A unmarried man and a woman sleep together, and she gets pregnant. She now has to buy maternity clothes, work fewer hours, spend more time at the doctor, and, generally speaking, live a less productive and more expensive life for nine months. Should the man be forced to pay half of her expenses?
If you agree with the New York Times, the “paper of record,” for the liberal left and its worldview, the answer is, “yes.”
Former spouses are often required to pay alimony; former cohabiting partners may have to pay palimony; why not ask men who conceive with a woman to whom they are not married to pay “preglimony”? -The New York Times
But why should the man pay for part of the woman’s expenses? According to the New York Times, because conception is as much his fault as it is hers.
What exactly are we talking about here, though? The “product of conception” has long been denied the status of an actual child in our culture. Children in the womb are simply “blobs of tissue, similar to cancer,” in the eyes of the left wing of our culture. What is it, precisely, the man is being asked to care for here? If a man and a woman sleep together and he ends up with a disease, should she also be held responsible for half of his cost? And what of government supplied health care, abortion, child care, and school? Aren’t the roots of each of these programs to remove the burden to women of the “results of conception?”
Or is the left finally admitting this little mass of tissue might be something more than just a collection of cells? That we might be talking about a person here?
The writer goes on to say:
The most frequent objection I hear to this idea is that it will give men a say over abortion. A woman’s right to choose is sometimes eclipsed by an abusive partner who pressures her into terminating or continuing a pregnancy against her will, and preglimony could exacerbate this dynamic.
We can’t let a man’s readiness to have children —financially or emotionally— get in the way of the woman’s choice, after all. If a man feels like he’s not ready to have children, he’s a bully. If a woman feels like she’s not ready to have children, well forget what the man thinks, he should pay for the abortion anyway.
And thus we wind our way down the twisted paths of the leftist worldview. Men are responsible when women want them to be, a child is a child when the woman decides it should be (whether inside or outside the womb), and the government’s primary job is to make certain that what goes on in the bedroom is properly accounted for and handled with fairness. Where are all the leftist with their signs saying, “get out of my bedroom?”
There is a solution for this mess, though I hate to even mention it in polite company any longer. It’s called marriage. As in monogamous marriage, marriage between one man and one woman. Putting the ties that bind in place before putting the children in place keeps the government out of the bedroom, and keeps the commitment on a bit higher plane than the merely financial. Disconnecting children from marriage, making marriage about self satisfaction, is quickly taking us into the realm where government inspectors monitor every bedroom in America, and then determine who pays for what in the resulting mess.
Marriage seems, on the whole, a lot simpler.