This has been on my mind for a while now, but the conversation lately around student loan debt has brought the issue front and center of mind. I've always considered myself centre-left; I vote leftist candidates based on most issues; I say this not to conform to the echo chamber but to make any who might be about to jump the gun from the subjectline take a step back and ask themselves what else they could be wrong about; but some issues I'm at odds with them on and this one stands out to me.
I vaguely recall a few years ago, on NSG, someone made the case that with child support law, as it currently stands, there is nothing stopping a woman from claiming before sex; whether honestly or otherwise; that she had no intention of keeping the baby if the condom broke, and/or that if she did, she wouldn't mind if he had no part in raising it; deciding nonetheless to go after him for child support payments anyway, even if doing so would require him to drop out of school. What he had reason to believe would be a mutual act of pleasure would ruin not only his life, but prevent him from contributing to society in ways he needed to go to college to do. Government welfare for her could lift her out of poverty; making him pay up from the very first year would just pull him in too.
The response was "vasectomy or don't fuck." You know, because every jurisdiction just gives teenagers vasectomies willy-nilly.
On the matter of student loan debt, many on the left don't just support its cancellation, they almost come across as feeling entitled to have it cancelled, if the demonization of dissenters on the matter is anything to go by. I don't think the converse is as hypocritical; I can see student debt as an incentive, be it too cruel of one or not, to study something more practical like engineering instead of something less practical like literature; but what does child support law incentivize? Abstinence? Then why is virginity so often used as an insult by some of the same people who approve of the status quo on child support law? Condom use? Then why does child support law not have the government pick up the tab for, let's say, the first 4 years so he can finish college, if he used a condom? I mean, you could have him owe 4 years' back pay after he finishes college and gets a job, and that would still arguably be more analogous to student loans than to the cancellation thereof. But with student loans, at least the guy gets to finish college. If he has to drop out to pay child support, he doesn't.
On the matter of abortion, many who don't support criminalizing it (to hell with phrases like "pro-choice" OR "anti-life"; supporters of either label have a history of guessing wrong about my opinions on the matter) aren't content to say the fetus is insentient in the first and second trimester, and often a potential health hazard in the 3rd; that alone is a pretty good argument, and would end in a vote for legal abortion from me if a referendum were held tomorrow, regardless of its unintended side-effect in making it unprosecutable to get drunk while pregnant. But they aren't content with that. They make it out to be "hypocritical" to want to criminalize abortion without making having children more affordable, as if A, those criminalizing it were a majority of voters (they aren't, so we'll never know what those voters would do about the unaffordability of parenting if they were numerous enough to call the shots) or B, the voting public as a whole didn't have a history of using criminalization in lieu of addressing the root causes of crime (brutal policing and incarceration instead of Scandinavia-style policies helping the poor, etc...) without any of the motives attributed to those who would criminalize abortion (supposed envy at others' sex lives, supposed desire to make women date rich men instead of otherwise-desirable poor men, etc...) applying to... any of the other issues on which they rely on deterrence instead.
And really, if the "vasectomy or don't fuck" crowd got their way; what would that look like? Would it look like abstinence in one's teen years, except among those wealthy enough they could afford the consequences? Wouldn't that render virginity a rather poor metric of undesirability, reflecting poorly on the judgment of anyone who would have ever used it as a cheap shot?
Would it look like teenagers getting vasectomies en masse? Obviously you'd need mandatory paternity tests at birth to find out if these people practiced what they preached, but if they did, how would all the women who want babies later in life make them? Taking turns getting pregnant off the richest guys in town? Wouldn't that be a de facto form of eugenics in favour of the wealthy?
Or was "vasectomy or don't fuck" just a disingenuous attempt to dodge the issue, making them the kind of hypocrites they accuse those who would criminalize abortion of being?
