063208.8783@midway.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: thf2@midway.uchicago.edu
Followup-To: alt.child-support
Newsgroups: soc.men,soc.women,alt.dads-
rights,sci.psychology,misc.legal,alt.child-support

In article <1993Aug4.034937.5774@rotag.mi.org> kevin@rotag.mi.org (Kevin
Darcy) writes:
>In article <1993Aug2.113704.2717@midway.uchicago.edu>
>thf2@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>>Legally, one intends the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his
>>own action.  If I negligently hit someone with a car, my liability is
>>not absolved should the victim's treating doctor also act negligently--
>>such negligence is reasonably foreseeable.
>
>A victim of a tort, however, _does_ have a duty to mitigate damages.

To the extent reasonable, yes.  Your duty is to prove that a decision
not to have an abortion is unreasonable, and there's not a court in the
world, much less a jury, that is going to hold that.  One of the many
fatal flaws in your analysis.

>>And this structure even concedes what no court ever has or ever will concede-
-
>>that the decision to carry a child to term is somehow legally unreasonable.
>
>My, you sound awfully sure there, Ted...
>
>At some point, as abortion becomes accepted more and more as a part of life
>in this country, and maybe 70%, 80%, 90% of pregnancies to unmarried women end
>in abortion, the reactionary judges who uphold the current paternity child
>support regime will have to engage in some serious sophistry in order to
>brand
>the choice to carry to term as "reasonable" which is only chosen in a scant
>30% or 20% or 10% of cases, which poses serious medical risks to the woman,
>and which imposes involuntary fatherhood on a man (which has many NON-
>PECUNIARY
>effects as well as pecuniary ones).

Dream on.  The abortion rate hasn't reached 70% in Red China, where the
government encourages and possibly even forces abortion.  It isn't going
to happen here--especially with single motherhood becoming more acceptable
socially and the last vestiges of legal discrimination against "bastards"
being swept away.

Too, even granting arguendo all of your assumptions, it is unthinkable that
a court would judicially penalize the decision not to have an abortion, given
that a court that did so would have its decision struck down by an appeals
court applying _Palmore v. Sidoti_-type analysis to the question of bodily
autonomy.

You are clearly confused, Kevin.  It's not a social "experiment."  It's
a fact that has lasted for centuries, and comes almost entirely from the
legislature.  Does anyone still have that article I posted in September
citing child support laws from the reign of Elizabeth I?  The only
"experiment" is your insistence that a society and judicial system that is
at best reluctant to strike down any but the most burdensome restrictions
on abortion is suddenly going to declare Red-China-style population-control
through judicial fiat utterly unsupported by anything resembling precedent.
--
ted frank                 |  "You won't settle for putting Susan B. Anthony
thf2@kimbark.uchicago.edu |   on the new dollar then?"
the u of c law school     |   -- Justice Rehnquist, to Ruth Bader Ginsburg in
standard disclaimers      |      a 1978 sex-discrimination case oral argument