RapTOR (sorry for the mis-ID),

Forgive me but I'm still not clear on what you are saying as i understand it a woman can get pregnant and the man is responsible for the child finantualy untill its 19 years oldautomaticaly and has NO right to and opinion as to weather he wants to have the child(not that this is wrong).

How is the choice not the womans?

Well, I perceive no disrespect. Let me clarify a bit.

There are numerous circumstances in which a woman does not have a choice apart from rape. While the obvious cases occur in extremely poor countries (like most of Africa) and countries with large fundamentalist or anti-female populations (like the Middle East, India and many part of rural Asia), it also applies to western countries.

Let's just pick an example, and not an uncommon one:

What of a poor woman with 4 kids who can't afford or isn't allowed birth control by her religion, or who's birth control fails (as it often does), with a husband who won't wear a condom? Her economically subjugated position doesn't allow her to realistically refuse her husband sex without jeopardizing the welfare of herself and her 4 kids, if not rape itself. So what happens when she has a 5th child she can't afford food or medical care for?

This is not as hypothetical a situation as you might think -- it's the modern equivalent of several millenia of the choices women have made. When they couldn't afford (i.e. have the food) for a new child, abandonment or neglect were very common ways of dealing with it. If the choice is the new child, or the child you know and love, who do you choose to die? Or do you try and feed all of you, and have you all sicken and die? It's not something discussed in western society, but any anthropologist will tell you it still goes on, often subconsciously. Mothers seemingly perplexed at why an infant dies, when they neglected to ever feed them. Selective memory to protect oneself, I would say.

"Dumpster babies" are a modern version. It's might be better than being eaten by wild animlas on the hillside, but maybe not.

In the modern western era, women who do the same jobs are paid 25% less than men. A single women, particularly without health insurance, is hard pressed to have the kind of money that not only pays for the pregnancy, but allows her to take ANY time off near the birth. And not just money, but TIME. Kids take lots of time, the kind that a regular 8-5 job really doesn't allow unless you have a very understanding employer. Men frequently walk out and abandon their families, and while there's a lot of talk about how that's bad, men are really not held responsible. Imagine what you hear said about a woman who abandons a little child and leave it with the father... and a "deadbeat" Dad?

Then the working mother she is derided for leaving her child with a substandard daycare center, which she probably can't afford anyway.

A woman without a male partner is severely compromised in her ability to care for one or more children in our society. This would not necessarily be a bad thing if we held men to the same standards in regard to children as we do women -- two or more people is not only the easiest way to raise kids, but still probably the best. A woman with a partner (who is not lucky enough to have one of the MudCat gentlemen) may have to appease her partner at all costs to herself in order to continue to care for her children.

Many women live in a form of economic slavery, even those who appear to have middle class lives. Because of the disparity of the payscale, they may be trapped. And no woman really knows if her partner may walk out or even die and leave her financially incapable of caring for her children -- and our society does not accept responsibility for needy children as a whole, especially if the mother is not deemed "unfit."

This doesn't even touch on religious issues that confine a woman.

In a nutshell, *I* do think that men are equally responsible about ANY pregnancy and ANY child that is the result of their sperm (moreso in the case of rape or molestation) -- but since the woman is, in reality, going to be held virtually soley responsible for that child's care by our society, hers should be the final choice, by consulting the family, friends, doctors and spiritual advisors she needs to make her decision. These kinds of very hard decisions can't be decided by law, particularly when the law does not in practice judge both genders equally. Justice and law are not the same.

If we lived in an gender-equal society, then comments about how a man should have half the choice would be more appropriate and reasonable.

Imagine if every man had to get a woman's permission to get a vasectomy? Or NOT get one, because a woman decided he had to have one? That's not even the life-altering decision a child is, yet every man reading this is recoiling at the idea of someone else deciding what to do with the family jewels.

FWIW, I agree with the term parasite, in a biological sense. One might argue that a fetus is a symbiote -- since the species needs them to reproduce -- but on an individual level, no woman NEEDS a child and every woman who carries a child pays a physical price because the fetus draws the best and most nourishment from her body. And the fetus cannot survive without a human womb (real or technological), so in that respect, it's a parasite.