Posted on 06/03/2007 2:37:29 PM PDT by IsraelBeach
Can't get past the second sentence without telling a big lie.
My husband and I were separated (by the Army) during the last part of my first pregnancy and for three months after. The first time my husband held our daughter, the look of tenderness and love that crossed his face stunned me.
Yes, let's not move beyond that bedrock principle that has served so long for so well...when in doubt, it's the man's fault. Conservative thinking not long ago called for fathers to have custody of children...when viewed in that light, it's the current system that's influenced by what you call "Marxist" thinking.
Assuming that men are never at fault is as insane as assuming that women are never at fault...or even that any one gender is predominantly at fault. The truth is that there's plenty of blame to go around.
This article addresses the role of courts in the current model of divorced families and the consequences that follow. It addresses the empowerment of women to exclude fathers from their children's lives. Perhaps you can move past your own palpable bitterness(whether sympathetic or personally derived) and address that issue.
Shared parenting is perscriptive, not mandatory. It isn't forcing those who don't want to assume 50% parenting to do it.
Interesting point.
No, no, NO!!! That's discrimination!!!
(according to Gogeo's 'Fractured Webster's', discrimination is that which does not accrue to my benefit.)
Note that estimates range from 1 percent (for high status men) to 30 percent.
Good that that publication recognizes the truth. That popular psychology mag has a lot of light-headed articles based on fluff, and so I haven’t read it years and don’t expect to.
Thank's for the link. I was planning on digging one of them out for Albion today but you saved me the trouble. If Albion is interested, she can find more references in Wade, N., Before the Dawn (2007).
One additional factoid. The earliest study I know on this subject was accidental. It was conducted by a hospital in Chicago in the 50's. They were studying something about heritability of blood type. In the course of that study, it became apparent that about 15% of the babies could not possibly have been sired by the supposed father because of differences of blood-type. That means the number was almost certainly greater than 15% as some of the women had probably philandered with men who had the same bloodtype as the supposed dad. (They terminated the study as soon as they discovered this because, in the 50's, this was an unacceptable fact. N.B., it's sad that it is no longer unacceptable--it's just another marker on the long, moral decline of America.) I don't have the time to look this study up. But I'm sure a google search project would provide it.
One could easily look at this fact as an easy explainer of why otherwise conservative women are so adamant about legal abortion. For every women who philanders and gets pregnant, there are certainly more who manage to avoid pregnancy and more who would like to have the option of philandering without having a baby. Altogether, if you start at 15% and add on, this amounts to a fairly substantial portion of married women. That makes abortion the ultimate, fix-it-up-after-you-break-it solution for a substantial group in the population. It would explain the odd voting pattern of married women on this issue.
Yup! (My daughter is 11 and says similar things).
My ex-wife has my extraordinary self-control to thank for the fact that she is still alive...
Another poster kindly provided them. I also added some in my last post to you.
I have a little family law background also (nothing like your graduate degree). I handled some dissolution cases when I practiced law. Sometimes I represented the boy and sometimes the girl. (I avoided cases where custody was involved--there's nasty and then there's nasty. Custody cases are at the extreme end of nasty.)
Even where no custody was involved, both spouses were usually complete jerks and were using the system to exact revenge on the other in whatever way they could (these were disputed dissolutions, not ones the parties agreed on.) Both spouses were usually willing to perjure themselves to exact revenge.
It was much worse than ordinary civil litigation. However, usually the man got reasonable long before the woman. Not out of moral purity, but because the rules are so heavily skewed in favor of the woman. The cost to the man of being a jerk is, in divorce court, much higher than the cost to a woman. So the women had a lot more leeway to continue being jerks. And, I should add, they took full advantage of that leeway most of the time.
It seems to me that skewing the rules in favor of the woman in custody cases (even more than the financial rules) is really a bad idea. It lets one side be super-jerks and leads to the very high prevalence of false claims of child-abuse where custody is involved. Where both parties pay a cost for being jerks, both tend to be more reasonable. And that's better for the kids.
I objected to that figure, because you attributed this behavior to married couples. I read your link and none of the studies gave that high a figure for married couples, only for all pregnancies. Also, the studies were conducted in ultra-liberal European countries as well as the U.S.
Given today's promiscuity among young people and Europe's wholesale rejection of religion except among its Muslim immigrants, I do believe this figure is possible when applied to all pregnancies in Europe and the U.S., certainly including poverty communities such as "trailer trash" or "urban youth", as well as those marriages that took place when, or because, the bride was pregnant.
But I do not believe it could be accurate for couples who marry and wait to have children after marriage. One of your sources also cited the lower incidence of "cuckolding" among the more educated couples.
I doesn't surprise me that high-status men are cuckolded less. It's a good female reproductive strategy. Get the best schlup you can to support you and your kids and then populate the nest with better genes than the schlup can provide. But if your man is at the top of the totem pole, that strategy doesn't help. QED.
That's life in a fallen world.
;’}
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