Yeah, people should agree on what kind of sex they will have before they have sex. That agreement doesn't need to be an explicit line of statement of intent regarding babies, because some things are obvious.

Things like vaginal (or even anal since it's close) sex with a condom on - no babies. If anything, if in such a situation one of the partners is going to do something to make this sex result in pregnancy, they should be the one who have to make a declaration. Handjob, blowjob, sex with condom and taking that off to come somewhere else - same thing.

I'm not arguing about custody, but about whether a law that attributes parental responsibility to men in cases such as those, is justified. BTW I dont think those rulings helped an iota the establishment of the image of women as equals in society, in order to get rid of discriminations. What these two did - getting pregnant on purpose and having the man take responsibility as well, is what some women NEEDED to do before in order to get a man, because that was their only place in society and only decent means of survival.

And it's not like their actions aren't seen as wrong, premeditated fraudulent intentions WAS ruled in the second case, fraud due to forgered signature is pretty obvious in the first one. It's that the men still had to pay. Maybe the man from first case would win custody and she will have to pay - but then again pay what, she was bankrupt, so he will have to not only pay but also take care of the children or let his new wife do that, which isn't really the point.

I'll put it this way.

Say a man gets a catholic woman pregnant even though she didn't want to have a baby, and specifically told him so, and he didn't use a condom or whatever.

Ok so the girl gets pregnant.  She gives birth because she's Catholic and against abortion and gives him the baby.

She'd still be responsible for child support.

It's got NOTHING to do with a Man/Woman thing.

The only "inequality" is that a man can't force a woman to get an abortion or force a woman to have the baby... which is totally the right descision since it's her body.

It's a lesser of two evils thing...

It's not that women have an advantage.

It's just harder to do to a woman in which you aren't committing sexual violence to a woman and basically if it did happen she would probably get an abortion rather then give you the kid.

Another example of this is fertility clinics.  Sometimes some sick ass doctor will use his own sperm... and he's the biological father... if somehow a court granted him custody... say  the mom doesn't want a son that's half either doctor... she would still be responsible for child support.

Sorry, going to post a wall of text and going to class, bbl.

This probably varies from country to country, and maybe even state to state in the US, but generally it's the mother who has all the parental rights over an out of marriage child.

As such the catholic woman would be able to give the child for adoption, ending all her responsibilities and rights over the child. In the second case the woman will also be able to give the child for adoption. If the father wants the child, he might have to go about it the hard way, the child can be ruled into third party custody if he's not deemed to be the better option for the child's upbringing.
Marriage is a different beast because it was obviously never designed for anything having to do with fairness and choice. However if the catholic woman was married to the man and didn't want to get pregnant, she WOULD be still able to get an abortion without consulting him, in a lot of countries that allow abortion. Yes, that would be against her faith, but at this point this gets very conflicting when considering the Catholic interpretation of sex and marriage, and is ultimately a dispute about ideology rather than rights.

I actually don't think that men's and womens rights should be put absolutely equal when it comes to pregnancy. At least not until science is up to having a complete artificial womb birth that would even out the actual footing when it comes to inconveniences of pregnancy and birth, economical, social or personal, and both parents can be just donors. Just swapping the sexes simply cannot currently make for a valid comparison because men aren't getting pregnant and outside of marriage don't have the parental rights by default.

But when it comes to child support, the interpretation of laws that end up like the two presented cases, disturbs me. A case with circumstances allowing for a swap of sexes and still the same situation and ruling would still disturb me. This is about a law being rigidly interpretated in view of both parties' ethical treatment of the other, measures against and for pregnancy being taken and ultimately the distribution of responsibility for doing something.
Given the current possibilities for both men and women to decide pro and con having a child, I think laws regarding those decisions should allow for a lot more variation. And it's depressing that we have some profit-oriented laws (e.g. copyright) include all sorts of subclauses and differentiations to cover as much ground as they can, but a basic social law is stuck on a binary system.

We will have double standards for a long time, they can go both ways, and there are a lot that work against women, we've had a patriarchal society at least since the agricultural revolution. They won't be done away with making sides either scared or empowered, especially not when it comes to children. We still want people to have children and families, feel confident and comfortable with the (level of) commitment they have decided on. And while it was easy in the past for men to just get a wife, have kids and not care about what the wife had to say very much, and it was a given for women that their values would lie entirely on getting married and being said wife, this isn't the case anymore, and now there needs to be proper communication and a proper shift of responsibilities.

Regarding the issue of joint property that sapphy made. Personally I very much dislike the traditional roles for both sexes, as well as the value society tends to attribute to their traditional occupations. Household work, raising your kids, providing healthy food on a daily basis, providing domestic comfort for a family's well-being - this isn't even considered economic activity in the context of the family, yet it is considered so when responsibility is given to a third party. It is actually work, a lot of which we will likely not be able to replace by machines any time soon, while a lot of the traditionally worthy, hard and technically-wise complex jobs are successfully being done by robots. Taking all those traditionally female occupations and duties out of a family would completely ruin this family, and in the long run drive down society. IMO it's largely already happening. I can see no good about downplaying the importance of those occupations by measuring it by money earned. The focus when looking for equality should be for both men and women to cover between them the full range of all duties, in a split agreed upon, not just match or split the earnings and in the process do the bare minimum of the rest. Stay single and childless, make a career and keep all the money if that is the actual worth of a family and of life.

Several points:

A. The woman didn't randomly find the sperm on the ground, and I'm not aware that the guy told her she can keep the sperm. As I said, she could've decieved him by saying she would dispose of the sperm.

B. If the sperm really was her property, the outcome of what she did with it shouldn't affect him. It's not important that the baby is a human being. The man did not participate in the conception of the child, therefore the child is not his responsability.

C. The woman concieved the baby deliberately and artificialy, using the man's sperm, but without his consent. Since the result of this process obviously affected him, he should've been consulted before the act was commited. Essetially he's a sper donor and, if I'm not mistaken, you need legal documents attesting that the donor consented to having his sperm used for the conception of a child, before you can go through with IFV. If this was done at a clinic, and they did not ask where the sperm came from, and if the person who produced it consented or not to having his sperm used, then he should be able to sue both the clinic and the woman, as fraud was commited.

As I said, you can't have it both ways: you can't say that the sperm became her property, but he has to suffer the consequences of her actions.

D. What does my racist, sexist, homophobic culture have to do with this? Over here it's essentially impossible to for a man to get custody of his children, and that's even if the mother is insane (I know of such a case). Also, there's no way this guy would've gotten off not paying child support, even if the woman had raped him (I'm not even sure it's considered that a woman can rape a man in the Romanian legal system).

E. I'm gay?! O_O I did not know that... Wonder why no one has told me up 'till now?

took the words right out of my mouth

A) Well this first point is just... irrelevent.

B) Right, it wasn't.  What did effect him however was when the kid was born.  Since the Kid is no longer DNA but his biological son.

C)  Where you are mistaken is that one crime does not nessisairly totally rule out other laws.  Nor does it destory the rights of a third party.  IE) The Child.

D)  Sounds like a problem with Romania.  Shit like that happens in anti-female societies like yours.  In a few cases they protect women because women in mother rights because they see them as the only thing they should be doing.

To complain about something that women get because of their descrimination EVERYWHERE ELSE is ridiculiously stupid.  It's like complaining that more black men get introductory jobs and welfare because they aren't aloud to have later laws.

ESPIECALLY in a system like yours that is extremly sexist AND has extremly backwords marriage laws, effectivly removing most women from the workplace via social pressure AND robbing them of any value as a wife and homemaker by robbing them of their due property in a divorce basically making them completely dependent on the husband, no matter how big of a douche they turn into.

Doesn't really happen in the US or Europe.  Except possibly France Italy.  It's shocking the shit that happens in France.

E)  Oh, my mistake.  In that case your sexism is much more understandable.

A. It is relevant, if you're gonna suggest he gave her his sperm and she was allowed to do whatever she wanted with it.

B. The law says that a child's rights begin at conception, provided the child is born alive (at least thats how the law is in my country). The conception also should've been dine with his approaval (unless it happened as a result of a sex act he willingly participated in, which is not the case in either of these 2 examples).

C. The laws are outdated, as I said. A man shouldn't be liable for child support in a situation like this (a woman stealing his sperm, and using it to concieve a child without his consent, which is fraud, as the sperm donor needs to sing a legal document giving his approval). This also doesn't change the fact that both these women should've been jailed for fraud, yet they got a pat on the back in both cases.

D. Your country is the one that has backwards marriage laws, giving huge advantages to women, even though circumstances have greatly changed in your society (most women no longer need their husbands for support). If anything, such laws encourage women to be dependent of men, rather than asser their independence, as it's more comfortable to just stay at home all day, clean the house a little, knowing that you can easily divorce and get half of what your husband worked hard to get, plus monthly alimony 'till you remarry (obviously these laws are very unfair towards men, and overall I would not even consider the ideea of getting married in your country, unless I wanted to play gold digger myself).

Over here women can't do that, plus there's also the fact that one family can't survive on the income of a single person (unless that person is CEO of a big corporation or something). A much larger percentage of women are housewives in the US versus Romania (I've actually only met 2 women in my entire life who didn't work).

Yeah, Romania is sexist, but not that much more than most places.

E. I don't know why you say I'm sexist. I think that women and men should be equals (other than some physiological differences I don't see men and women being different at all, and I'm against the ideea of gender stereotypes). If a had punctured holes in a condom to get her pregnanat, you can be sure he would've been sent to prison, and the woman could've easily aborted and gotten rid of the child (a similar example to the second situation, the one with the oral sex). And if a man had stolen his wife's egg from an egg clinic, he most definately would've been sent to prison (similar example to the first situation). This is certainly not fair.