Trust Sacks to deliver

Well, it was bound to happen. Something interesting enough for me to break the I’m-busy-working-on-a-very-important-project silence was sure to come along. While I don’t have a problem with leaving the well-balanced, sensible arguments to other people for a while, I have never been able to resist the lure of a clear-cut, hit-the-roof, I-can’t-believe-anyone-could-be-so-ridiculous story. So here it is.

I quote, from the website of the eminent Glenn Sacks, a columnist/commentator/talk radio host whose skills as a debater and rhetorician I have the utmost respect for but whose opinions I rarely share:

“A 25-year-old computer programmer has done what has long been thought impossible--he has united the pro-choice feminist left and the pro-life right. Matt Dubay of Saginaw, Michigan is the plaintiff in a new lawsuit in which he seeks to wipe out the child support payments he is obligated to make to an ex-girlfriend. He says he had made it clear to her that he didn’t want to be a father at this time, and that she got pregnant after she had repeatedly assured him that a physical condition rendered her sterile.“ (Read the full story here.)

Come to think of it, I’m sure I already heard about this back when the story first broke and was giggled at/playfully quasi-debated on the mainstream radio shows. I guess I just dismissed it as yet another oddball attempt to get back at the nasty old feminists who peddle the ridiculous notion that a man should actually be expected, by the time he becomes sexually active, to know how babies are made. But browsing Sacks’ website I came across the story again, and this time I was roped in.

So let’s look at what Glenn Sacks and his co-writer on the piece, Jeffrey M. Leving, are adding to the argument. The first bit comes as no surprise – it is a rehash of the old chestnut that women shouldn’t on the one hand ask for the same privileges as men while on the other hand trying to hang on to the few that were actually theirs to begin with. The Leving/Sacks view is that it’s deeply unfair that women should be able to choose whether or not to have the child they have conceived while men are denied this (in my book dubious) privilege.

Now, I’m not going to get bogged down in a playground level tug-of-war as to what is fair. It might come as a surprise to some, but the fact is that life isn’t fair. And in my world – listen carefully, those of you who thought you had feminism down pat – the sexes aren’t diametrically opposed, one of them is not in any given struggle the winner while the other is the loser. If you want to talk about fairness, you’d be better off thinking in terms of rich/poor, educated/uneducated, healthy/sick or any other power-defining combination you can think of. (All else being equal, it is possible to theorize about which sex has the most power in any given situation but as all else never is, the analysis has no practical purpose.)

What I will comment on, though, is this:

“One and a half million American women legally walk away from motherhood every year by adoption, abortion or abandonment, yet somehow nobody labels them 'deadbeats' or 'deserters.'"

Say what? I think a reality check may be called for. Do you have any idea what expectations society places on any woman who gives birth to a child, anno 2006? Can you even begin to imagine what scrutiny every mother is put under, what kinds of social controls are in effect and what the consequences are for any woman who will not, or cannot, conform to society’s definition of a Good Mother?

Clearly you don’t, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: There are way easier ways to get labeled a deadbeat or a deserter than to have your child adopted. Try putting him in daycare, for example, and go off to do frivolous, selfish things like earn a living. Even worse, try admitting that you didn’t even plonk your kid in an institution because you have to put food on the table, but simply because you enjoyed going to work much more than you did mopping up mashed bananas.

The suggestion that women can “legally walk away from motherhood” without being labeled everything under the sun is quite frankly laughable. How can you even begin to argue with a statement like that?

Maybe it’s better to simply move on:

“Yet if the mother decides she wants to keep the child, she can demand 18 (or in some states 21 or 23) years of child support from the father, and he has no choice in the matter.”

We’ll leave aside for the moment the obvious objection that the father does have a choice in the matter – it’s just that the choice has to be exercised at a somewhat earlier stage in the proceedings. Because again, this is only too likely to end up in another fairness debate, where I might be tempted to laugh exaggeratedly and shriek “HA! Women never had access to commitment-free sex! Try that on for size!” And that really wouldn’t benefit anyone.

Instead, I’d like to comment on the way the statement seems to imply that the biggest, most desperately unfortunate situation anyone could ever end up in after fathering a child – a CHILD! – is to have their budget restricted for the next 18 years. Hello?

So yes, I totally agree – let’s scrap this ridiculously harsh penalty, which really has no place in modern society. Instead, I suggest that when a man becomes a father, he is forced to actually take care of his offspring. (A revolutionary thought, I know.)

Instead of wearing his poor wrist out writing monthly checks, let him stay up all night, every night, feeding and comforting a hungry/sleepless/sick/playful child, and then go to work the next day. (Margaret Thatcher got a whole four hours?!) Let him do without sleep night after night after night after night, until he is begging for someone to take the kid off his hands for triple the support money. (No one will, of course.) Then let him come down with flu and lie on the couch with a 200 degree temperature, completely alone, realizing that he is unable to stand up yet knowing that he is going to have to do just that and get on with changing diapers.

Let him plan, shop for and cook three healthy meals a day, every single day of the week, every week of the year (including important game dates). Let him clean, do the laundry, remember to buy diapers and schedule play dates and dash from workplace to daycare to home and back again in an endless cycle. Once the child starts sleeping better, let him instead spend his nights baking cupcakes for the school bake sale and changing the sheets on wet beds.

Let him, wherever he goes, be met by frowns suggesting that no matter how he runs, he is always, always letting someone down, most of all his child. Let him be unable to sleep for whatever portion of the night is left for worrying in equal parts about a) whether he will lose his job due to domestic commitments, b) whether his kid will end up on Jerry Springer because he was less than a 100 percent committed dad, and c) whether he will ever date again for the next 18 years. And let him be publicly stoned to death if he ever – EVER! – suggests to a living soul that having responsibility for young children might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

How about that? It sounds like a much better deal to me. Even in this day and age, unmarried women and single mothers are being blamed for most of society’s evils, and if they are going to be accused of being conniving bloodsuckers, they might as well get something more out of it than a pitiful child support check.

Sadly, of course, both Messrs. Sacks/Leving and myself are missing the most important point in the whole argument. In fact, it sounds like almost everyone is missing it. The point is that it doesn’t matter what lies the woman told the man when they were about to have sex. It doesn’t matter what choice the woman later exercised, and what say the man would have wanted to have but didn’t get. It doesn’t matter what the man thinks about being given the choice only between fatherhood light (child support) or full-fat fatherhood (sleepless nights) but not being allowed to opt out of it altogether.

The only thing that really matters is the fact that once the child is born, whatever actions and conflicts may have preceeded the birth, the relationship between the mother and father no longer takes center stage. What’s important from that point on, and what the law should be concerning itself with, is the relationship between the child and each of its parents. Whoever is to blame for the parents’ gigantic screw-up, it sure isn’t the child, and so the law should be aiming at protecting him or her from having to bear the consequences. (Wouldn’t you just love to grow up to read about how your dad made news headlines out of how badly he didn’t want you?)

Less academically put:

You have a kid. Deal with it.

PS. I would like it to be noted that I am hereby making a prediction, so that I can come back to this topic in 15 years time and say I “told you so”. I predict that by the time Mr Dubay’s child is in high school, Mr Dubay will have changed his mind about not wanting to be a father. At this point, the toughest part of parenting has already been dealt with by someone else, and Mr Dubay will be pushing 40 and may even have gained some maturity along the way. The mother, as always, will put her child’s good before her own outrage at the preposterous suggestion that Mr Dubay should get to finally play Dad, so she will let him, and all will live very confused ever after.

PPS. To stave off any comments along the lines of “get yourself a good man and you won’t have to be a feminist”, I should perhaps mention that I am married to a good man – a great man, in fact. He was born at the dawn of the 1960s in an industrial town in northern England, so God forbid he should ever call himself a feminist. But let’s just say that he has never been in any doubt as to where his children came from, what his responsibilities are and that Jackie Mason was absolutely right when he stated “the more sleep, the greater the schmuck”.